[brigadier132]

Well said, this thing is here to stay. When I first played around with gpt-4 I was filled with immense dread. I, as many others have, immediately understood what kind of enormous societal impact this would have.

But I put the question to myself, if I could magically wish this thing away, would I? I wouldn't. I understand the many that would, this thing completely upends the status quo. Massive swathes of people will have skills they have built up their entire lives become worthless. But the potential for good that can emerge from this, can potentially benefit everyone and the people that are not benefitting from the status quo the most.

If you think AI is a disaster, think about the potential for medical breakthroughs that can emerge from this. Doctors will spend fewer hours writing charts and more time with patients. Every underprivileged child could have a personalized tutor. The number of discoveries and ideas that can be generated are endless.

[ladzoppelin]

"Every underprivileged child could have a personalized tutor." Tutor for what, prompt engineering? The impact of this on the kids is hard to fathom and just because "similar" advancements in the past opened up doors does not mean this one will as well.

[tetris11]

I think it's more that the (ad-riddles, SEO-centric) internet is no longer the education tool it used to be, but chatgpt is. I asked it to walk me through cross-compiling for an old NAS, how to setup Ethernet over coaxial in my custom setup, what legal advice.I should take,etc etc. It did not give perfect answers, but the answers were good enough to build upon, and after working with of for so long, it really feels like it's a friend that's trying to help.

I can definitely picture this being a personal tutor to a child

[ryanjshaw]

Do you have kids? My young child wants to "ask the AI" stuff all the time - which is a relief, because I'd much prefer that over giving them full Internet access until they're mature enough. AI is a huge accelerant for childhood learning.

[autoexec]

Either way you'd have to be watching what the kid was asking and making sure what they found was accurate and appropriate. I don't think I'd trust an AI trained on random crap found on the internet to teach my children unattended any more than I'd trust youtube's algorithm to feed them video suggestions all day without oversight.

Not only would I be risking my kids being exposed to things that were outright wrong or entirely inappropriate, but I'd also be missing the opportunity to discuss their questions and the answers with them, provide context, and learn new things myself in the process.

[AlecSchueler]

Sounds like school.

[autoexec]

Thankfully teachers don't usually get their degrees by reading social media posts and whatever else they happened to find on the internet. That said, you should absolutely be paying attention to what your kids are (and more importantly aren't) being taught in schools too.

[AlecSchueler]

They don't get their degrees that way, but they absolutely do use social media and have their views shaped by it. ChatGPT is also trained on a lot more than social media, you can be sure it's read a lot of scientific literature as well.

But yes, you're final point is the one I'm getting at: You should be actively monitoring and explaining what your child is being told whether it comes from a human or an LLM.

[catchnear4321]

Tutor for whatever the kid has the curiosity to ask.

You don’t need to be a “prompt engineer” to get use out of a language model. You just have to recognize what it is, and what it isn’t.

If that can’t be taught to children, there’s no sense fretting over AI. We don’t need it to fail.

[throwoutway]

I'd rather kids not be taught by something that hallucinates and spits out accurate-sounding lies. The education system is already struggling to teach kids to read and has been removing math from california schools (two front page news here this week). Adding a lying tutor should be classified as child neglect.

That said, I like the AI, but only as an adult who has enough training to question whether I'm being lied to by an auto regressive Turing machine.

[naveen99]

Newspapers and the government already basically spit out accurate sounding lies all the time also.

[catchnear4321]

it would make a poor tutor for you. even as an adult.

go find examples of the lying tutor you hypothesize - you might just find smart kids extracting value from chaos. your fears will not deny them that.

[lannisterstark]

>If you think AI is a disaster, think about the potential for medical breakthroughs that can emerge from this.

Don't bother. People here love to miser. There's no way you're getting any positive responses to this. Let doom and gloom begin.

[lannisterstark]

>When I first played around with gpt-4 I was filled with immense dread

Really? When I played around with it I was filled with incredible optimism and hope. It was an amazing companion that helped me with my code, answered questions, and what I hoped Google Assistant/Alexa/Siri etc would become a few years in. Sadly they never did.

This is amazing, and would be an excellent personal assistant when it becomes cheap enough for smaller personalized LLMs.

[ChatGTP]

If you think AI is a disaster, think about the potential for medical breakthroughs that can emerge from this.

The “think of the good” argument is over played. Same was true for combustion engines, they will probably send us extinct.

I’d like it if people just stopped with it. People aren’t idiots, they know good things and very bad things can be achieved.

[gwoolhurme]

Yeah I really hate this line of argument as well. We obviously understand it can have a lot of beneficial effects in society. It's a strawman to say that people don't see that. The problem is nobody seems to be properly discussing the bad things that can and will occur.

[bugglebeetle]

We can of course also judge the track record on this kind of techno-optimist rhetoric. People expressed all the same lofty ideals about social media, almost all of which have been outweighed by what we really got: anger-driven addiction, micro-targeted propaganda, turn-key state surveillance, and teenagers attempting suicide at all time highs.

[brigadier132]

> People expressed all the same lofty ideals about social media

Who (that wasn't a billionaire owner of a social media company)? Also, major strawman.

[nullsense]

Now take that and 100x it.

[brigadier132]

> We obviously understand it can have a lot of beneficial effects in society

Really? Because nobody seems to be talking about them. You talk about how bad things "will" occur. What about bad things that are literally happening right now?

[xiphias2]

Maybe think of the children.

