Comment by Marha01
3 days ago
Yes. Every great technology developed to date has been a net positive for the human race. Including the more controversial ones, like internal combustion engines or nuclear power. Why should AI be different? I think the critics always fixate on the negatives, but ignore the potential big positives.
Depends on your point of view. Has the web been a net positive overall? If your criteria is "instant access to any information" or "catalyze more technological progress" then positive, if your criteria is "young people's mental health" or "how easy it is to control the public's perception about a certain topic" then negative in my opinion. It's all relative.
I judge it in the aggregate. Overall, we have higher standard of living than people 30 years ago.
If you judge on aggregate then "Every great technology developed to date has been a net positive" is nonsense.
You cannot judge aggregate positively and conclude that therefore each segment was positive.
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30 years ago was the 90’s, when just about everything peaked.
The things I’d be truly missing from today 30 years ago, would be the advances in medicine really and the fact that we don’t have the ozone layer threat.
Most other things have peaked back then. Rising kids was definitely easier, and healthier.
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No. We do not. So many people are nostalgic about 30 years where you could afford basic things on minimum wage for a reason.
There are many technologies that have not been a net positive for humanity. Leaded gasoline comes to mind immediately. For many other technologies it is also hard to determine because counterfactuals are hard to reason about.
Even then past performance is not an indicator of future results. Just because you think internal combustion engines were a great invention, doesn't mean AI cannot be bad for humanity.
I wouldn't say that leaded gasoline is a great technology like AI, it's a pretty niche tech. Gasoline in general is comparable to AI, and the pros of that outweight the cons. Modern civilization would be impossible without gasoline.
>Even then past performance is not an indicator of future results.
It is not perfect or guaranteed, but it can definitely be an indicator. Technological progress is the main reason for the massive standard of living increases that we have witnessed in the last ~200 years. If someone wants to argue that this trend will stop or even reverse, they need very strong arguments, IMHO.
> Gasoline in general is comparable to AI, and the pros of that outweight the cons.
This analogy is great, because your grandchildren will probably not consider gasoline to be a great technology, they'll consider it the thing that caused the wars and the famines.
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I suspect your reasoning is circular if you only consider "great" technologies.
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We still use leaded gasoline (100LL) in prop airplanes today, for what it’s worth.
So it’s not clearly a net-negative technology.
The fact a technology is still in use does not imply that it is not negative for humanity.
A common thing is to lump things together like a tech tree. Is it possible to conceive of a world where nuclear power is invented but not nuclear weapons? Combustion engines but not let everyone have a car and then cause cities to be planned around cars?
Long-term, sure. Short-term it is going to cause a lot of suffering.