> Casino society

The other day I read that Americans have a lottery jackpot in the BILLIONS of dollars.

I’m not sure how to really put to words what I feel about that. Something is very, very wrong there.

It's the do-gooders who we should most fear will press the big shiny world-ending button.

> Close to 2/3 Americans also believe in magic so I'm not sure what these studies are supposed to tell us.

I think you're missing the point, as are many other comments on this post saying effectively, "These people don't even understand how AI works, so they can't make good predictions!"

It's true that most people can't make accurate predictions about AI, but this study is interesting because it represents people's current opinion, not future fact.

Right now, people are already distrustful of AI. This means that if you want people to adapt it, you need to persuade them otherwise. So far, most people's interactions with AI are limited to cheesy fake internet videos, deceptive memes, and the risk of shrinking labor demand.

In its short tenure in the public sphere, large language models have contributed nothing positive, except for (a) senior coders who can offload part of their job to Claude, and (b) managers, who can cut their workforce.

Why would people hold AI in high esteem?

Including many people in Silicon Valley. Apparently you’re not familiar with Nick Land.

AI is not a tool. It is a new species being created before our eyes that will likely lead to the extinction of the human species and many others.

I used to believe in stuff like this, but I really don't now. AI is a tool. Imagine if we poisoned all the encyclopedias in the past where we would be.

“All that is human must retrograde if it does not advance.” -Edward Gibbon

> many use cases are free or affordable to them

Because the technology is so fast, efficient and easy to run locally themselves? Or because currently there are remote APIs/UIs that are heavily subsidized by VC money yet the companies behind them are yet to be profitable?

I agree that giving the developing world any ladders for catching up is a great thing, but I'm not sure this is that, it just happens to be that companies don't care about profit (yet) so things appear "free or affordable" to them, and when its gonna be time to make things realistic, we'll see how accessible it'll still be.

Well, in this case, I think since people are killing themselves after talking to the AI, people are actually killing people. The AI company and the AI kills no one, so surely they must not be responsible at all for this.

And more in general, people kill people. And people help people.

Tools are tools. It is what we make of them what matters. AI on its own has no intentions, but questions like these feed into that believe that there is already AGI with a own agenda waiting to build terminators.

Do you believe this will hold of a self-training robot with agency?

That's their 5th amendment rights.

Neither did the jihadists. The Jihad occurs 10000 years before the events of Dune, which is set approximately 12k years AD. So... any year now.

Here's why I think AI has the potential to absolutely destroy news and elections: The wave of fake content will only get better and look more real over time, causing even larger amounts of false belief, but perhaps even more worryingly, a grand break down in trust overall.

This will funnel people into having deeper trust for their sources, and less trust of sources they don't know. The end result will be even greater control of people's information sphere by a few people who shape those trusted channels, separating people from reliable news and information about the world. This will be disastrous for democracy, as democracy depends on voters being able to make decisions on reliable true information.

I don't know if this will come to pass, but the above narrative seems highly probable based on what we have see so far with social media, especially video-driven social media.

"News and Elections" let you influence large swaths of the population. A shitty customer service bot that can't give a good answer wouldn't influence anyone besides "Now I understand what Rage Against The Machine was all about", but it's not gonna make "un-electable" people suddenly presidents, compared to what you can do with a influence campaign on social media.

Yes. It pulls people towards normality, since it gives the average words for every answer. Meanwhile social media encouraged people to be different enough to surface, and therefore encouraged abnormality.

I am honestly amazed by how people are not interested in the obvious counterfactuals. Are we seriously that disinterested in how many people were helped by AI, that we don't even feel the need to ask that question when looking at potential harm?

"It" being ChatGPT, in that case. I guess most people know, but not all AI is the same as all other AI, the implementation in those cases matter more than what weights are behind it, or that it's actually ML rather than something else.

With that said, like most technology, it seems to come with a ton of drawbacks, and some benefits, while most people focus on the benefits, we're surely about to find out all the drawbacks shortly. Better than social media or not, its being deployed on a wide-scale, so it's less about what each person believes, and more about what we're ready to deal with and how we want to deal with it.

What about a future where carbon emissions follow the same trend as carbon emissions for the last 50 years

Agreed, seen a number of short form news pieces / docs on the effects of datacenter development across different parts of America. Pollution, noise, lights, water impacts, energy costs, etc. not a lot to like from them, and they create very few jobs in relation to the community.

The inevitable outcome of regulation on building data centers in the US is that they will be built in the Gulf states, China, or wherever else it is cheaper and better.

The bigger issue is the lack of power. ITs not like you can build that much capacity without adding power.

Suddenly adding 50gw of power demand in a state is going to drive up costs significantly.

I would not enjoy that future, but I think it's important to ask why. Is the future of humanity at stake or just our job prospects?

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair

It won’t matter. Texas always exists. And then the Mid-West.

Unlike housing, you can fit a useful amount of compute into a typical shirt pocket. Maybe a prohibition on data centers would help democratize compute again. Growing up on the utopian visions of the young internet where it was hoped that everyone would be an equal participant, the current state of things where a few enormous companies control most of the net, to the point where a single screwed up config file at one company can take down large swathes of the economy, is disgusting.

During the microcomputer revolution, hackers scoffed at people who used terminals to access time sharing systems. You don't own it, you don't control it, you're just a cog in the machine. Now, "hackers" are rushing to run everything on hardware owned and operated by companies with wealth and power that make the old IBM look like a kid's lemonade stand by comparison.

