Item — HN Reader

The talk of AI exterminating us via paperclips is an annoying one to me that detracts from the real dangers that are currently unfolding:

- scammers are having the time of their lives, and their capabilities are only going to get better and easier

- people are actively getting dumber as they trust the hallucinated outputs blindly

- regular communication is starting to break down because you can't trust that people aren't just copy/pasting some AI bullshit in lieu of an actual discussion

- I've already seen AI girlfriend products which doesn't strike much confidence in our ongoing future as a species considering the numbers I've seen on some of them

And the biggest one for me is all the psychotic C-levels and MBA types who only give a shit about squeezing every single red cent they can by any means possible, including firing off thousands of people en-masse to be replaced by some shitty chatbot owned by a corporation backed by fucking Micro$oft

I don't think AI is going to send out nukes, I do believe it's going to replace every single person's job and make the powerful even more powerful.

"Oh but UBI!", an AI sycophant will shout, as if saying the magic incantation changes the reality of the real world somehow.

7 comments

> I do believe it's going to replace every single person's job…

Some may try to make that so, but since LLMs perform badly with anything that has to be ground in facts and actual reality, the hype wave will die down soon enough. When the point of a job is to generate the most amount of bullshit as quickly as possible, LLMs will excel.

So, marketing as a profession is endangered.

Fingers crossed. Ive come to the slow realization that marketing might be an unjustifiable rot that only makes money through pervasive negative externalities — at least when it’s become so extensive that “brand” advertising is a thing. Would a future of commerce that looks more like eBay / early Amazon than Google really be that sad?

Obviously, this is rough for people who have invested time and money into that profession. Luckily most of them are smart, diligent professionals, so the optimist side of me hopes there will always be a need for such people in our struggles against suffering. For one, we could certainly use a few more teachers…

Only if you're doing it wrong. Marketing is about explaining your product.

Depends which people and whose communications. I was in the farmers market of my small rural town this morning and it's funny how all of this simply don't exist here. No smartphones in sight, people are here physically, they interact, buy local food, laugh, have a drink, etc... Then they go eat at some friend's place and have some outdoor activities. On the other hand yes it looks bleak for terminally online people.

>I don't think AI is going to send out nukes, I do believe it's going to replace every single person's job and make the powerful even more powerful.

The shitty part being: it won't replace people's jobs at equivalent skill and quality levels. It'll just make the output and consumer experience much, much shittier, because for some weird-ass reason a lot of these executive types seem to literally believe that minimizing labor costs is more important than providing value for the customer.

There is one more serious issue: currently, to establish a dictatorship, you need the support of many people because the armed forces consist of people. Now imagine that the armed forces are mostly autonomous robots.

I also agree with your point about virtual girlfriends. Add VR to that, and young boys who are increasingly socially isolated will use this technology to meet their needs.

I sort of cover that in "SkyNet is not coming to kill you": https://renegadeotter.com/2024/04/22/artificial-intelligence...

AI can generate a lot of automated output, that is true, but my argument is that it's almost always mediocre at best.

There is a LOT to be said about the dangers of AI coming from the people running and funding it - not the AI itself. That stuff is complete bullshit.

The productive output of many people is also just mediocre. I think of chat AIs as near-zero cost interns or the boss's nephew. Probably doesn't know what it's talking about, but can get a lot done with supervision.

I hope the net result will be a shift toward upskilling employees to achieve the expertise handle the difficult edge cases and less time spent on the routine or the trivial. Seems like a win-win. Incentive structures might make this hard.

I think it was on the Ezra Klein show where he dropped the statistic? Almost 70% of employees are using ChatGPT in one way or another.

In many cases the bosses don't even know, but all it will do long-term is require everyone to produce more output. AI is not about to create 3-day work weeks and everyone living their best lives off of Universal Basic Income.

Literally nothing will change - except that all of us will be expected of more and we will be more stressed out and overworked.

