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Just as a user, deleting my Google account 10-11 years ago (don't even remember precisely when) was a great feeling that was received as "insane" by friends and acquaintances. While I think the author is a bit late in quitting (assuming he is genuine in his motives) given this is practically a trend right now, a lot of people should more often say "no" to things that are as ubiquitous as Google.
I also don’t believe addiction and other psychological exploits are used for the sole purpose of ad revenue. There are other more direct forms of monetization involved, such as microtransactions and subscriptions.
If you really want to blame something, it really all comes down to one word:
Greed.
Instagram? Tiktok? Facebook?
Social media feeds off addiction to generate ad revenue.
And how much damage has social media done to political and social institutions and to collective mental health?
Ads on other web properties are not weaponised in the same way.
Advertising has become 'active', very recently in the overall lifespan of advertising. For most of it's lifespan it was passive, it blared out at you from the TV or radio or bus stop. Now, however, it's reaching out and taking pieces of you back for analysis and reconstruction, and on-selling to any other entity interested in doing the same.
The reason is greed, yes.
We can't regulate human greed, but we can regulate the manifestation of its symptoms.
We can also choose not to work towards expanding the capacity of said symptoms.
> I plan to study how AI agents debug code and whether debugging tools that can make them more effective at that.
> I want to use AI agents to bring some of my hobby project ideas to life.
> I’m keen to reap the benefits of AI
and addresses the anti-AI view:
> AI detractors think that AI won’t really work. I think it will. (ed. for brev)
The main reason then is the concern of the velocity of the rollout and the increased pervasiveness of AI. Too fast, too much.
Personally if I could Thanos-snap AI out of existence I would, but as long as it exists, it seems better on balance to make good use of it where possible than just try to ignore it.
"Focusing more on AI stuff" ... not really? Of course I was using AI a lot in my work at Google, as well as contributing to AI acceleration. Now I won't be contributing to acceleration and I can be as cautious as I want to be about using it.
That is a threat to the fundamental stability of society.
AI is concerning in some aspects, yes, but the loss of a shared reality has nothing to do with that, and is even more scary.
Even before big money was on the table, people didn’t blink an eye at starting to work for Google/Facebook, “solving fun tasks.”
I respect the argument for not working for a company that does addictiveness work anywhere, even if you don't work on it yourself. But that's not where I drew the line.
Also FWIW I disagree the danger of AI is abstract. A lot is happening right now, in education for example.
I think it's worse than that. Or at least, the products that have been built because of advertising are worse than that. Instagram/TikTok/Facebook are all ultimately just surfaces to serve ads, but they've wormed their way into their users' consciousness in fairly insidious ways
All intellectual, psych and social scores are in free fall since introduction of ad-supported attention grabbing internet.
AI is theorethical threat. Advertising is a constant detriment to our brains, societies and culture.
If AI can mitigate a fraction of the damage that ads do it will have massive positive impact.
We live in times where everyone can pick their own flavor of apocalypse to be scared of. Ads are leading us into Idiocracy since ~2004 and made huge progress towards it.
Google and Meta's wealth came at the cost of civilization getting sucked dry of its attention and mental capacity.
edit: Guys, I said “in some way”, not “perfectly”.
There's no alignment except the arrow of entropy.
It should also be noted that it says in Genesis that G-d promises not to destroy the world ever again like He did with the flood. This is important psychologically because it prevents this type of apocalyptic millenarianist thinking.
I’m always intrigued by the duality and conflict of “I have free will and must choose to act the right way” and “God has a plan so everything will be alright”.
Either free will allows us to deviate from the plan, or the plan will always be carried out and free will doesn’t really matter in the end. Arguing for God’s plan as the thing that will save us is eerily similar to nihilism, because they’re really arguing none of our actions truly matter.
It’s not uncertainty about the motives; those and the end state are clear. It’s just the details of how we get there (“God’s plan”) that aren’t clear.
In the old testament God was hard and judging heartless, killing his creation through flood, wanting sacrifices, killed 1st borns, leveled two whole cities Sodom and Ghomora, and was in general an hardhearted God that you should fear.
