[stuckinhell]

AI that can do creative work is scary for its implications on humanity. Are we at best biological AI's ?

I've played around with several of them. These artwork AI's are way more scary than GPT-3 et al because they seem to do something so creative with such good visible results.

I don't think the genie goes back in the bottle. I think humanity has an existential crisis on its hands.

Whats the point in doing things if the AI can do it better than you ? Do those things become relegated to some increasing unpopular niche ?

I just have increasingly amounts of questions and fear.

[LeanderK]

> Are we at best biological AI's ?

imho yes. But don't have an existential crisis just yet. It's a very narrow task where the AI systems do well in a way that we don't expected from computers. But it's well chosen, there are still only few tasks where significant progress was made. They really can't make "logical deductions" at all and we have no idea how. Everything you see is learned via a massive amount of labeled data, but imagine you are a tradesmen repairing machines. We have no idea how to build a system that you could explain some basics on how to repair a simple machine and the system understanding what's going on. We can't learn from explanations. It turns out "AI" is not a single skill we have to master, but orthogonal concepts where we managed to conquer a single one. This doesn't mean the next one is around the corner.

I think it's a bit like the early mechanical age where people thought everything in the future will be mechanical (those fun retro-future posts). In my opinion we are in a similar situation. We are surprised by machines automating tasks that we thought are reserved for humans and just extrapolate, but it's not that simple. We have to find out exactly where to extrapolate to, but it currently very much looks like there are bounds to our current approach.

[htrp]

> We have no idea how to build a system that you could explain some basics on how to repair a simple machine and the system understanding what's going on.

90% of biological humans probably couldn't assemble Ikea furniture from the instructions either .

>I think it's a bit like the early mechanical age where people thought everything in the future will be mechanical (those fun retro-future posts).

I like this, and I'm definitely quoting it.

[ben_w]

> They really can't make "logical deductions" at all and we have no idea how.

What exactly do you mean by this? Because this sounds like the exact opposite of the problem AI has — logic is the easy part, and has been working in machines since they were clockwork and punched cards and is the foundation for 100% of the functionality of modern computers, but natural language comprehension is only just starting to be possible now, and only at a fairly rudimentary level.

[LeanderK]

Maybe i could have phrased it differently, i'll try my best to explain it. Keep in mind that this is open research, it can change quickly with breakthroughs. What you mean is strictly "following" logic, by executing code or combining axioms like in prolog. What I want to get at is maybe better described as "reasoning". Learning by thinking about stuff and combining knowledge, not by example. Our current models can't do this at all, this was all the rage of old-school, logic based AI (but this also didn't work at all, hence the AI-winter). Just think about the difference between learning to play tennis (repetition and exercise, learning from errors without much reasoning) and my IKEA furniture example, for which you are expected to assemble it on your first try without guidance or repetition. It turns out that we can solve, through repetition and exercise, a lot of problems that were previously thought have a lot to do with reasoning, like dalle-2 or gpt-3, this involves huge amounts of data and long training times. Is it all solvable by repetition and exercise? I doesn't look like it. The learning process is so fundamentally different that we have no idea how to build systems that learn by explanation and have the ability to "think hard about a problem". Some researchers are convinced it can be done, but we currently can't do this at all and there's not really an indication that it is possible using our current approaches.

My personal opinion is that we now have a hammer and everything looks like a nail. I don't think everything is a nail, but surprisingly many problems are, if you phrase the problem correctly. In practice this means that if we can gather enough training data then a lot of problems suddenly become solvable, but this is not possible for all problems. If we can not gather enough training data, then we have have a problem we just can not solve and there's no indication that it is solvable with current tools. It would have to "reason" and "think hard" about the problem, we can't do that. All those fancy things work by ever increasing datasets. This is currently a hard limit and I can perfectly imagine that we have just solved one of the ingredients for better AI. And just like rolling a dice, if you have rolled two 6s in a row the probability for another 6 is still 1/6. If we need another breakthrough this can take years or decades and just because we've made one in 2012 this doesn't mean the next will happen in 2022.

