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Discussion (59 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
There's a strange vein of aggressive-denialism that anyone could find AI genuinely useful (bordering on miraculous) even if it hasn't yet cured cancer, led to 100% unemployment, solved nuclear fusion, etc.
I'm unconvinced that AI will make us all dumber. In the public perception, at least among students, AI is viewed as a cheating tool. What kinds of students gravitate towards cheating tools to complete their coursework?
On the other hand, the opportunity for AI to act as a personal tutor, meeting you at your own skill and knowledge level, is limitless.
A lot of potential that's currently unrealized. It takes a student to swim upstream to get there. The convenience of cognitive offloading is difficult to say no to. For evidence, I see it everywhere at work, including (at least in some cases) in my own work, for matters I don't care to invest effort in learning because it's a one-off.
The rates of AI use show it far exceeds the rate of good old-fashioned cheating, and not an equivalency between them.
So I am convinced AI will make the ~80% dumber, at least until there are excellent teaching products and changes to teaching practices that end up making that 'AI as a personal tutor' the norm. In the absence of the actual right answer -- actual people as personal tutors with qualified, well-paid teachers and right-sized classrooms -- an AI as personal tutor is extremely scalable and would allow productive 'struggle' learning.
It really is absolutely clear that higher education is over for good unless radical measures are taken. You can calculate the economic conquences. Colleagues are adopting 19th c tech and it may be well for universities to enforce them across the board https://www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty/learning-assessm...
Typically speaking, the ones that run companies.
> On the other hand, the opportunity for AI to act as a personal tutor, meeting you at your own skill and knowledge level, is limitless.
To be especially contrarian here, people said the exact same thing about the internet. That it would let you connect with anyone and truly evolve your knowledge and skill. It may be true for an extremely small minority of people but for most the reality was almost exactly the opposite. People willingly became dumber, embedding themselves into conspiracy and ways to hide from reality.
AI im not sure of because it generates so much slop and anyone not already deep into a topic or field are unlikely to be able to recognize what parts are useful and what parts are common misconceptions or hallucinations.
Search engines are certainly worse tho, the first 20 hits on certain topics these days are AI articles that lack the needed details in favor of verbose generalizations or have questionable figures that other slop makes difficult to verify.
I'll give the author a pass because he's not in the industry, but even an outsider looking closely enough would know that this is not true. Companies have been laying off while using AI as an excuse, but before AI it was the end of ZIRP, and before that it was something else. Also the layoff peak was 2023.
https://safebots.ai/declarative.html
At best, perhaps it's an overengineered way to force humans to rigorously validate every action... which the humans are all very hostile to doing.
> [Architecture page] Reasoning is Read-Only: Input=Data, not Instructions
This doesn't make make sense unless the "reasoning" is regular executable code, and then someone still needs to audit the code whenever it changes. The core LLM algorithms simply don't have room for the distinction.
> Complex workflows broken down into encrypted graph segments
Grandiosity++, where does "the architecture" actually end?
This raises some interesting questions about the authorial process.
Question though — what do you have against what I’m saying or working hard towards?
Trying to create healthier versions of technologies and help people?
https://www.laweekly.com/restoring-healthy-communities/
The actual point of the article was: recursive self improvement is scary and upredictable, you can get 99% of the benefit by doing the reliable and predictable thing instead. Did you even read the actual article? I didn’t see anything in your comment about that main thesis which is woven through — well — every paragraph.
Update: oh, I went through your recent comment history and apparently most of it is just snarky criticisms of surface level things. Okay :)
In the quotes I noted [Architecture Page], which is the extremely prominent blue button/link on the SafeBots homepage. (To a PDF.)
It's on the slide "Scalability: Distributed Reasoning & Encrypted DAGs", number 11 with a black background.
> Did you just make that up
I choose to take this false-accusation as a positive sign that we feel the same way.
You read the text I quoted and (just like me) felt it somehow didn't make much sense... and you felt that very so strongly that you could not believe it even existed!
I don’t know, I find myself doing things I would’ve never done before AI.
I find myself doing more projects outside of work.
I discover new problem domains and are less afraid of tackling the unknown.
I code in languages I don’t know and start learning how they work.
I can get anything explained to me, at any time, in a somewhat coherent manner, by a tutor that won’t get tired or annoyed.
Look— I’m not exactly thinking AI is free of criticism, but it’s definitely a revolution in access to information and at least to me that’s a big deal.
Did you mean: Google?
If I ask an LLM, it tells me “your usage is pretty low for an apartment, good job!”
The latter is exactly the question I had in mind. Not even close.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilowatt-hour
Obviously, LLMs are quite tolerant of typos, and even ignore mis-capitalization, or it may have at least tried to correct your improper usages.
But I always swore I would never buy another iPad until Apple added one key feature: support for multiple user profiles.
Can’t understand why they’ve never done this. Even Apple TV has user profiles now. Perhaps they think they will sell less iPads if family members can share them.
I don’t think it makes sense as an analogy to AI, however.
I don’t think the analogy makes any sense whatsoever either.
"read Kant and found it to be dense and impenetrable...an AI generated summary would have helped"
followed by "Would it have improved comprehension? No."
Why? Because "research says so."
Wut?
(still waiting for one or more HN commenters to freak out because the article has gasp! multiple em-dashes)
He seems to have changed his mind now that he owns a major AI company.
* It's not going to go away and will only get more sophisticated whether we like it or not.
* It has legitimate super powers that can enable people do things that would either be impossible or insanely expensive.
I've been fascinated by tech my whole life and have watched various waves of technology transform society:
* solid state electronics enabling portability and functionality hitherto not possible
* integrated circuits bringing down the cost and increasing the capability of electronics, including microprocessors
* the personal computer revolution
* mobile telephony
* the internet
* smart phones
* AI
Most of those wonders have come with significant societal costs (e.g., silicon valley promised a revolutionary new industry without pollution, but instead gave us multiple superfund sites to clean up the toxic materials they haphazardly dumped without care, etc.)
We can't stop AI but we should try to have serious conversations how how to live in a non-dystopian world that it threatens to bring us. The small flaw with that idea is that those in power have no fucks to give in that regard and will sell out humanity if it means they can have the deluxe bunker package and enough slaves to serve them.
There, fixed that for you.
I'm not saying the haters have zero point, but I find AI far more useful than not. I think so do most people. If I walk into any coffee shop and look over the at the screens of the people next to me, I see all asking AI questions and getting something positive from it. So I don't think "most cases" is correct.
Smartphones are cool, but do you think that they don't have issues?
* Distracted driving
* Attention span decimators
* A culture of zombies staring at their screens?
The list goes on for everything I mention: virtually all of them had some sort of cost to society and it's important to recognize that.
Are you capable of dialectical thinking?
I find it hard to imagine having a chatbot fix your broken SQL query or summarize some event be experienced as gross.
I think using an absurd amount of power to train a neural network on stolen data which is then used to perform mundane tasks and performs significantly worse then if done manually. If anything LLMs is one of the least impressive, yet most annoying technological achievement this century.
This piece, by a defense analyst formerly at RAND, expands its concerns out from public sentiment and is mainly drawing attention to major yet-unsolved and generally uncontested issues such as AI output being unoriginal (fundamentally, due to next-word prediction), the output polluting future training (garbage in garbage out), and errors only being caught by experts (cf. the Gell-Mann amnesia effect). The essay, in a political magazine, intends to warn elected leadership about strategic issues that are likely to arise if our government and experts intertwine AI into their decision making without these concerns being solved first.