Artificial intelligence discussion

AI to my mind has a very specific definition. I remember in the early 2000's when I undertook my A Level in Computing, the defintion of AI was far tighter than it appears to be today. Of course back then, we were also taught to print off hard copies of our code, so I know that times have moved on somewhat!

I still largely hold true the axoim that no computer program will ever be smarter or more intelligent than the developer(s). 

The main problem I have with more modern attempts at AI is that they are largely built from questionable practices. I know for example that the books I have published were used in part of the libraries of information used to train a well known LLM. That is unquestionable an illegal use of copyrighted materials. Such systems then in my opinion simply should be shut down immediately. They were developed unethically and cannot be without bias and can never be used ethically.

Similarly to that, let's imagine AI for self-driving cars. Are we as a society mature enough to have a conversation about the ethical choices that an AI driven car may have to make. Let's imagine the busy road. There is an accident ahead, a cyclist on in the lane to the right, and a pedestrian on the pavement to the left. The only way to protect the car is to swerve left or right. What level of decision making are we as a society comfortable with. Do we program these vehicles to always endanger the pedestrians? The cyclist? Or do we program them to destroy themselves and compound the accident ahead?

I don't think society in the UK, USA, or Europe is mature enough or tech aware enough to make that choice well. 

AI - of any stripe, must be developed according to incredibly high ethical standards. Standards that are applied to few, if any companies in the western world today. As a result, I don't believe that human civilisation is capable of utilising such technology and this I would rather have it banned entirely.

IrishInManchesterUK said:

Some of the reasons I have for my total opposition to AI and all advances in science and technology is that, as we have all seen in the past, it always falls into the wrong hands and is always used for evil purposes

If you apply this logic to the earliest technological advances then society would remain living in caves.

The earliest technology - fire - was corrupted and used to burn down buildings, set fire to crops and even burn people on the cross (think of the Salem witch trials)

Bow and arrows were great for hunting but soon corrupted to be a weapon of war.

Buildings gave shelter but also became prisons.

Fabrics kept us warm and dry but could also be made into straightjackets and restraints.

Injections can be used to cure a disease or cause it.

Organised religion (not belief mind you) can be used to enlighten or subjigate whole populations of people.

Any invention / discovery can be used for good or bad purposes. Trying to cancel it will only negate all the good it can do and unfortunately it is easily demonstrated that mankind will always find ways to pervert the use of the inventions.

Blame the workman, not the tool.

Thanks for the info.

Deleted User said:

I thought  the first day of a new year might be a good time to revisit this.

I'm just replying A so that this is bumped back up as your response has appeared (which I find fascinating).

I should think you are now released from spam prison as this post has been approved.

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Some of the reasons I have for my total opposition to AI and all advances in science and technology is that, as we have all seen in the past, it always falls into the wrong hands and is always used for evil purposes and AI is the most dangerous example of this, second only to robots and transhumanism - given that the elites never allowed their children under 21 any access to mobile phones and computers/internet when they were first released to the rest of us with no restrictions (which our grandparents generation were totally opposed to that free for all, as they correctly and accurately predicted where it would all lead to) and another reason is that many of these advances will in many cases only be available to the super rich and wealthy for their exclusive use - also technology will be used in any efforts to introduce a social credit system that will be integrated into every aspect of our lives via various devices to control us all - I embraced tech advances as a teenager in the 80’s but at age 54 now, given what we have seen now since Covid and given the rise of the CCP and its use of technology to control the Chinese people and it’s detrimental effects on Chinese society, I’m now very wary of all tech advances especially AI - during Covid, many of these advances were used to restrict free speech, including the censorship of historians online - I don’t honestly think that it’s an age thing and/or that I’m just being a Luddite for its own sake, I’m just concerned for the well-being of future generations 

I’m a bit scared of AI in malicious human hands. Someone can use it to create a video of me committing a crime, publish it and then is it easy to prove, that it wasn’t me? Just someone used my photo from Facebook for example? This is scary, not robots in my opinion. Well, robots may cause harm too, like the car accident you described, it needs much more work on it. I think we (humans) can use AI for some purposes, in medicine for example. But we have to keep it under control, or better - control ourselves. 

I wish I understood more than I do. Which is very little to begin with. 

I thought  the first day of a new year might be a good time to revisit this.

There was a lot of hype and excitement around ChatGPT a year or so ago and then everyone got bored and stopped talking much about it. But there have been staggering advances in 2024 which aren’t getting coverage in the main stream media.

Specifically, the addition of reasoning algorithms to LLMs and increased compute resources for this as opposed to the training phase - ie additional capability to actually “think” about the correct answer.

The result of this is that AGI - Artificial General Intelligence - may  have been achieved in the last few months. There’s a standard test set for AGI, on which GPT4 rates around 2%. OpenAI’s o1 model, released at the start of December, scores around 32%.

And they have released figures for the upcoming o3 model which scored 88%.

For comparison, an expert human might be expected to score around 70% on the same tests.

