Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments

wastedtime32 OP t1_j8o00h2 wrote

Reply to comment by TFenrir in What will the singularity mean? Why are we persuing it? by wastedtime32

This is what I keep hearing. Stuff about excepting change. But there is no historical precedent for this. This is the start of the exponential growth. The way I see it, I have every reason to be afraid and not one reason not to be. I am spending my parents life savings to get a degree that likely will not matter. My big problem is, what exactly are we expected to do once we “solve intelligence”? I LIKE the natural world. That’s all there is. It will never make sense to me. I don’t want to float around in a computer metaverse and be fed unlimited amounts of seratonin and never question anything or wonder or worry or feel any other emotion. That is all I know. And it is going ti be taken away from me without my consent? This future of AI is inevitable totalitarian. Brave new world type shit. It’s real. It’s fucking real. And everyone around me is talking about internships and where they want to live and different jobs and stuff. My girlfriend thinks I’m crazy because this fear is all I talk about. She said everything will be okay and I’m just falling for the fear mongering. I don’t know what to do with myself. It is hard to find joy when all I think about is how EVERYTHING that gives me joy will be gone.

8

TFenrir t1_j8o1khg wrote

>This is what I keep hearing. Stuff about excepting change. But there is no historical precedent for this. This is the start of the exponential growth. The way I see it, I have every reason to be afraid and not one reason not to be. I am spending my parents life savings to get a degree that likely will not matter. My big problem is, what exactly are we expected to do once we “solve intelligence”? I LIKE the natural world. That’s all there is. It will never make sense to me. I don’t want to float around in a computer metaverse and be fed unlimited amounts of seratonin and never question anything or wonder or worry or feel any other emotion. That is all I know. And it is going ti be taken away from me without my consent? This future of AI is inevitable totalitarian.

It's really really hard to predict anything, especially the future. I get it. There is a sort of... Logical set of steps you can walk down, that leads to your conclusion. But that is only one of many paths that are going to open up to us. You're right it's all exponential, but I also think that means what the human experience can be is going to expand. Maybe we will diverge as a species. There is a great sci fi book series (Commonwealth Saga) and in one of their books, they come across this species that seems to have fallen into this divide. Most of the species have left their physical bodies behind, but some of the species never strayed from their farming, amish-like lifestyle. My point is... I can imagine lots of different futures, and lots of them have a world where maybe more people can have the kind of lives they want.

>Brave new world type shit. It’s real. It’s fucking real. And everyone around me is talking about internships and where they want to live and different jobs and stuff. My girlfriend thinks I’m crazy because this fear is all I talk about. She said everything will be okay and I’m just falling for the fear mongering. I don’t know what to do with myself. It is hard to find joy when all I think about is how EVERYTHING that gives me joy will be gone.

I had this talk with my partner literally... Monday, this week. She's had to hear me talk about AI for the entire decade we've been together, and as things get crazier she asks me how I feel about it. If I'm freaking out. I just told her that I'm trying to live my life like the next ten years are the last years that I can even kind of imagine, that there is an event horizon that I can't see beyond, and worrying about what's beyond that line is just a source of infinite loops in my mind.

Instead I'm going to get some friends together and go out dancing. It's been a while since we've had the chance.

8

MrTacobeans t1_j8p1wwt wrote

I have sorta the same kinda fear response to the exponential growth of AI in just the last year. We've gone from "WOAH this ai can convincingly have a conversation with a human and beat a world expert in games/challenges" to "holy shit this AI chatbot can now help me with my job, give therapist level advice (even if it's wrong), image generation at 1% of the effort needed by a conventional artist and the constant flux of all these things improving not just on a quarterly basis anymore but like every other day some sort of SOTA level model is released".

It's alarming and it is a lot but I think if AI doesn't just randomly decide that humans are a useless presence we'll be fine. I see a world where even general intelligence AI aligns as a tool that even "bad actor" AI is combatted by competing "good actor" AI. I don't see society falling apart or a grand exodus of jobs.

I'm hoping AI turns into the next evolution of the internet, where we all just have an all-knowing intelligent assistant in our pocket. I can't wait for the day that my phone pings with a notification from my assistant with useful help like "Hey, I noticed you were busy and a bill was due so I went ahead and paid that for you! Here's some info about it:" Or "I know it's been a tough day at work but you haven't eaten, can I order you some dinner? Here's a few options that I know are your comfort foods: ".

The moment a dynamic AI model that can run on consumer hardware with chatGPT level or even beyond intelligence, stuff like that will become a reality. AI might be scary but trying to think about the positive effects it could have really helps me cope with the nebulous unknowns.

2

Eduard1234 t1_j8pkiql wrote

Just a comment about the idea of having one AI supervise the other. I’m thinking that won’t work. If the bad actor AI has even slightly more advanced than the other AI it will be uncontrollable. Chances that a bad actor AI somehow figures out how to escape its confines and invent self improvement unsupervised seems real to me.

1

wastedtime32 OP t1_j8p2nn1 wrote

Those things aren’t necessarily positive effects to me though. I don’t want to be able to consume all available information at the press of a button. What would be the point of knowing if you can’t actively learn?

0

MrTacobeans t1_j8qi0gg wrote

You just explained a Google search. Atleast in the short term AI/chat bots are just proving to be a more consumable or more entertaining way of gathering information.

It's upto each person to decide what they want to learn without the crutch of technology. Even an expert AI will never replace the need for actively learning things. Jumping way back even written language is a technology. For thousands of years humans have been figuring out how to compress knowledge and share it easily.

1

wastedtime32 OP t1_j8ri4rq wrote

Idk dude. Seems like a lot of people on this sub (and subsequently, in the tech world, at the forefront of these technologies) look at AI as a means to completely optimize all human functions and reduce any sort of meaning in anything. Seems to me a lot of these people feel alienated in modern society, and the way they think it will get better is by taking all the things that alienate them and making those things even stronger. Like the way Musk and SBF say they’ll never read a book because reading is useless. The game of life has already lost its meaning to so many in the modern age, and people who can’t see WHY, and they wrongly think that accelerating into a even further alienating world is the answer. If it was up to the tech gurus, we’d all be neurologically implanted into the blockchain and never do anything other than optimize optimize optimize produce produce produce. There is a reason most people at the forefront of these technologies tend to be neurodivergent. This is all just a capitalist wet dream and soon enough all ethics and regulatory practices will be seen as enemies to the doctrines of “efficiency” and “optimization” and serve no purpose and will be ignored. People here love to paint me as some weird traditionalist religious conservative values person. But they are so unaware of how they worship the idols of optimization and utility and efficiency. These are things that should be the goals of systems that supply human needs yes, but they have their place. The idea that once we reach post scarcity those in charge will have ANY incentive to help us in any way is entirely insane. It’s “evolution”! Following the same biological tendencies, AI is giving those in power the means, and the reason to completely annihilate all others. And people here really think it will HELP us😂😂😂.

−1