It might not be that bad. Auto workers produce more cars per employee, but some of the really repetitive activities are done by robots now. I think not having to do the same weld 8+hrs a day every day with consumers still getting their car is a net positive for owners, consumers, and labor.

Personally, I would love to deliver more projects. The vast majority of my time is spent on mind-numbing drudgery that makes the job extremely unsatisfying. If someone offered me a job where I got to focus on the fun parts of my work, and I didn't have to dump the drudgery on a poor intern (the AI does it), but at half my pay, I'd resign the same day.

The AI apocalypse isn't about killing you. It's about leaving you to die. Subtle difference.

Just to voice the opposing view for lurkers: no, the safety concerns about this new and unexpected technology are not unfounded, and dismissing them because chatbots make mistakes is completely missing the point. The point is that experts have been thinking about AI for a long time, and have identified the theoretical limits that prevented us from reaching (‘real’ / ‘general’) AI. Those experts (other thank Chomsky, for now…) are now sounding the alarm — with the advent of intuitive algorithms, the Frame Problem dissolves and a ton of previously intractable problems become tractable.

The point isn’t that chatbots will take over the world through a browser window. The point is that someone’s going to connect 10,000 specialized GPT agents into a series of self-organizing hierarchical agencies, and then hook that up to their country’s justice system, propaganda & surveillance systems, and military systems. Not to mention replacing knowledge workers in mass and the well-discussed potential fallout therein.

We are living in the most exciting, important time since the world wars at the least, and I hope that choice of example drives home the seriousness. Short term, “Solidarity” and “basic human rights” need to enter all of our vocabularies, IMO…

Well, yes, but the problem is still the people, and these warnings are usually not clear, specific, or just confusing.

Then there is also the media, which breathlessly "translates" what you just wrote into "artificial intelligence is about to go sentient and kill us all".

They're both real dangers. Neither one is a distraction from the other.

Hm.

Well, I see dangers at every level. Partly because I see a whole bunch of people saying "the real danger of AI is…" and then finishing that sentence in a different way than the others.

So:

> - scammers are having the time of their lives, and their capabilities are only going to get better and easier

Yup. This is one reason why I am frustrated with all the people who keep asking for downloadable models and who criticise OpenAI for not doing that. If it's a private model, you've at least got some control over the system, some ability to see who is doing what and perhaps making your own automation to stop it or to prosecute the wrongdoers.

If the weights are downloadable, you're giving this ability away and pretending you're not responsible for the result.

If OpenAI and Facebook both get sued out of existence due to their models allowing this, the OpenAI models go offline, the Facebook models remain circulating forever.

> - people are actively getting dumber as they trust the hallucinated outputs blindly

Roll to disbelieve. People have been saying this about every new tech at least since Socrates was moping about the invention of writing.

> - regular communication is starting to break down because you can't trust that people aren't just copy/pasting some AI bullshit in lieu of an actual discussion

Yup. Been accused of that myself, here.

I'm fairly sure it's improved the content of r/HFY though. I think I can recognise the stories which are AI generated from having played around with it (and been unsatisfied with the results), but I remember how much worse it was before.

> - I've already seen AI girlfriend products which doesn't strike much confidence in our ongoing future as a species considering the numbers I've seen on some of them

I think the bigger problem is two older AIs, specifically (1) whatever Match.com uses to pair people in their dating apps and how much worse this seems to be than the original (pre-Match.com) OkCupid, and (2) everything Facebook does.

Both make real human connection much harder than endless swiping, it's just that the former is swiping sideways and the latter swiping vertically, but both make para-social relationships out of people we should be genuinely connected to.

> "Oh but UBI!", an AI sycophant will shout, as if saying the magic incantation changes the reality of the real world somehow.

I… think we need that, in step with AI making people unemployable, even if only to avoid a riot, but I'd agree UBI isn't going to fix any of the other problems you're worried about.