The majority of U.S. adults don’t believe the benefits of artificial intelligence outweigh the risks, according to a new Mitre-Harris Poll released Tuesday.
The majority of U.S. adults don’t believe the benefits of artificial intelligence outweigh the risks, according to a new Mitre-Harris Poll released Tuesday.
The truly terrifying thing about AI isn’t really the Skynet fears… (it’s fairly easy to keep humans in the loop regarding nuclear weapons).
And it’s not world domination (an AI programmed to govern with a sense of egalitarianism would be better than any president we’ve had in living memory).
No. What keeps me up at night is thinking about what AI means for my kids and grandkids, if it works perfectly and doesn’t go rogue.
WITHIN 20 years, AI will be able to write funnier jokes, more beautiful prose, make better art, write better books, do better research, and generally outperform all humans on all tasks.
This chills me to my core.
Because, then… Why will we exist? What is the point of humanity when we are obsolete in every way that made us amazing?
What will my kids and grandkids do with their lives? Will they be able to find ANY meaning?
AI will cure diseases, solve problems we can’t begin to understand, expand our lifespan and our quality of life… But the price we pay is an existence without the possibility of accomplishments and progress. Nothing we can create will ever begin to match these AIs. And they will be evolving at an exponential rate… They will leave us in the dust, and then they will become so advanced that we can’t begin to comprehend what they are.
If we’re lucky we will be their well-cared-for pets. But what kind of existence is that?
People don’t play basketball because Michael Jordan exists?
People don’t play hockey because Wayne Gretzky exists?
People don’t paint because Picasso exists?
People don’t write plays because Shakespeare exists?
People don’t climb Everest because Hillary and Norgay exist?
Are you telling me because you’re not the best at everything you do, nothing is worth doing? Are you saying that if you’re not the first person to do a thing, there’s no enjoyment to be had? So what if the singularity means AI will solve everything- that just means there’s more time for leisurely pursuits. Working for the sake of working is bullshit.
Problem is: That’s one guy, far away and rather expensive if you want them in your team.
AI in contrast will be ubiquitous, powerful and cheap, and do whatever you want from it. That’s way harder to resist that, especially once you have a generation of people that have grown up with it and for which that is the new normal.
You need to read some Iain M Banks. His Culture novels are essentially in that future where AI runs everything. A lot of his characters are essentially looking for meaning within such a world
While I do understand where you’re coming from, someone being better at something shouldn’t stop a person from doing what they love.
There are millions of people who draw better, sing better, dance better, write better, play video games better, design websites better or just do anything I can do better than I can… and that’s fine.
I mean, chess is already obsolete, but it’s also more popular than ever.
To me there is extreme value in being able to choose your endeavor vs being forced into something agonizing just to survive.
When everything is obsolete, people can create entire worlds and experiences using AI for themselves and for others who may care to experience it.
The threat of needing to find something to do is one of the most frustratingly privileged concepts.
I don’t need anything to do. I just want to be alive without also being exhausted, in pain, and chastised by customers despite working my hardest.
I’d rather the struggle of finding an activity over worrying about whichever coworker is crying in the walk-in because just surviving requires more from them than they are capable of.
Being obsoleted is fine by me, as long as we have the power redistribution necessary to keep people alive and happy.
AI won’t be creating anything new anytime soon, because it recycles existing art just like hack writers do now. The “best” art tends to require a supporting story, which AI won’t have. Comedy changes constantly, and AI won’t be any better than people trying random stuff.
You don’t question your existence because other people are smarter or better at doing things, right? Is most of humanity not of any value because they aren’t the best at everything?
This is one of those half-truths which I think is doing more harm than good for the AI-skeptic crowd. If all we have to offer in our own defense is that we have souls and the machines do not, then what does that mean if the machines ever surpass us? (For the kids snickering in the back: I am using “soul” as a poetic stand-in for the ineffable creative quality which the “AI as collage-maker” argument ascribes to human people – nothing spiritual).
For now, the future of AI is incredibly uncertain. We have no clear idea just how much gas is left in the moment of this current generative AI breakthrough. Regardless of whether you are optimistic or pessimistic, do not trust anyone who acts like they know for a definitive fact what the technology will or won’t be capable of.
It already has.
ChatGPT can write that. Multi-modal models that combine text generation with audio and video are months away.
Those claims have the tendency to not age well.
Humans aren’t that much better than me and not doing the things I want to do. AI on the other side will be much better than me, as well as do exactly what I want it to do and will be a click away.
And yeah, I had numerous experience were I would question my existence when playing around with ChatGPT or StableDiffusion. Neither of them is quite good enough yet, but they are very much on a trajectory where you can see that you have zero chance of competing with them in the future, or even getting remotely close.
The fact that we got them in the first place, not from humans doing centuries of research on art and language, but by simply by throwing huge amount of training data at AI algorithm, should be enough to question your existence.
AI writing a fictional background story about how it came up with some piece of art is not the same thing as multiple researchers telling the story of an artist. Neither of your examples are something someone couldn’t do, because whoever prompted it could have done the same thing and just had not yet.
You are completely missing the point that great art is generally supported by the context of how it was made and not the end result in a vaccuum.
I understand why you think that, but what you have to remember is that every great piece of art you’ve ever seen has been derivative of something before it.
For example, I think of the Beatles as musical geniuses. But they are the first to admit that they stole other people’s ideas left and right.
Beethoven’s 9th symphony is this piece of transcendental music, that was widely considered at the time to be the greatest symphony ever written.
But if you listen to Beethoven’s works over time, you see that the seeds of that symphony were planted much much earlier in inferior works.
Genius and creation aren’t what we think they are. They are all just incremental steps.
That is overly reductive and conflates copying (like a cover band) and creating something new (being influenced). Heck, even when some bands play new versions of existing songs they are adding their own personal touch and have the possibility of making it mean something new. Like how Hurt by NIN and Johnny Cash are the same song, but how they are performed ends up being about completely different experiences.
Even when bands like Led Zeppelin outright covered existing songs they added something to it that AI can’t, and won’t be able to do. AI can’t have sexually charged energy that a human can have. They can pretend to, like how cover bands can pretend to be like the band they are covering, but AI won’t be able to replicate the personal touch that memorable art has.
Even popular stuff with widespread appeal frequently drops off over time because it isn’t the type of art that holds up over time. Hell, the Beatles mostly hold up more for when they were popular and how they have managed their legacy than any kind of technical prowess in musicianship. Without their performances, their personas, and the backstory to most of their music it is just well done music that has been superseded musically since that time. None of that will apply to AI, and without the backstory it will just end up being high quality music that won’t stand the test of time because we don’t have any context for it.
Hell, there were a ton of other composers during Beethoven’s time that were putting out great music too, but you know who he is because of details other than his musical prowess.
You need to read Iain Banks to soothe that existential dread.