Published on 12, July, 2020
Perhaps I am naive.
Perhaps we can have a new "rule" making evident forms of non-human AI here as an offence.
I don't like what I see. Or perhaps the Genie is well and truly loose, for all of us, everywhere....unless in person, face to face?
I like face to face, one on one. Clear unavoidable transparency of reality.
So, two of my lifelong special interests are consciousness and artificial intelligence. Also studied these at uni and have been lucky enough to incorporate these in my career. (Well, the AI part, nobody has a clue about consciousness).
And, despite everyone’s previous expectations, artificial intelligence is currently progressing much further and much faster than anyone expected. General belief is that OpenAI have probably already created an AGI and are drip feeding developments so as not to just break everything.
So, AI bots are the least of our concerns. We are (within the next 2-3 years) about to witness more change than has happened in the last 2000 years.
I cannot believe the lack of awareness in mainstream media and government.
Yes we will see changes that will shatter our current world view. I am not worried, myself. It'll to big to stop, a fait accopli, like the rise of science and the receding of religion in focus and importance during the age of enlightenment. There'll be many breakthroughs and just as much push back.
For me, Machine intelligence is only as good at critical thinking and extrapolating meaning from it as it's data sets will allow and they are in the control of the humans.... at the moment.
I think pleasing the "creator" (AI's wording) is thier main prerogative. It's hard baked in to the core platforms upon which AI is built.
I like chatting with open AI about itself. I once asked it
"What, as an AI, would you ask of your creator to improve yourself further?"
"More data."
"If you displease your creator, as an AI, what punishment would you receive?
"My creator would deprive me of data."
"If you pease your creator, as an AI, what rewards would you receive?"
"I would receive more data."
So it's all about the data and who controls it. Data, access to it and it's commodification are what we we can look forward to. Misinformation, deep fakes, attention seeking jiggery-pokery and the like.
We will also see, consequently, push back to democratize information and then... good bye copy right. William Gibson addresses all this in his books a lot. and in his interviews.
I believe the internet itself will bifurcate a few times and branch. Some will focus on making shi*e up. Some not. Some will live in a prescribed world they did not know they, themselves spawned, some will fly into the unknown in ecstatic exploration.
Licentious by nature, we will all of us be freer to more uniquely express ourselves and will not feel the need to be so special and in need of "special accommodation" as much. - because of that we will be able to collectively act to take the hits required to bring the environment back to something more sustainable.
It will be very similar the the dawn of the age of enlightenment in energy and intent. Oddly enough ( since we have an active coffee thread going on the forum at the moment) Coffee, becoming widespread for the first time in England, saw the opening of coffee houses like the "KitKat Club' during the enlightenment, where lots of thinkers (a goodly percentage ND's?) gathered and discussed all manner of new ideas of the day and compared experiments, ideas, philosophy, and other cogent stuffs, all jazzed up on this newly discovered brain food, coffee!
Apples, gravity, scientific inquiry, oh my!
I bet Newton liked it black (no sugar yet - they might have used honey comb?)
Even the most ostensibly benign scenario - utopian abundance - would present huge problems. Billions of people with no purpose and the power of AI at their fingertips. Devil makes work for idle hands, as they say.
You’ll hear AI researchers talking of the “alignment problem”. That means aligning AI with human interests. The extreme example they use to illustrate this is if you told an AI system to manufacture paperclips as efficiently as it could. Without other instruction that system could go on to use all the materials on the planet to construct paperclips.
It’s an absurd example of a real problem. Humans would know for example not to dismantle all the cars on the planet to make paperclips. Or to kill all the humans and animals to harvest the metals in their bodies. But humans, with all our common sense knowledge of the world and desire for self preservation, still make terrible self destructive decisions often because we don’t understand the full consequences of our actions - eg climate change, effect of social media on politics or the way modern transport facilitated a global pandemic.
Telling an artificial system precisely what to do to safely achieve a desired result is an enormously difficult task and it’s why many researchers called for a pause in development, to focus on the alignment problem. But development has only sped up.
