Comment by brokencode
5 days ago
The downsides you list aren’t specific to AI. Globalization and automation have destabilized labor markets. A small handful of billionaires control most major social media platforms and have a huge influence on politics. Other types of technology, particularly crypto, use large amounts of energy for far more dubious benefits.
AI is just the latest in a long list of disruptive technologies. We can only guess about the long term ramifications. But if history is any indicator, people in a few decades will probably see AI as totally normal and will be discussing the existential threat of something new.
Well, duh. Same thing applies for "Technology X can be used for war". But anyone with a brain can see nukes are on a different level than bayonets.
Claiming AI isn't unique in being a tool for evil isn't interesting, the point is that it's a force multiplier as such.
Every new technology is a greater force multiplier, with potential to be used for good or evil. That’s literally the point of technological advancement. Even nuclear bomb technology has a more positive side in nuclear reactors, radiotherapy, etc.
Yeah, that's exactly completely missing the point. A bayonet multiplies a person's power by 1.1x, a nuke multiplies it by more than 1,000,000x. Trying to be cute and lumping them together as "every technology is a force multiplier" is peak autistic literalism of 1.1x and 1,000,000x both technically being a multiplier even if they're clearly different.
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There may be many disruptive technologies, but none come remotely close to AI when it comes to rate of change. Crypto has been around for a while, and hasn't really made a dent to the world
We had friends over for dinner a couple days back; between us we had two computer scientists, one psychologist, one radiologist, one doctor. Each of us were in turn astonished and somewhat afraid of the rapid pace of change. In a university setting, students are routinely using Claude and ChatGPT for everything from informal counseling to doing homework to generating presentations to doing 'creative' work (smh).
At the end of they day, we all agreed that we were grateful that we are at the tail end of our working life, and that we didn't have to deal with this level of uncertainty
AI feels particularly disruptive now because it’s new and we don’t know how it will affect society yet.
But people surely felt the same way about gunpowder, the steam engine, electricity, cars, phones, planes, nukes, etc.
Or look at specific professions that software has negatively affected in recent decades. Not a lot of people use travel agents anymore, for example.
I’m not saying that the negative effects are good. But that’s just the nature of technological advancement. It’s up to society to adapt and help out those who have been most negatively affected.
They're not really comparable.
AI is not only a general-purpose technology (such as, e.g., electricity or computers), but also the only one that can self-improve. Also, its potential for diffusion is much bigger, because unlike for electricity and computers, barriers are much more easily overcome [1].
But I'd suggest looking at this not as a separate "technology" like airplanes or smartphones, but rather as a software breakthrough. Everything that worried people about software [2] in the 20th and the early 21st century - or anything that came to pass on a smaller scale - is now much more worrisome.
[1] Pretty much any person or machine today that has access to electricity and computers can use AI, thanks to subscription models, cloud computing, VC subsidies, web access, etc.
[2] For example, large-scale automation and job loss, mass surveillance, robot swarms, etc.