Geoffrey Hinton: it might turn out we were better off without AI

If the people in charge of the AI companies understand the risk I don't know, but I think it's a good point that they mainly care about the money. These are also people who aren't accustom to cleaning up their own mess, so what do they care if something goes wrong.

The carelessness is also clear in how AI is rolled out. It's being presented as a disruptive technology, as is everything else presented by modern tech companies. The goal is a very large payout in a very short period of time, it's not to make anything better, or worse, either is just a side effect.

Had LLMs first been presented as a "better IntelliSense", where rather than auto-completing function names, your editor can now suggest implementations, very few people would have been upset. Same for writing, it's just a better version of Grammarly, it's fine, or as a tool in drawing software. The issue would have been, for the AI bosses, that this takes time and doesn't create trillion dollar companies. It only creates companies that they'd actually have to run, long term, and that's boring.

"he warned it could trigger a large-scale incident this year or next, such as a temporary blackout of financial or power systems."

I know this sounds unusual, but I do think this wouldn't be the worst thing that could happen. Sure, it would cause a bit of chaos, but it might also make us think twice about continuing down our current path of unfettered development, and possibly even make us much more cautious, which might in turn even help us with the climate crisis.

Because human beings in a large mass only respond to one thing: immediate difficulty. They don't respond to delayed difficulty like "the climate is getting worse" or "technology will make life more difficult in the distant future". They only respond to immediate pain.

So I think it would be a good thing if the financial system had a serious threat. Then people with money, who tend to offset future problems with technical solutions and financial padding, would start to become much more suspicious of technology and defund AI and wasteful things that are likely to threaten their safety.

So Hinton doesn't trust the tech leaders but then the consequence of having governments censor LLMs is that only tech leaders and governments have unlimited access to AI.

If someone manages with the help of AI to hack into a vital system, then the system was already in a critically bad state beforehand. If developers can't use AI to check the code for security flaws, then security gets worse and not better.

Of course, we are. Back in the late 80’s early 90’s, no one working on ML was aspiring to develop systems which would be used to generate the kind of AI crap which plagues us today.The good is being smothered by the absolutely soul-crushing pointless.

"We". Who "is" we? This isn't about you. or me. there was never a we. Before you open your mouth or put your pen down, wouldn't you think of the shareholder value for once?

  “I think [Mark] Zuckerberg and [Elon] Musk and Sam Altman, they understand the risks, and they don’t give a shit. They’d rather have the money. That’s my belief.”

What's risk for people valued close to or over trillion dollars? Risk is meaningless when corporations get too big to fail.

Such a smart guy so late for the party. Thanks to him and others who understand a lot about tech, we gave monster a weapon to destroy us.

I still don't know how Karpathy still works with those folks. I really think the guy is great but he makes me wonder

Speak for yourself - I'm in AI heaven.

Programming has never been this awesome.

"It might turn out we were better off not opening Pandora's box" says man who helped open Pandora's box.

That's a touching sentiment or whatever but the nature of the thing is that it will inevitably be opened and that it cannot be closed thereafter. So (I think) we'd all be better off putting our efforts towards predicting the likely outcomes and figuring out how to make the best of them.

As is the case with any technology in the hands of careless people, but unfortunately we can't wait for society to catch up morally to the technical standards, innovation is organic and breakthroughs have no timing.

AI winter has arrived.

almost every story that has ever been written about a world with AI has posited that humanity was better off without AI.

I think we did good inventing it and it's inevitable. Lets use it well.

modern day Mary Shelley

To be honest, I think it depends on the environment. In the past, if you didn't come out of a good university, your access to knowledge was limited. But these days, in terms of access to knowledge, I think things have clearly improved, whether or not AI is illegally sharing knowledge.

Looking back now, was it really happier before AI existed? I'm not sure. In the past, when I wanted to find out whether I was right or wrong about some piece of knowledge or information, I'd contact several people and, far from getting an answer, I'd often be told not to bother them. But AI, in that respect, is the best teacher I can think of.

I think the times are continuously getting better. It's just that there's a problem of power concentration among the people who handle it. Still, if AI is a tool of that nature, then I suppose that can happen.

But considering what access to knowledge was like before AI came along, I think having AI is better.

This is a bit like Rudolf Diesel saying maybe we're better off without airplanes. The field has long since left this guy behind.

I guess capsule network haven't improved ...

What is the point of this quote? Or any of his quotes for that matter.

We should introduce regulation so only credentialed software engineers are allowed to use AI.

It might turn out we were better off without nuclear weapons, but so far I’m happy we haven’t had another world war (in the traditional “total war” sense).

No way to tell until after, though. So far, mutually assured destruction is working. It works until it doesn’t.

Same with AI. Thus far we’re better off with it than without it. That may change.

I mean, look what we did with fossil fuels. Some people are even still willingly burning them, even though the data is clear that our use of them has already started the total destruction of our civilization.

Is there a name for this, a technology that is so insanely useful that there is no way we won’t exploit it, but where the worst case scenario is total collapse, and impossible to determine well in advance?

(Fossil fuels I suppose don’t count as even the energy companies knew unambiguously decades ago that large scale use would eventually bake the entire agricultural system out of existence.)

oh word?

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The scene is bleak, silent, desert-like with a few dead trees bleached white by unfiltered UV. Nothing moves. In the distance a cave, and from that cave

... no shit Sherlock

We should have not left the trees. You cannot disrupt banking and power if they do not exist. Checkmate!

So why did he start to develop it in the 1970s?

We are not but we need a better approach, https://www.ethicalacceleration.org