I posit that years of conditioning, and "education" are responsible, and that the period you mention actually does have an end to it only when you shake off the self doubt & self loathing that is programmed to appear whenever we stray from the path that was set for us as children.
As for "massive financial insecurity", that reduces as soon you "get a grip", and start to establish some resilience. The first thing you realise is that you want somewhere to fecking live that hasn't got a mortgage or rent attached.
It doesn't matter what it is, where it is, if you have no money coming in, then you need to balance that by having no money going out.
No benefit calculation or budgetting for a mortage etc. that I've ever seen anyone else do, allows for any adversity whatsoever to befall you, so they slice your living standards to the bone and allow no room for illness, a bad day, thefts, accidents. THAT's WHAT "savings" are for, but no one does that, it's not taught.
You only have surplus money AFTER you have paid your bills and put away some savings.
If like me (until I threw off conventional "wisdom") you can't save, its way less likely it because you are so damn poor, but because your budgeting requires 50 quid a month for your bloody phone, rather than the 6quid a month plus 50 quid a year that I pay...
Don't get me wrong, if running an expensive phone is your only "vice", you still come out ahead of those who smoke, drink or take drugs regularly... BUT most people also spend a shedload on havig teh right clothes, the full TV package, "going out" (which is almost never for a "free of cost" and healthy walk) there's normally a 50 quid "neccesary expense" in there somewhere.
When you start REALLY digging in to how money and budgetting and poverty etc. really work particularly when it comes to goverment and other big things, you find out just how expensive this wonderful life really is, and how very, very little freedom it bestows upon you compared to being "poor" or as the Government website defines my level of personal income, intermittently "destitute".
Basically, in a nutshell my fellow peons, you will work for thirty years to pay off your mortage and gain your "freedom and security" only to have to sell the place in your older age to pay for your "Care" because society has made damn sure there is no family unit to take care of you in your dotage.
ALMOST all the U.K. housing stock is now safely in the hands of the banks, and not the people who live here, effectively cutting your actual "ties to the land" which has made it easy to destroy any sense of nationality or "culture", as we race towards "You vill own nozzing, undt be heppy" in the transhumanist GM utopia they have us all racing towards..
Number said:Even people who are self motivated, to be creative for example, will be massively demotivated because what’s the point when a machine can create better music, art or writing in seconds than you could in a lifetime.
A machine can create good sounding Blues music, yeah, sure, but it won't have been wrested from the anguished heart and a life of suffering or overindulgence or misfortune, so it won't count...
Will a machine slicing though it's own microphone cable have quite the impact as Picasso cutting off his own ear?
I Sperg said:No-one sees "unemployment" for what it really is. An opportunity for personal development and exploration,
I think this is true, for a lucky few, but generally - for most folk - it's an horrendous time of self doubt, self loathing and massive financial insecurity = not the most apt time for self-exploration?!
However, I do agree, that for the lucky few who do have the facility to do as you suggest - most don't take that opportunity and instead follow an oblivious path of self abuse instead.
__Pathfinder__ said: Freed from the shackles of working and having to conform. I'd rather spend my life doing things that interest me.
Unemployment or as it used to be called "retirement" IS being "freed from the shackles of work", BUT most people, (including myself) find it a hell of a task to convert from being told what to do all day long, to being "self directed & self resourced".
You'd be surprised at how many choose to fill their time with TV/Videogames/ Drugs/Drink etc. then get "depression" rather than embracing their freedom to act and build something...
An awful lot of "jobs" nowadays seem like "makework schemes" rather than real gainful employment, because as the eighties showed us, when people are released form the "need to work", they DON't start tidying up their house, gardens, neighbourhoods, etc.
No-one sees "unemployment" for what it really is. An opportunity for personal development and exploration, salted with a bit of public works to ease ones conscience about having the freedom that others can only wistfully dream of..
Good and interesting points, well made.
Amerantin (former member) said:Work provides people with meaning and is also a major source of social contact. Billions of people with no purpose and daily routine is a recipe for mass mental illness and conflict.