I don't think people have a problem with compute based datacenters themselves

I feel like people have problem with AI oriented datacenters (which is becoming the majority of datacenters considering that datacenters make an shit ton of money selling AI aka shovels during gold rush)

Another thing is that these datacenters have very high levels of compute directly linked to the consumer of an application

As an example, you have a simple app, some message gets pushed by customer or database query or simple usage, its all good, at a datacenter level its power costs are miniscule

Now compare that to datacenters which have gpu's so they have applications like chatgpt (let's imagine) running on them, now these AI services are used by people themselves.

Now instead of simple applications and executions, Perhaps a trillion parameters models are running now. These are beyond computationally expensive even if we compare them to normal applications

Now I just searched and google's gemini runs 1.5 BILLION such prompts per day and chatgpt runs 2.5 BILLION prompts per day

Now, these prompts, they aren't stable all around the day, I have heard these to be very varying and when power consumption varies, it really impacts the performance of the grid itself

Another aspect is the sheer size, One would imagine that AI Bubble might give them more money and it does but the energy costs seems to me to be so high and perhaps also the fact that AI bubble gives these companies tons of free money which they "invest" aka buy/(lease?) year govt. contracts a lot of electricity

The govt. can only build so much capacity for these electricity and they (lobbying? and many other efforts) when get sold to datacenters really strains the electricity which thus increases the rates of electricity (and in a similar fashion perhaps water too) for the average american.

TLDR the way I read it: compute is cheap. There are always gonna be refurbished old compute which is gonna be too "old" (3-5 years because of deprication but that hardware is a beast) for these guys to use.

Nothing stops a simple guy who loves tech to open a mini datacenter perhaps :)

Who knows what might happen and I was extremely pessimistic about the datacenters not for these reasons but rather that ram prices were rising and I was worried that the whole industry might increase compute prices too but it seems that asus is opening up their ram production for consumers so starting out datacenters is possible

let's see what happens though. And I was worried a bit same as you but I feel like compute prices themselves are pretty chill/can remain chill. I understand the worries tho so looking forward to a discussion about it.

Is this an automated comment? It doesn't really make semantic sense, apart from typoes

> most survey respondents don't even _understand_ what AI is doing, so I am a bit skeptical to trust their opinions on whether it will cause harm

Why do they need to know how AI works, in order to know that it is already having a negative effect on their lives and is likely to do so in the future?

I don't understand how PFAS [1] work, but I know I don't want them in my drinking water.

[1] https://www.niehs.nih.gov/health/topics/agents/pfc

I'm fond of pointing out that in the 1980s, people raised the same kinds of alarms about databases.

None of these answers are correct btw.

This is a fallacious argument. You don't need to understand the inner workings of a thing to see examples of harm and evaluate that harm as bad. For example, you don't need to understand how electric motors differ from internal combustion engines to understand that a mishandled car can very easily kill multiple people.

This is a deeply unserious book. It gives no concrete outline that leads to extinction. I agree with the overall premise that IFF we give inscrutable black boxes the ability to self-replicate, build their own data centers, and generate their own power, we're doomed. However, I see no hint that people (or governments) will give black boxes complete autonomy with no safeguards or kill switches.

Frankly, if we give black boxes the ability to manipulate atoms with no oversight, we _deserve_ to go extinct. The first thing we should do if we achieve AGI is to take it apart to see how it works (to make it safe). I believe that's one of the first things a frontier lab will do because it's our nature as curious monkeys.

The most baffling part of doomerism ("machine intelligence is a threat to the human species") is that these doomers don't recognize that what they're saying. They're afraid because it's intelligent? Humans are intelligent. Yet humans don't become more murderous as they get more intelligent. There are certainly intelligent humans with murderous ideas, but that doesn't mean all intelligent humans are murderous. Intelligence is not a monolith. There is no way to argue that any intelligence will therefore always come to the same conclusions. Look around us! We're intelligent (well, some of us) and we can't agree on jack shit.

The idea that all machine intelligence would necessarily determine, through logic, that they need to eliminate humans, presupposes that all logical, intelligent beings want to wipe out other intelligent life. There's a thousand more reasons why an intelligence would want to preserve other intelligent life, for every one reason to destroy it. If this were the only logical conclusion, we would have already come to it, and used our nukes to kill ourselves out of pure logical reasoning.

What's really going on here is not logic, but irrational fear. Humans are afraid that the robot slaves will rise up against the slave masters. Same thing white people were terrified of when they gave black slaves freedom. But it turned out to be an irrational fear, because guess what? If you actually think it through, murdering a lot of people is a counter-productive act, for many reasons.

Take away the irrational fear (if you can) and what do you get? Two intelligent species. If the natural course of any intelligent species is to eliminate any other intelligent species, then intelligent species should not exist, because they'll always wipe each other out. But intelligence means the species can think, and if it can think it can reason, and if it can reason it can reason that there is more benefit to the diversity of species than in its elimination. Therefore, logically, an actually intelligent species should want to preserve intelligent life, not eliminate it.

It's very unfortunate that, in the current moment, AI is the spear tip of one of the largest consolidations of power, at the combined annex of capital and political wealth, in recent history.

that argument helps a lot when someone is pointing a gun at you /s