Posted on 04/09/2024 7:36:23 PM PDT by DallasBiff
From the academic who warns of a robot uprising to the workers worried for their future – is it time we started paying attention to the tech sceptics?
Eliezer Yudkowsky, a 44-year-old academic wearing a grey polo shirt, rocks slowly on his office chair and explains with real patience – taking things slowly for a novice like me – that every single person we know and love will soon be dead. They will be murdered by rebellious self-aware machines. “The difficulty is, people do not realise,” Yudkowsky says mildly, maybe sounding just a bit frustrated, as if irritated by a neighbour’s leaf blower or let down by the last pages of a novel. “We have a shred of a chance that humanity survives.”
It’s January. I have set out to meet and talk to a small but growing band of luddites, doomsayers, disruptors and other AI-era sceptics who see only the bad in the way our spyware-steeped, infinitely doomscrolling world is tending. I want to find out why these techno-pessimists think the way they do. I want to know how they would render change. Out of all of those I speak to, Yudkowsky is the most pessimistic, the least convinced that civilisation has a hope. He is the lead researcher at a nonprofit called the Machine Intelligence Research Institute in Berkeley, California, and you could boil down the results of years of Yudkowsky’s theorising there to a couple of vowel sounds: “Oh fuuuuu–!”
(Excerpt) Read more at theguardian.com ...
Who knows, some people I know say AI will be an economic salvation, I am scepticle but my inner Luddite is making me queasy.
Flame away.
Dictionary
Definitions from Oxford Languages · Learn more
skep·ti·cal
/ˈskeptək(ə)l/
adjective
1.
not easily convinced; having doubts or reservations.
“the public were deeply skeptical about some of the proposals”
I’m thinking of getting a shotgun - to take down drones
This a container where your doubts are stored.
I’ve been using Claude 3 as a junior writer to help me complete my screenplays much faster and with more control. I come up with the beginning, middle, and end paragraphs of a story and feed this to Claude to generate a four-page treatment, character descriptions, logline, and other screenplay essentials.
After some editing, I send the treatment back to Claude to generate a three-act outline with plot points. This is then edited and fed to Claude to generate detailed story beats. I then edit the story beats to clear up any mistakes and misunderstandings and have Clause generate the scenes for a complete 115-page formatted script from the story beats.
Although the premise can take weeks to refine, the rest of the process takes about 8 hours rather than four months. Once I have a script in Claude’s voice, I need to polish it into a final draft script in my voice which can take several weeks.
My point is that AI is a game-changing productivity tool for creative writers. I look forward to the day when I can drop my script in an AI tool like Sora and have it generate a feature movie from it without bothering Hollywood producers.
Panic Porn from some media shill.
Our saving grace is the flawed nature of technology.
AI will never be what people think it will be. Technology never meets expectations.
My car still meets my expectations. Don’t know what the expectations of others are.
These days, every corporation has an IT department, and the phone lines to the “technical difficulties” desk are the busiest.
Decades ago, all you had to do was plug in a cord and turn a knob. The only failure was when you had to get new batteries.
My understanding of how to explain the increasingly flawed nature of technology has to do with its increasing complexity.
It’s simple. As technology becomes more complex, there are more ways for it to fail. By sheer probability, it fails more often.
Do you remember at the dawn on the PC-warnings of madmen building super computers in their garages to threaten earth?
warnings of immense job losses to the computers?
Same old tune. I’m still wondering if the computer chip created or destroyed more jobs.
AI=Anti-INRI
The danger is not that Artificial Intelligence will become self-aware, it can’t.
The danger is people believing that it HAS become sentient and that it is infallible, that its logic is perfect and must be obeyed.
That is when the edicts and decisions from AI will lead to bloodshed.
The machines will never rise up and kill us; they’ll convince us to kill each other.
The global proliferation of the computer chip dramatically improved the lives of every man, woman and child on earth.
It didn’t meet expectations it surpassed them by light years.
It was delicious... I think.
If bureaucrats didn’t have computer memory, but still had to rely on paper, then maybe we wouldn’t have as much bureaucracy as we currently do.
I love that
Only Paper Files for government
So creativity is left to AI because your creativity or lack thereof takes to much time.
Depends on the car... The wife’s car’s infotainment system is a technology nightmare. Some S/W updates require you to lock the car and wait 90 minutes for the update to load, it shuts down completely while driving, screens go blank, audio shuts down etc. According to blogs, we’re not alone.
No flames from here.
Technology has improved out lives greatly.
*Smart* technology is betraying us as it allows government surveillance and control of our lives.
AI?
A whole ‘nother issue itself. Opposing AI does not make one a *luddite*> It makes one wise. This has far too much potential to backfire and destroy mankind.
Not necessarily because the AI will become sentient and decide to eliminate humans by itself, but it’s the human programmers of AI I do not trust.
Very interesting observation and very feasible as far as I can see.
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