[keiferski]

Man it annoys me to no end that this basic fact is so under discussed.

It’s as if calling something AI is all that’s needed to justify it being the same thing as Skynet, Dune automation, Terminators, Neuromancer, and every other cultural trope using the label of AI.

The ultimate fact is that LLMs are a pretty powerful technology that has little to nothing to do with most fictional depictions of intelligent machines.

Sloppy thinking all the way down.

[netsharc]

Yesterday's plane making a turnaround because of a Bluetooth speaker with the name "bomb" (media says "a 4 letter word") makes me think the Skynet-level destruction is a risk, because humans are already too chicken-shit to take responsibility for decisions. They'd rather feel safe by just following the procedure, however stupid it is. And in the the future the procudre might be "Do whatever the AI says".

My thought about the turnaround: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48343390

[keiferski]

Absolutely. The real danger is that people treat LLMs like actually intelligent entities and stop making decisions themselves. Not that the LLMs will be conscious and evil in the way Sci-fi portrays.

[tim333]

People worry about what will come in the future even if today's tech has limits.

[sph]

We don't have "Skynet, Dune automation, Terminators, Neuromancer, and every other cultural trope using the label of AI" today simply because LLM technology doesn't seem to directly lead to those, but the end goal of AI research is the creation of those.

It annoys me to no end that people keep looking at the finger while pointing at the moon. No, we don't have Skynet today, but you can believe Sam Altman would have loved to see Skynet appear out of ChatGPT. That is the end goal, and it's worth discussing now, not when it's too late.

[keiferski]

We’ll have to agree to disagree then. Personally I think treating sci-fi tropes as likely outcomes is a major distraction from the actual real likely and near term outcomes from LLMs. There are enough real problems there, we don’t need to indulge everyone’s fictional scenarios too.

[sph]

Sci-fi tropes are not black and white. It's a spectrum from what exists today to the impossible. 20 years ago many would have claimed being able to have a machine generate decent code from a sentence is science fiction.

When talking about artificial superintelligences, you don't want to study their potential effect on humanity the day they appear, because it is too late.