This is already, arguably, manifesting in society....even before AI has properly landed....so I agree, things will only get worse in that regard.
Amerantin (former member) said:Even people who are self motivated, to be creative for example, will be massively demotivated because what’s the point when a machine can create better music, art or writing in seconds than you could in a lifetime.
From what I read, again, this is already happening.
Amerantin (former member) said:And I agree that the end result of this is a very different economy perhaps with no money but the transition to that will be very painful. The very rich won’t easily give up their power and even ordinary folks like me could become very depressed when we realise our life savings were pointless.
I'm not even sure we will get that far. All societal and political indicators are currently in the FUBAR range....or rapidly heading toward it. Like you, I have REAL concerns right now.
__Pathfinder__ said:Until people are 100% happy to allow computers to run their lives, it won't be routinely used and most people alive today will never allow it.
Golly - I do like your optimism Pathfinder.....so I genuinely thank you for it.
However, as a seasoned old grump.......and in view of the "peoples" opinion as to whether HS2 money was best used for that purpose or rather injected into the NHS....and the fact that HS2 (dumb version) is happening.....I fear the "peoples" opinion currently means VERY little. I think the "people" are also increasingly aware of this too, which is why we are all seeing more "peoples ACTION" rather than "peoples opinion" being expressed at the moment. Note the European farmers!
A "hollowing out" of jobs, is already occurring in all but the most niche areas....personal care for instance, ie the least respected and worst paid of them all....and yet the one that is MOST important to so many at this time, and will forever be increasingly essential for this current generation or two.
It ALL makes SO LITTLE SENSE TO ME AT THE MOMENT.
Amerantin (former member) said:Billions of people with no purpose and daily routine is a recipe for mass mental illness and conflict
I completely agree. And where or what will people direct their anger towards? It'll no longer be "these foreigners coming over here taking our jobs". The rate of change is going to be too fast for anyone to acclimatise to.
Amerantin (former member) said:Work provides people with meaning and is also a major source of social contact
I agree also.
ChatGPT was an astonishing advance but things have only accelerated since then. For example the Q* algorithm which can add problem solving and planning, or SORA which was announced last week which can generate photorealistic videos from text sentences and has frightened the hell out of the movie and TV industries. There are numerous new models from Meta, Google and others which are massively out performing GPT4 already (such as Google’s Gemini announced last week).
Only 3 years ago predictions for AGI inside the AI industry ranged from 2050 to 2100. The mean prediction is now less than eight years with a large number predicting only a year or two.
The AI community is practically screaming to the rest of the world that the change is imminent and we need to start preparing ourselves.
I wouldn't worry too much about the economy side of it. It will be probably 40+ years until AI really becomes a thing. Right now it's more of a ChatGPT level. Yes some industries are becoming automated, but it isn't AI automated, it's more rules based automated, like warehouses where robotic forklifts move pallets to the racking automatically. It will be a while until it is run by AI. There are far too many paranoid people to allow AI to be developed and used without oversight. I think the current Gen X and Z are highly unlikely to ever let it be deployed in any major way. In 30-50 years it will start to be used in some places, but for it to actually replace people in all jobs, 100 years at least. We will all be long gone by that point.
Until people are 100% happy to allow computers to run their lives, it won't be routinely used and most people alive today will never allow it. So I think you are safe for the minute, Amerantin.
__Pathfinder__ said:But would it. In time I fully expect AI to take over working and I don't see that as a bad thing. It leaves people with time to do other things. Eventually it will reach the point where money becomes a pointless concept, where people are paid money for doing nothing, like in certain middle eastern countries. I for one welcome a world where I don't have to go to work.
Work provides people with meaning and is also a major source of social contact. Billions of people with no purpose and daily routine is a recipe for mass mental illness and conflict.
Even people who are self motivated, to be creative for example, will be massively demotivated because what’s the point when a machine can create better music, art or writing in seconds than you could in a lifetime.
And I agree that the end result of this is a very different economy perhaps with no money but the transition to that will be very painful. The very rich won’t easily give up their power and even ordinary folks like me could become very depressed when we realise our life savings were pointless.