[jhbadger]

"Most AI researchers think good outcomes are more likely. This seems just blind faith, though"

Or, you know, they might actually know something about the subject? On a similar note, most physicists don't think particle colliders will cause mini black holes which will swallow the Earth, but the fear gets repeated by non-physicists.

[chrischen]

You are fallaciously appealing to (assumed) authority and missing entirely the fact that the author is a PhD in AI. This critically underscores why blind faith in authority is bad, and why people should do some basic research such as reading the article. By reading the article you would have understood the arguments the author is making on their merits, rather than on blind faith in imagined authority figures you are citing.

The author is not talking about sentient AI turning Hollywood film evil like Elon Musk did. Why no, that would be ludicrous. You would have easily noticed that if your mental model didn’t get trained to filter out article titles like these…

In fact what you did with your mental model is exactly some of the problems with AI that is dangerous. There are more banal problems with AI such as encoding discrimination and automating it, possibly absolving people of the responsibility of discrimination and prejudice. AI in its current form is a lot of automating assumption making. Imagine taking your assumption making powers, and extracting it into an unaccountable model that can be deployed at national or global scales.

[teucris]

> AI in its current form is a lot of automating assumption making. Imagine taking your assumption making powers, and extracting it into an unaccountable model that can be deployed at national or global scales.

Just say this part! This is what we could be talking about. It’s not a difficult mental model. But it’s just wrapped up in alarmist rhetoric that makes it hard for us to focus on the fact that the quote above is terrifying!!

[chrischen]

Problem is some people do think it's the other things like in Terminator or 2001 a Space Odyssey, and they're co-opting legitimate arguments and conversations on AI safety and ethics.

[vatotemking]

please explain some more. what are the specific examples?

[chrischen]

Read the article or my original post.

[Zetobal]

There are also physicist that believed cern will open a portal to hell... or just listen to the congress hearings about the Superconducting Super Collier in Waxahachie.

[ShredKazoo]

Part of what's going on here is that AI researchers are paid to tinker with systems and make them work, not think about these kind of big picture questions. A demonstration of this is that if you ask a big picture question a bit differently, you can get a very different answer. Example:

>...if you ask [AI researchers] for probabilities of things occurring in a fixed number of years, you get later estimates than if you ask for the number of years until a fixed probability will obtain. This looked very robust in 2016, and shows up again in the 2022 [human-level machine intelligence] data. Looking at just the people we asked for years, the aggregate forecast is 29 years, whereas it is 46 years for those asked for probabilities. (We haven’t checked in other data or for the bigger framing effect yet.)

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/H6hMugfY3tDQGfqYL/what-do-ml...

[vages]

Did you miss this paragraph from the same page?

> I am not a Luddite. I have been wildly enthusiastic about science, technology, and intellectual and material progress since I was a kid. I have a PhD in artificial intelligence, and I find the current breakthroughs fascinating.

[kmeisthax]

This is actually where I stopped reading and checked the comments, because it shows that the author skipped a few history lessons.

The Luddites were not intrinsically opposed to the advance of technology. In fact, the whole reason why they were smashing looms was as a protest tactic - not an end goal. England's upper class invented the myth of the technology-hating Luddite as a way to slander and libel what was basically a prototype of a modern labor union. Parliament would then crush them with laws that made machine breaking a hanging offense.

Transposing this to today would give you artists angry that their work was trained on by DALL-E, SD, or Midjourney[0]. In both cases the opposition is not to the technology itself, but to the reallocation of wealth away from labor and to whoever owns the machines. The latter today would be akin to, say, "businessman" hustlebros using ChatGPT and art generators to create labor-free fly-by-night operations[1]. Most art generators are also hosted platforms whose access is sold for profit, creating a second layer of ownership on top of the hustlebros.

Meanwhile the main argument here is more akin to the stereotypical technophobe: AI can't be trusted. Hell, there's a whole chapter (not yet written) arguing that we should just junk neural networks entirely. This isn't Luddism, this is the god damned Butlerian Jihad[2].

[0] If you want a bit of a stretch you probably could see some Luddite in, say, Richard Stallman

[1] I regularly get YouTube recommendations for people trying to tell me how much money I can make by just typing a few prompts into an art generator and posting the result on a print-on-demand site.

[2] In the sci-fi novel Dune, the Butlerian Jihad is an event in which all computers are outlawed and mercilessly destroyed.

Yes, this is why /r/Dune banned AI art.

[vages]

I'd just like to clarify: The “PhD” sentence was more important to my point than the “luddite” sentence

I find your comment both thought-provoking and well-formulated. As for the references to the Butlerian Jihad: I read Dune for the first time this summer. The quote “Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.” has lodged itself within my mind. I’m not as fatalistic as the author Dr. Chapman seems to be, but I find myself thinking about it nearly every time I read of some new AI development coming out of a big corporation.

[jhbadger]

I think the word "most" is relevant. You can find people with doctorates in technical fields who believe in a Flat Earth or that the Earth was created in 4004 BC. They just aren't most of them.

[ShredKazoo]

The shape and origin of the Earth are central questions of the relevant scientific fields. They've received centuries of extensive debate.

By contrast, the questions that this book explores haven't received nearly as much expert attention. And if you poll the experts on whether those questions should receive more attention, they mostly say yes!

>69% of [ML researcher] respondents believe society should prioritize AI safety research “more” or “much more” than it is currently prioritized, up from 49% in 2016.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/H6hMugfY3tDQGfqYL/what-do-ml...

[class4behavior]

Now you're moving the goalposts

[twblalock]

The parent comment did not move the goalposts in any way -- it simply pointed out that having a PhD is not enough to prove that the author is not a crank, because a lot of other people with PhDs are also cranks.

[class4behavior]

Sure they did. First, they question the qualification of the author, then suddenly those qualifications are all relative and not really so relevant.

[tempodox]

“No true Scotsman…”

[twblalock]

This is a great example of a fallacious appeal to authority -- both from the author, and from you.

[ShredKazoo]

I think jhbadger's original comment also counts as an appeal to authority by the definition you're using: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34785616

[madrox]

Robert Malone is also an expert in mRNA technology

[twblalock]

Claiming that one is not a Luddite is like claiming not to be a racist -- what follows almost always confirms that the author is exactly what he claims not to be.

[ElFitz]

The analogy doesn’t hold. ´

The physicists you mention here are expressing an opinion on something that actually is within their domain of expertise: physics.

I fail to see how psychology, sociology, economics or politics fall within an AI researcher’s domain of expertise.

[green_on_black]

minor nitpick, it's not that we don't believe it makes mini black holes, it's that we're fairly extremely sure those black holes wouldn't interact with anything in the minor "time" (if you can even call it that) which they exist.