However, let's imagine the most "ideal" situation where it's possible to replace 90% of the workforce with AI automation. Then the remaining 10% workforce will enjoy 10 times more income, assuming revenues didn't go down (or increased). Now comes an interesting situation. Where are the revenues coming from? Who can afford buy the products/service of this company when 90% of the workforce is out of job?
Case-1: Since there is a flood of products and services - all automated and bot-based - the prices would fall to rock bottom and to there is no longer a need for humans to work hard hard to afford the material affluence.
Case-2: This results in an extreme concentration of delivery capacity for products and services. A few companies are now capable of serving the needs of entire humanity. Everyone should work for these companies for pennies and still can be happy, because things cost pennies, thanks to automations.
Case-3: Humans revolt. They break their shackles - their needs. Rediscover what they really need for living. They go for minimal living. Abandon cities and expensive living, go country side and do farming just enough to feed their families. No college, no office, no car, no highways. They realize what their basic needs are as humans. Sort of Amish.
Case-4: There is still some work left that can't be automated. But there are very less number of jobs and they require hard work. The current generation can't handle it. They were schooled and grown up in cities, expecting a milder office work. They fall out of employment. But they were not built to deal with hard reality. They lost their survival instincts a few generations ago. The genes are gone. The job of rebuilding the survival instincts is delegetaed to future generations. Meanwhile the so-called developed nations undergo generational cycles of poverty and richness.
> AI is developing faster than humans can individually and collectively understand it and adapt to it. People trying to plan their futures, e.g. trying to plan for a world several years in the future as they enter university, can no longer do so the way previous generations could.
I'm so bothered that we seem to have moved on from the ATTRIBUTION problem with LLMs. It just isn't on people's minds anymore, even tho it STILL is a big deal.
Whatever AI people have been saying for the last 70 years, AI capabilities have improved stupendously in the last 10 years and there is no sign of the rate of improvement slowing down. I would like to deny it, but I can't.
Trope circa 1950 not true, because of trope circa even earlier...
Then they say they are going to keep doing it...
Forgive me for alerting you: they are liars
There are trillions of dollars at stake here, do you think getting 1000 people on board is that difficult with this level of money? lol
I'd also be interested in how much your opinion on the existential threat of AI changes during your ten day backpacking trip, assuming it'll be a pretty offline experience.
Whilst I am involved in technology in my work and some of my hobbies, I do enough things 'away from the desk' that it feels to me that a lot of the doomerism is from people who have too much of their own personality and self-worth tangled up with the internet; the serially-online. I don't know where you naturally exist on that scale, but you already said you're outside the bubble and aren't the typical AI-rationalist-tech-bro (and surely the natural beauty of New Zealand is impossible to ignore).
I personally think that the old analogue world is big enough that some kind of AI-pocalypose wouldn't be anywhere near a civilisationally existential threat.
At risk of coming across an arrogant prick in telling you to do something: Consider your opinion now, and record it somehow. Then revisit it when you get back from your trip and see how far you've strayed from that as a baseline.
Stay away from the lucrative then? Why did you ever think it was a good idea to start at Google? I don't think Jesus would have approved.
It's pretty hard to live in the world and be completely disconnected from anything unethical. Jesus doesn't seem to demand that (e.g. he didn't tell centurions to leave the Roman army).
Then came so much money, and by being chaotic evil even more money..
Still makes me sad. I was so sweetly naive
How's he so sure he's not already in both of these groups? His post about the AGI boogeyman sounds like it to me. Why is he bothering working on both of his projects if AGI is right around the corner anyways?
Perhaps a good thing to come out of these big companies over-indexing on "AI" is the liberation of creative minds. So many fantastic open source contributors have disappeared into corporate black holes...
excellent logic, m'lord.
You might be right. You might be wrong. But being overly confident on a topic you're a spectator to is possibly not the right choice.
It is not about objectivity or belief.
It is about being.
I have a lot of bones to pick with Google's morality, but "democratizing the transformer and LLMs" is at the bottom of my list.
Presenting it as such does disservice to any serious conversation.
All bad?
Woe is me, victim of the 21st century separated from my true calling of paying for software.
Edit (rate limited):
> Does Gemma belong to this list?
Yes, and Tensorflow too.
It is clearly incorrect to call it a conspiracy theory. You can be skeptical, as there is no clear consensus even among experts, but outright dismissal is simply an unscientific position.
