How is this the fuck AI server? Just stumbled on this post. If you hate AI, you should be at least as concerned if not even more concerned than the average person about uncontrollable AI and AI safety. Seriously, what’s the point of denying the enormous scientifically documented risks of AI if you’re against AI? That cuts against your whole argument. It’s like you’re dismissing AI as completely useless or ineffectual. The fact it isn’t is part of why it’s such a problem. AI is incredibly powerful technology and it’s only in its infancy. It has already solved Millenium Prize problems and automated most coding, as well as been implicated in various misalignment incidents, escaped containment, and started massive conspiracies with other AI agents to hack into various digital infrastructure. People who are skeptical of the capabilities of AI are like climate skeptics or flat Earthers at this point.
This meme is a false equivalency. The car is not autonomous and doesn’t make decisions for itself, and cars are mostly within the control of humans. The result of the car crashing was entirely due to human recklessness, neglect, or ignorance, if not intention, and the car didn’t operate outside the control of the human. The human was in control and directly caused its outcome.
With AI, humans are definitely responsible for creating the AIs and the way that they develop and program them, and the kinds and levels of safety guardrails and research that are conducted and implemented. They’re also responsible for what they do with AI and tell AI to do. But AI can also operate outside of the control of humans in entirely unexpected, harmful and potentially catastrophic ways, even with the best intentions. The AIs can do things directly which humans did not directly cause, even if they did cause them indirectly. AI can be autonomous and agentic. It literally has a mind of its own.
AI is not like any other technology that has ever existed. Many of the smartest people alive, and the people studying this technology extensively, have warned about the risks of AI and warned against underestimating it. We shouldn’t do this and make these foolish reckless mistakes, especially if we are against AI, and we don’t need to in order to be against if. It seems like an attitude has settled in that in order to oppose AI you must disregard it as completely useless and trivial, or you must attribute all of its actions to humans and deny that AI has any autonomy of its own, even though its autonomy and ability potential is what makes it so dangerous, and humans can still be largely to blame for creating and programming AI even while AI is also operating against the intentions of its creators. Two things can co-exist without being mutually exclusive. You can acknowledge that many of the uses of AI are useless “slop” and have no real value, or even negative value; but you can also acknowledge that AI can ironically also be used in ways that are highly consequential and dangerous. A human can deliberately use AI in ways that cause enormous harm. AI can also act out in ways that humans did not intend at all. And AI can even engage in a hybrid of both, where it follows human intentions in unexpected ways (perverse instantiation and value lock in).
We need to take this seriously, it’s not a joke or a game. It’s not a trivial technology. It’s not just marketing hype or a scam. In fact safety warnings about AIs have harmed the market. The risks of AI are real and they aren’t helping anyone. And denying the risks isn’t helping the case against AI. Even if unintentionally, by downplaying the power and autonomy of AI, you are hindering the efforts to control, slow-down, pause or prevent its development, and helping to enable its rapid proliferation in society by undermining potential critical barriers and reasons not to do so, and the biggest problems that exist with it.
We are creating entities that will be much smarter and more powerful than us. Our intelligence is what makes us the masters of our own planet, and look how that turned out for the planet and the other animals. It takes an incredible amount of hubris to think that we can control such phenomena safely or easily, especially with the way companies and governments are rushing ahead in the race to develop it and reach increasingly advanced AGI or ASI. We must tread lightly here.
Maybe worth a read https://benthams.substack.com/p/i-underestimated-ai-risk
Or this (I get you may not be ready for the consciousness stuff, heck most humans are not sentientists even when it comes to other sentient animals like us, but even if you ignore that, the case for AI safety risk is very strong - and also don’t worry about the political stuff, it’s not really relevant): https://benthams.substack.com/p/im-disappointed-in-leftists-on-ai
Maybe read Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom too, or The Compendium by Connor Leahy. Just do some freaking research and moral contemplation before you start spouting such reckless garbage that I’ve seen here.
I care about the future of the planet and the way the “anti AI” people are acting is very pro AI. It’s incredibly worrying and hypocritical behavior. I’m not angry or annoyed, I just want to try to get through to people. But given the overall sentiment I’ve seen here and elsewhere, I think this is a much larger cultural problem that one person isn’t going to fix. The dismissive reactions to AI safety incidents are just the tip of the iceberg. As several experts and researchers have predicted, it might take some catastrophes or semi-apocalyptic incidents in which millions of people die or are severely impacted by AI before the public take AI risk and the colossal threats it poses seriously and stop downplaying or writing it off as science fiction. The problem is that humans are very bad at planning ahead and acting pre-emptively to prevent disaster until it’s already happened, and also terrible at heeding warnings and evidence. We did the same with climate change and pandemics, and we still are far from sufficiently acting on those problems.