[slibhb]

Do you really think AI companies/researchers are motivated by greed? It doesn't seem that way to me at all.

Stopping AI would be immoral; it has the potential to supercharge technology and productivity, which would massively benefit humanity. Yes there are risks, which have to be managed.

[jobs_throwaway]

AI researchers are not a monolith. I definitely think that many of them are motivated by greed. Many are also true believers that AI will improve the human condition.

I fall in the latter camp, but I think its a bit naive to claim that there is not a sizable contingent who are in AI solely to become rich and powerful.

[ben_w]

> has the potential to supercharge technology and productivity, which would massively benefit humanity

The opportunities you chose to list are the greedy ones.

> Yes there are risks, which have to be managed.

How?

As a reminder, we've known about the effect of burning coal on the climate for well over a century, we knew that said climate change would be socially and economically disasterous for half a century, yet the only real progress we're making is because green became cheaper in the short term not just the long term and the man in charge of the USA is still calling climate change and green energy a hoax.

Right now, keeping LLMs aligned with us is easy mode: they're relatively stupid, we can inspect the activations while they run, we can read the transcripts of their "thoughts" when they use that mode… and yet Grok called itself Mecha Hitler, which the US government followed up by getting it integrated into their systems, helping the Pentagon with [classified] and the department of health to advise the general public which vegetables are best inserted rectally.

We are idiots speed-running into something shiny that we don't understand. If we are very very lucky, the shiny thing will not be the headlamp of a fast approaching train.

[slibhb]

> The opportunities you chose to list are the greedy ones.

Technology covers healthcare. I don't see how it's "greedy" to want to cure cancer. But on some level I guess "wanting life to be better" is greedy.

Your attitude is very European, and it's basically why your continent is being left behind. I'm not totally against Europe becoming the world's retirement home, as long as there are places in the world where people are allowed to innovate.

[ben_w]

> Technology covers healthcare.

If you'd chosen to list that in the first place, I wouldn't have said what I did; "supercharge technology and productivity" is looking at everything through the lens of money and profit, not the lens of improving the human condition.

> Your attitude is very European, and it's basically why your continent is being left behind

And yours is very American. You talk about managing the risks, but the moment you see anyone doing so, you're against it.

And of course, Europe does have AI, both because keeping up is so much easier and cheaper than being bleeding edge on everything all the time, and of course, how DeepMind may be owned by Google but is a British thing.

Plus: https://mistral.ai

Also, to be blunt, China's almost certain to win any economic or literal arms race you think you're part of; they make too much critical hardware now.

> as long as there are places in the world where people are allowed to innovate.

I would like there to be a world.

When people worry about the end of the world, they usually don't mean to imply its physical disassembly. Sometimes people even respond as if speakers did mean that, saying things like "nukes or climate change wouldn't actually destroy the planet, it will still be here, spinning", as if this was the point.

AI is one of the few things that could, actually, literally, end up with the planet being physically disassembled. "All it needs" is solving the extremely hard challenges of a von Neumann replicator, and, well, solving hard problems is kinda the point of making AI in the first place.

[slibhb]

> If you'd chosen to list that in the first place, I wouldn't have said what I did; "supercharge technology and productivity" is looking at everything through the lens of money and profit, not the lens of improving the human condition.

Bullshit. "Technology and productivity" are not the same thing as "money and profit". You're projecting your garden-variety European degrowth ideology onto what I wrote.

> Also, to be blunt, China's almost certain to win any economic or literal arms race you think you're part of; they make too much critical hardware now.

Europeans are so hilariously polarized against the US that they would prefer China, a literal authoritarian dictatorship, to "win any global economic arms race". I guess it's because China is too culturally distant for them to feel insecure over.

> AI is one of the few things that could, actually, literally, end up with the planet being physically disassembled. "All it needs" is solving the extremely hard challenges of a von Neumann replicator, and, well, solving hard problems is kinda the point of making AI in the first place.

It's not worth wringing our hands over science fiction scenarios.

[ben_w]

> You're projecting your garden-variety European degrowth ideology onto what I wrote.

Don't believe all the memes you read on the internet.

Europe isn't degrowth, "degrowth" is a mix of a meme and environmental scientists; Europe is in fact still growing: thanks to US shenanigans, even with tech stuff that we'd prefer to outsource due to the well known economic point of "comparative advantage"; and also, thanks to Russia's invasion, we sped up energy transition and defence sectors.

> Europeans are so hilariously polarized against the US that they would prefer China, a literal authoritarian dictatorship, to "win any global economic arms race". I guess it's because China is too culturally distant for them to feel insecure over.

Prefer? No. Simply look at the back of most electronics, "Designed by … in California, assembled [by Foxconn] in China" at best, at worst the entire business is unpronounceable in English. Even when you may think you've got yourself an American factory, so many of the bits arr usually made in China, or in Taiwan which is unfortunately very insecure right now. Even when you think you've bought them from a non-Chinese company, with the goal of no Chinese parts, you can find Chinese text on the production label and that you've just paid for re-badged Chinese stuff. You may have a stated goal of on-shoring, but even with the most competent leadership this would be a very hard multi-decade project. (Similar logic applies to us shifting away from your tech, but is slightly easier for us due to open source, hardware replacement cycles, and how little of "your" hardware you actually manufacture in the first place).

That doesn't make China good in any objective moral sense, it's not like China's above doing to us what was done to them in their "century of humiliation". Just, powerful.

Their power is aside from any question of should we prefer the authoritarian in charge of a democracy who threatened to invade, or the authoritarian in charge of a one-party state that's doing some genocide who wants to sell us stuff, because two things can both be bad.

> It's not worth wringing our hands over science fiction scenarios.

AI is already a sci-fi technology relative to what I had as a kid. Or indeed relative to just after the first ChatGPT was released, given what people were saying back then that LLMs would "never" do.

The idea you could talk to your computer and it would write a computer program for you that could solve a problem that you had? Sci-fi.

The idea of computer could generate, not simply find but generate, an image according to some prompt of yours? Compose a song? Win awards for its out when people didn't realise computers doing it was an option? Sci-fi so hard it's become a meme of a robot saying "can you?", as disbelief of that was expressed as a line from the film "I, Robot", 2004.

People are still arguing if these things have or have not passed the Turing test, someone has even made a game about this for Hacker News comments, I game in which I score 0, or even scored negative given I only identified false positives. Sci-fi.

And it's not just LLMs, Even just solving chess was sci-fi when I was a kid. Then it was Go. Now protein folding is solved, and thousands of novel toxins have been found by AI. And yet, when I have told AI-Laissez-faire-accelerationists stuff like this latter example, they still doubt AI is capable of doing anything dangerous.

But the worst part of it? The AI which called itself Mecha Hitler, that AI is in use by the Pentagon, the DoD is trying to bully a different AI company that doesn't want to be used for military stuff.

We're in a sci-fi future.

And remember too that making a "robot army" that can replace all human labour is a stated goal of one of the people running an AI company. Don't get me wrong, I hope he's talking out of his rear on this, but failing to plan is planning to fail.

And you've not, at any point in any of your replies, answered my earlier question: how to manage any risks from AI.

[rune-dev]

> Do you really think AI companies/researchers are motivated by greed?

Researchers, maybe not. Companies, absolutely yes.

I don’t see how you could assume the likes of Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, and even Anthropic with all their virtue signaling (for lack of a better term) are motivated by anything other than greed.