I do expect to use AI in my work, as I indicated in my blog post. I haven't (yet?) reached the point where I consider that anathema...
There's no arguing with someone who claims God forced them to do something, but I do wish this person good luck in whatever they do next.
Few things are as indicative of mental instability than someone believing God is speaking to them directly. The schizophrenic ward is full of these.
Sometimes people use the "Yet you participate in society" meme as a shield for blatant hypocrisy, like a Marxist-Leninist Twitch streamer who lives in a multi-million Hollywood mansion, drives a Porsche and wears thousand dollar pants.
The post resonates with me and the author shows the way.
Is that all that different from what people fear AI might do?
Why the one makes people feel elation and the other dread?
The first is that AI will actuallly the world Skynet-style. I actually consider this unlikely. People are unlikely to completely remove people from the decisions to launch nuclear missiles, for example. Look at the Soviet/Russian design for Dead Hand [1], as one example.
The second is that AI destroys so many jobs that society falls apart. This is the far more problematic and likely scenario (IMHO). To put this in context, I see two general outcomes for AI:
1. AI will be used for further widen the inequality gap as the already ultra-wealthy will get, well, more wealthy, for literally no reason. This is the outcome where you still need a job to survive but a whole bunch of them disappear and aren't replaced. The world of The Expanse was kind of like this (on Earth); or
2. AI makes everyone's lives easier so less work needs to be done. Crappy jobs get automated. People in general get more leisure time and quality of life.
I believe (1) is far more likely at this stage and it's not going to be pretty. But this is an issue of economics not technology. Put another way: our society isn't structured to handle this change. Put yet another way: no amount of guardrails or slowdowns on AI will solve the fundamental issue of wealth distribution. And put even yet another way: this is capitalism vs socialism.
We have a preview of what this looks like when you compare the US to China.
The US has crumbling infrastructure, has lost the ability to manufacture everything but weapons and about 1000 people are insanely wealthy while everyone else are struggling to survive while AI systems drive up the cost of everything necessary to live like food and housing through demand pricing. We now spend over $1 trillion a year on a military to essentially siphon money to those 1000 from everyone else.
And what's China done? It's invested in infrastructure and its people. China's vision for AI isn't to maximize shareholder value at all costs. It will be strictly regulated so society as a whole gets to benefit.
So while I can respect people such as this author leaving on principle, I think they're still focusing on the wrong problem.
[1]: https://www.military.com/history/russias-dead-hand-soviet-bu...
China is not in an ideal place right now, youth unemployment is way up, lots of dead end jobs, a 35 age employment limit that isn't just a meme. China has disparate visions for AI but maximizing owner (erm, sort of like shareholder) value is definitely one of them. Don’t get me wrong, China could get this right in the end, but it’s not a forgone conclusion right now.
Why do people automatically associate intellectual capability with evil?
Does American anti-intellectualism explain the difference in perception of AI by Americans and Chinese?
No intellectual capability, but non-human, inherently amoral intellectual capability that has already been proven act in hard-to-predict, illegal, and unethical ways. I think that's a very rational thing to be afraid of.
The reverse also holds, btw.
- Create powerful AI but don't release it and keep it secret.
- Ask this AI to create some sort of virus that can be delivered to every human in the world without them knowing it and this virus does a fundamental change to the human brain such that humans never ever could even think of hurting other humans.
- Release this powerful AI to everyone.
Will that work?
I do believe this is possible for a virus to achieve, I just don't think it's possible without killing the human.
I have the feeling it is inevitable that a new species will take over Earth. Just as humans took over a hundred thousand years ago. Now a species even more capable of thinking is coming up.
Thinking a million times faster. Knowing a million times more. Able to wrap its head around a million times more aspects at the same time.
A strong effort to slow it down might slow it down a bit. But does that really make a difference? It's not like we can "brace" ourselves from what is coming. Would the apes have been able to prepare for the arrival of humans if they had had 5 more years?
It seems pretty capable of producing variations of itself. If these variations improve over time and roam earth - what is in your definition of "species" that is not met?
At any rate it can't be a new step in the history of evolution, as AI did not evolve in the same way as other species did and AI is not a species nor alive.