Why should they go to school at all? Why should they study? What should they study? What should I tell them?

A person who works in tourism just told me that he wants to learn something safer, because he had no job during COVID, so he started studying web design. All I could tell him is that that job has peaked, and I believe tourism is safer at this point.

[Turing_Machine]

What will all the serfs and slaves do for a living, now that we have tractors and combine harvesters?

I mean, that's > 90% of all jobs! How will we cope with 90% unemployment?

(it should be obvious that this is not serious... humanity has survived "machines are taking all the jobs" many times before, and it will survive this one too)

[birdyrooster]

Maybe they shouldn’t? Jesus what is with people shaming others for not attaining some arbitrary level of education and career?

[ChatGTP]

Ok so what will they be doing instead ?

[ChatGTP]

Do you think throwing “AI” problems at scale into this mix is a good thing to do right now ?

[JumpCrisscross]

> What about bad things that are literally happening right now?

Our lives are good. No child loses sleep for the bogeyman under the neighbor's bed.

[JumpCrisscross]

> Same was true for combustion engines, they will probably send us extinct.

What? Because we weren't burning fossil fuels before cars?

Besides forgetting about trains, steamships and the coal-powered Industrial Revolution, you're ignoring the billions of lives lifted out of poverty.

[ChatGTP]

I guess one could argue this was also a pretty stupid thing to do ? I read Tesla’s auto-biography, he even knew back then we were messing up a lot.

[asah]

Given the ability to sustain billions, statistically speaking neither of us would've been born if it weren't for the combustion engine.

[erikpukinskis]

> combustion engines, they will probably send us extinct.

!RemindMe 150 years

[shepherdjerred]

> Same was true for combustion engines, they will probably send us extinct.

Climate change is a serious issue, but you cheapen and discredit it by exaggerating its impact. There is zero chance climate change will cause humans to go extinct. If my stance is incorrect, please reply with some evidence.

[midoridensha]

You're being pedantic. Sure, there's zero chance humans will actually go extinct; instead, the climatic effects and then the ensuing breakdown in society leading up to thermonuclear war will "only" wipe out 99% of the population, leaving some bands of survivors to live in the rubble. In 10,000 years, humans will still be around, living in small tribes just as they were 1M years ago, and unable to regain ever regain the level of technology they had before because easy-to-access energy sources are all depleted so a new industrial revolution is impossible. For all intents and purposes, humans as a global society will be extinct, even if the species itself isn't. Perhaps our descendants will evolve into aquatic creatures with smaller heads and brains.

[ChatGTP]

I don’t think you need a paper to understand that if unchecked, climate change will mean humans are pretty much done.

At least a modern civilisation like the one we have today. Societal collapse is on the cards for sure if we stay in the current trajectory.

I’m not going to waste time providing you with evidence I’m sorry. You should already understand the situation.

[brigadier132]

Are you seriously suggesting humanity would be better off without the combustion engine? Also, presumably an AI powerful enough to kill vast swathes of humanity would be powerful enough to prevent something like climate change.

[ChatGTP]

Yes, I am absolutely suggesting that. Not all engines but petroleum fuelled combustion engines, yes.

The world is going through a mass extinction event because of burning oil and coal and combustion engines have been an absolutely integral part of that ecological disaster. So yes.

Just be real about it? Why do “EV” subsidies exist? To wean us off combustion engines to save the planet.

Combustion engines should’ve been much more carefully regulated and we should’ve had better incentives against their use.

[lannisterstark]

>Yes, I am absolutely suggesting that.

Alright unabomber. What an unhinged statement that is.

Combustion engine that is arguably one of the major causes of reducing poverty everywhere is a bad thing, I tell you hwat!

I love how you people(and it's generally people from developed countries too lol) can't think beyond your own needs and POVs. Yeah man, how dare the poor people in developing and impoverished nations increase their QoL.

[ChatGTP]

I'm not going to get upset about your ignorant statements, but you should be easily able to realize that we could've achieved similar results with electric systems a long time ago.

We could've deployed nuclear a long time ago, wind etc. We could've used and invested further in electric tractors 50 years ago.

You're conflating what I'm saying, I'm not saying technology wasn't helpful, I'm saying the internal combustion engine, sucked and still sucks and that we need to be careful when deploying technology at scale.

It wasn't just the internal combustion engine that has been a problem, oil wars, dictators, lead based fuels, deaths from air pollute, these thing have caused incredible amounts of harm.

Lastly, we're not also out of the woods yet, it's not over, go look at some climate charts and look at the trajectory we're on, the world is getting hotter, faster. Also strip mining the world for lithium and cobalt will also have massive implications for the planet.

I know we like to think we're clever, but we're rarely wise.

[nonbirithm]

For our civilization the time to proliferate electric engines before ICEs is gone, though. I have to wonder if there's something inherit to the properties/efficiency of petroleum combustion that ensures that intelligent civilization will proliferate it first over electric engines.

It sounds like the bottleneck is lack of foresight. Our ancestors were incapable of seeing the end result of ICEs everywhere when they were first used. How is any future civilization supposed to combat this when they aren't handed the correct answer by some forebearer civilization that destroyed itself first? It feels like not only humans but all future intelligent life with access to petroleum would fall into this trap over and over again.

It's as if the only way to avoid the current scenario is to discover all the petroleum and then not touch it for the rest of time. About the only guardrail that could incentivize that behavior in my mind is the blind faith of religion.

[Riverheart]

If only they’d focus their research on that instead of art and music.