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What is your issue with AI enthusiasts? Or doomers for that matter?
Do you just not like AI and want us to burn it all down or something?
That they completely ignore nearly-guaranteed misuses of the technology by governments and the powers that be, and just go "Woo! Cool new toy!". They're so blinded by it's shine that, as gilmore606 pointed out, they don't realize they're repeating, word for word, the promises people were making when they were working on the Internet, and ignoring how it worked out in practice.
They're focusing on bizarre and outlandish scenarios when a mere extrapolation of current trends is disturbing enough. What's worse the latter can plausibly be stopped, while the former is in the "not even wrong" category. After all the talk of AI threat, how do we even go about confirming alignment? The whole thing is a wordcell powergrab.
Personally I am a Butlerian Jihadi, but that's irrelevant to the conversation, the discourse is so sidetracked, that it makes no sense to even bring up my objections to AI.
I am very worried about this, I just have no idea how to stop it. What are we supposed to do? An AI slowdown will only serve to cement the power in the hands of the large labs. People are working on open sourcing models like LLaMa, but it's inherently a sort of technology that lends itself to centralization, with the massive data and compute requirements.
Honestly I think Open AI being the leader is better than many alternative outcomes. Sure Microsoft gets to use it but theoretically Open AI comes back under it's own control after $92 billion in profits is made. Seems like an okay situation compared to Microsoft or Google or another big evil corp controlling everything.
Why do you follow the teachings of the Leto II, God-emperor?
The obvious solution is technologies that either reward decentralization or punish centralization sufficiently to offset the appeal of silicon tyranny. The ease of development of such technologies appears to be the inverse of the mess and harm they create, though, so the problem is one of will and collective action. people do not perceive the threat, so they do not act when prevention would be cheap and easy.
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I know what, I don't know how. The Free Software movement has the basic blueprint: promote the empowering of the end user wherever possible - open source, open data, distributed systems, whatever it takes.
The issue is that you're going to run into the same problem as the Free Software movement - opening the AI (actually opening it, not just putting the word in your name) hinders your ability to make profit, so it'll get no corporate support, and empowers political rivals so it will get no government support. What's worse, culturally Free Software is currently kneecapped, no one cares about it anymore. It used d to be a pretty strong movement, but still failed to hinder the centralization of the Internet. It doesn't stand a chance now.
Still, I would say that both the optimists and the pessimists have an obligation to talk about it. Of the two my bigger issue is with the doomers. They're generating a lot of buzz about the negatives of AI, but they're sucking all the air out of the conversation to talk about SciFi scenarios.
I honestly don't see the difference. They're already censoring it, it will only get worse. With the Internet we at least got a few years of the Wild West, with AI we're at BigTech social engineering from day one.
I see it as the value alignment of those at the head. Sam Altman isn’t perfect, but he’s at least nominally aligned with EA values of making things better for everyone. He’s not a classic sociopathic shark at one of the big tech firms that was born into massive wealth, went to Harvard, did the standard track, and parasitically drained value from the masses.
Again I’m not saying Altman is some sort of hero, clearly he’s sociopathic if he’s made it that far into the power structure. But at least he’s a relative outsider and there’s hope he can steer us to better outcomes because he thinks more deeply about the consequences of AI than the folks who stop at the idea of gaining money and power.
But it doesn't matter. Jack Dorsey is a free speech guy, he was still forced to make Twitter conform to the establishment's preferences. It wasn't because he had a change of heart, because now that he's free from his creation, he's working on decentralizing social media.
Even if Altman is truly devoted to the good of humanity, and even if EA actually benefits humanity, that means absolutely nothing. What can he do when they come for him and make him kiss the ring?
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Yes. Well, it's unavoidable either way, because power is always centralized. If the power exists then it will centralize. It's a law of nature.
Who wields the power of guns? A few large actors.
Who wields the power of nukes? A few large actors.
Who wields the power of compute? The internet was supposed to be the ultimate tool of democratization, total freedom for anyone to say anything to anyone. But who reaps the benefits, who controls the discourse? A few large actors.
A few individuals seem to have a fantasy of using open source AI models to, like, fight OpenAI's models and Meta's models, in an epic battle for truth and freedom, or something. There will obviously be no such thing. It's as fallacious as claiming that the right to gun ownership in America protects us "from government tyranny". You have a gun, but they have bigger guns. No matter how smart your model is, the big guys in charge will always have smarter models, more compute, better logistics, more resources to throw at the problem.
The internet, ultimate tool of freedom and progress, introduced us to the concept of cancellation on a trans-national scale (they canceled the whole god damn country of Russia!), memetic social contagions that cause people to voluntarily sterilize themselves, all sorts of new ways to ruin someone's life with fraud and theft... what new and unanticipated forms of immiseration will AI introduce us to?
The only solution is to just not build it. If you have to build it anyway, well, good luck.
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