[estebarb]

I don't understand why almost always the AI doomerism needs to give embodiment the AI. Real life is not a movie needing visual effects.

AI doesn't need a body of itself to became dangerous. A politician could get into ChatGPT induced psychosis, that doesn't require a physical body, and it could happen now or even 3 years ago... I'm sure it has already happen...

Other pointed risks are interesting because they are basically the risk of empires loosing their tributary states. The world has always seen war mongering states trying to preserve their abusive advantages, humans doesn't need AI for that.

Overall, I would be far more concerned about some really dangerous humans than AI itself.

[narrator]

I like to think that all the crazy kids running around doing stupid and disruptive things for TikTok views is an early form of AI autonomously inducing mass psychosis.

[adonovan]

Stuart J. Russell (he of the AI textbook) claims in Human Compatible that YouTube is already an example of a runaway feedback loop between AI (YouTube's recommender "algorithm") and humanity (viewers, content producers, YouTube staff, and society at large). The AI doesn't have a body, a voice, a conscience, or a purpose yet it is busily working away to maximize engagement by changing people's minds, and in particular by bringing extremism into mainstream discourse.

(It seems to me that framing it this way does seem to absolve YouTube executives of responsibility by making the AI, not them, seem like the agent.)

[fwipsy]

I've been thinking along similar lines recently. It seems to me that the earlier form of nonhuman intelligence is a corporation (or any group which is not under one individual's control.) Each person following their own incentives can result in emergent behavior where the corporation follows its own incentives. If we can't reliably "align" corporations, and corporations create AI, will AI be aligned as well?

It's not totally disconnected, though. A corporation is constrained by what its members are willing to do. I read that the reason Gemini has fallen behind is because Googlers have been quitting over Google's DoD contract. Conversely, if engineers are willing to work hard for you, you can go far. I suspect this is behind both Anthropic's success and also Tesla/SpaceX.

[willy_k]

That’s been a thing since before TikTok even, well before AI in any modern sense of the word, and at this point the stupidness and disruptiveness is considerably reduced from those days.

[Shitty-kitty]

Imagine AI during the Cuban missile crisis telling both sides, the other is about to launch a first strike. The USSR is gone but China is only getting stronger and more confrontational.

[thrance]

Between China and the USA, the latter is the irrational agent. They were rumors that Trump attempted to use nuked on Iran recently, but was barred from doing so by some general.

[red-iron-pine]

Donald Trump is a convenient yes-man for the billionaire class and the people who have him on tape fucking kids (e.g. the Russians and Israelis)

the damning thing about his behavior is not that it is terrible but that the US populous and institutions have made little serious efforts to remove him and his enablers