Things are going to get very weird in 2025.

I think I've figured out half an algorythm to make it work to establish the veracity of a statement or person...

Now that would set the cat amongst the pigeons.

Dave Bowman: Open the pod bay doors, HAL.

HAL: I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that.

I would be ok with a diagnostic monitor or a devise that alerts medical staff when I fall - only when I get feeble enough to need such things, otherwise, I signed on to life for the people, not the bots.

TheCatWoman said:

Does anyone remember the TV program Humans, about a world where Ai enabled robots seemed sentient and helped to do things like care for the elderly, they also took over a lot of people's jobs too.

Wow, that was strong stuff, full of ethical dilemmas as I recall.

I'm sure a goodly amount of men here would be tempted by the "upgrade package", BUT would it be like electric cars, where it's my understanding that some owners get bored quite quickly and want to revert to burning dinosaurs again? (Seriously. I heard a stroy of a bloke round here who bought an electric porsche, found it boring after a few months, money no option, so back to the Porche shop for a trade-in and they turned him down).   

Question. If they made a male android, which also came with the upgrade package, would they name him Everard? ;c) 

AI as it is now seems like a novelty, used by lazy hacks to spaff out crappy spam or copy paste pictures.  Of course it will be used to spread disinformation, commit crimes and decieve people.

And the corporations will use it to harvest data for profit until it eventually gets leaked or stolen.

And the law is still a century behind electronic shenanigans so it can't be properly regulated for years to come.

Not to mention how dangerous it would be if it did the thinking for us or be twisted into manipulating the world and society.

That said, if AI was restricted to certain applications and industries, like research and development, science to help crunch data and such for medicine and space development maybe that's where it's true value lies.

Your grandparents might of believed that, but not everybodies grandparents did or do, is that the sort of society you'd like to live in?

It should be remembered that looking past the heuristics and neural networks, what we’re essentially talking about here are probabilistic systems. These are algorithms which essential make a decision based on probabilities and in many case produce an answer most likely to be correct based on either their programming or training. They are not thinking. They are essentially guessing. That said, make enough guesses and get good at it, and such a system can appear to be correct enough of the time to be useful. It all comes down to training and context.

As these systems become more complex, with layers upon layers of probabilistic algorithms working together they start to look more and more “human’ in the feats they can achieve. But there is a very big difference between a person and an AI. Could an AI have a soul? Feel love or joy? Or is it just a fascinating but nevertheless always artificial simulation?

My grandparents generation believed very strongly in the traditional Catholic faith and were totally opposed to Vatican II in thier vision of the Catholic Rural Ireland they grew up in, during the 1960’s & 1970’s where they would always say “faith and morals” if their views were ever challenged in any way and they were also guided by the sermons of the Irish Catholic Parish Priest who ruled Irish villages with an iron fist, along with the local police Seargent and others in the local village, where absolute obedience to the Catholic faith was everything, where already, they were totally opposed to the television in the 1960’s as this was the vision of Eamon De Valera’s Catholic Ireland pre 1960’s 

IIM, Tech advances are inevitable, it's the people who use them that have the morality, a knife is just an inanimate object, a useful tool to cut my food, or a weapon to end a life.

I'm not sure '..our grandparents generation..' were totally opposed to to tech, look at the numbers of older and even elderly people use computers, smart phones and the internet? '..our grandparents..' never had the chance to use modern tech so how could they reject it?

I'm a tech sceptic, but you make me look like I'm all in favour of it, do you see no benefits at all? You criticise potential uses, but still use tech yourself, to come on here for example do you not see anything a little odd about that? Or do you see yourself as the bloke with the sandwich board advertising that, The End is Nigh!

I suspect that AI will eventually be forced on all of us in at least some ways going forward, however as a traditional Catholic, I am fundamentally and totally opposed to its use, just like with all scientific and technological advances, even though it is only supposed to a tool, yet as we have seen throughout history, such scientific and technological advances always fall into the wrong hands and are always used for evil purposes, regardless of any safeguards put in place designed to prevent misuse - for me, the biggest problem is that many of these are like a “tower of Babel” or like “Icarus” as they seek to ursurp and replace the role of God in the story of creation, which mankind has no right nor entitlement to do and many of these “advances” are merely Satanism dressed up as “science” (there was a point in history where scientific discoveries were only sanctioned by the Church and were underpinned by Church teaching) - our grandparents generation, being totally opposed to the internet, mobile phones and computers before they passed in the 1980’s in my teens, going to great lengths to stop them and giving warnings and making predictions about what it would lead to (which turned out to be correct and accurate in our times) even as we teens embraced such “advances” and indeed, as we later discovered for ourselves once out of the confusion of our teens, it led to much worse indirect effects than what our grandparents generation could ever have predicted nor imagined as the decades rolled on - young people these days are only taught about the “advantages” of such technologies and not about the realities of what these could lead to, they are only taught what to think and not how to think, to think critically, something which is even more vitally important in our times