[ben_w]

People run for fun, even though cars beat us for both range and speed before the end of the Ottoman Empire and the departure of Ireland from the United Kingdom.

We'll do creative things for fun too, even if/when AI convincingly bests us in such endeavours by the margin it does in chess.

I, for example, still sometimes make musical noises, even though my musical talent is so bad that I wrote a procedural generator better than me back in 2009 — https://youtu.be/depj8C21YHg and https://youtu.be/k7RM7GsGeUI won't impress anyone, but me thinking I'm worse when I try to do it myself doesn't stop me having fun.

[mr_toad]

> Whats the point in doing things if the AI can do it better than you ?

“countries engage in international trade even when one country's workers are more efficient at producing every single good than workers in other countries”

“Widely regarded as one of the most powerful[7] yet counter-intuitive[8] insights in economics”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage

[mrshadowgoose]

> Whats the point in doing things if the AI can do it better than you ?

If doing something makes you happy, that can be reason enough for doing a thing. A huge portion of people already engage in "useless" hobbies with no meaningful external outputs. And in the vast portion of those situations, experts and/or machines already exist that can do far better than a hobbyist. Yet people still have hobbies, because hobbies are fun!

Ultimately one's purpose in life can only really be defined by oneself. As human cognition/capability is increasingly shown to be wholly unremarkable, I expect more and more people to turn to lives of leisure, indulgence and self-fulfillment.

This is all contingent on AI being harnessed for our collective benefit, instead of the egos of a select few. That's the facet of AI development that keeps me up at night. AI, AGI, and eventually ASI will be human-intent amplifiers of a magnitude barely conceivable by most. There is no steady-state where things remain as they are today. We are going to either end up with a utopia, or one of a myriad of possible dystopias.

[stuckinhell]

How do you know a huge portion of people engage in useless hobbies with no meaningful external outputs ? I really don't even know how one would go about figuring that out.

I think I see the opposite in my part of the United States. A life without purpose leads to rampant drug use, malaise, and decay.

I think an AI on demand that can out compete people in most of their hobbies would be absolute game changer, and doesn't currently exist. If that kind of automation reached the average consumer, I think the vast amount of people would give up those hobbies as well.

[notahacker]

> How do you know a huge portion of people engage in useless hobbies with no meaningful external outputs?

How many hobbyists' hobbies all meet the thread-relevant standard of usefulness with meaningful external outputs (e.g. producing creative work with comparable or greater value to people outside their social circle than hypothetical superb AI alternatives... or the abundance of writing and painting and recorded media and manufactured goods and software already out there available at little or no cost)? What proportion of the population would you say undertook literally no activities which could be described as hobbies? The difference between those two numbers is your portion of people who engage in "useless" hobbies with no meaningful output.

People still play chess badly against human opponents even though computers can play it perfectly (or with dialled down difficulty); even using computers with perfectly adequate chess playing programs installed to seek out remote human opponents. People spend hours trying to play Stairway to Heaven borderline adequately despite the fact anyone can listen to Stairway to Heaven played by Jimmy Page on demand, and has been able to for very little outlay for half a century now. Even if fans could ever be persuaded that the music the AI was generating was superior to that created by Led Zeppelin, why would people interested in playing music cease to be interested in playing music?

A hobby is something people choose to do primarily for enjoyment rather than profit; it's almost a tautology that [further] reducing the potential for profit by spamming the space with AI-generated outputs isn't going to greatly discourage people from doing it.

[ilaksh]

We still have decades, maybe even a century or two, before humans become irrelevant. We should be happy we got our lives in right before.

https://marshallbrain.com/second-intelligent-species#:~:text....

[dqpb]

> Whats the point in doing things if the AI can do it better than you ?

Whats the point in doing things if someone else can do it better than you?

[astrange]

> Whats the point in doing things if the AI can do it better than you ?

That's not how jobs work (comparative advantage). An AI won't replace you, simply because there's something better it could be doing than replacing you. And, no, it can't do everything at once - that would be a perpetual motion machine.