Hmmh. I’m really unsure about how to compare timeframes. Those were medieval times. Everything was slow to impossible. Nowadays I can communicate information from here to America within a fraction of a second. Back then they weren’t even aware of the Americas. And there wasn’t any hardware store to buy the material needed. They had to invent the oil-based paint, have a bunch of workers dig up the metal, cut down trees, carpenters and goldsmiths… Nonetheless within 40 years they went from invention to 110 printing presses all across Europe. I think that’s crazy fast given the situation. And it really took off after that. Not long after we got it to carry the Reformation. And some century later the Scientific Revolution. (And none of those we’re good things for the kings.)
And 3 years ago is an arbitrary point in time. Neural networks were invented 70 years ago. It’s been 50 years since the first AI hype with expert systems. 40 years since the second AI winter. And now 4 years after the breakthrough of LLMs. It’s really difficult to compare the two. And I personally don’t think LLMs are anywhere close to proper AI. They’re great and all. But also fairly limited in what they can do. For example they can’t update their weights while running. So there’s no learning nor adapting to the environment. Even remembering something isn’t really possible and has to be added on top. And I wonder if we can make them reliable enough for some tasks. Seems impossible to me with current tech. We still need some time to develop the first customer service chatbot which isn’t vulnerable to prompt injection or which doesn’t on occasion “hallucinate” terms and services and procedures. And just lie to the customers.
I don’t really get what you mean by fear. It’s certainly a thing. But I don’t think it is mainstream complaint #1 anymore. I come from a culture where we often meet new things with a healthy(?) dose of skepticism. I don’t see anything wrong with that. And a lot of the criticism regarding AI isn’t concerned with fear. It’s about Elon Musk putting up 6 dirty (and slightly illegal) gas power plants next to your backyard. Sam Altman polluting the environment and making electricity, computer chips and everything more expensive for you. And some idiots starting an investment bubble that requires AI to displace 30% of the human workforce by 203x or it will pop and have catastrophic effects on the stock exchange, including your retirement fund. I mean I’m positive we’ll manage to get by in some form… But I think it’s natural to feel a lot of rejection towards all of that.
I’m really unsure about how to compare timeframes.
Totally fair. I think the relevant difference is that we’re still in the middle of the advent of this technology, we still have a hardware shortage that limits access to it, and it began as we were already entering a crisis era and economic downturn. From our vantage point, we only see the damage caused by the tech, not the potential long term impact, and we are (rationally) assuming the worst.
But if a new scientific revolution could happen as a result of AI for the betterment of humanity, do we want to accidentally prevent that by throwing it out with fascism?
(And if that is in our future, the next question historians 500y from now will ask is, could it have even been avoided? Much like we could ask now, was there a timeline where the original printing presses were destroyed out of fear of corrupting the masses? And realistically, how long would that have lasted before a new one was built?)
3 years ago is an arbitrary point in time. Neural networks were invented 70 years ago.
But we both know that when people say “fuck AI” they’re not talking about anything other than generative AI made in the last few years.
I don’t really get what you mean by fear…I think it’s natural to feel a lot of rejection towards all of that.
Fear has defined the Trump era for the last 10+ years. It is why countries all over the world are tilting to the right. It is the necessary ingredient for fascism to gain traction. It happened during the great depression all over the world, even in the US, and it’s happening now.
I’m not saying it’s an unnatural or unreasonable reaction, I’m saying it’s causing democracies to be prone to rash decisions. If you recall, this thread is about the use of AI in FOSS projects. The most prominent sentiment by 99% of people in this thread is “fuck AI, burn it down and anyone who uses it”. And if that fear-based reaction is what prevents well-meaning, intelligent open source maintainers from being allowed to leverage an objectively powerful phenomenon to responsibly and ethically usher in a new scientific/FOSS revolution, we would be remiss to stifle that opportunity out of fear.
Edit: and to be completely honest, I don’t know who is upvoting me, because it’s very uncharacteristic of randos to follow a thread this dense between two people. I get the sense that there are bots in this thread voting for/against their favorite ideologies.
Hmmh. I sometimes struggle to emphasize. I don’t live in the US. Culture and politics are a bit different here. We certainly have those dynamics as well. But I don’t think we’re (yet) at a majority of the population living in constant fear. We Germans tend to be less open towards new technology, though. For other reasons. We always sell our souls to American big tech eventually. But it’s always met with some initial reluctance/backlash.
I’m not sure about your point about fascism. I mean there’s some inflation with how people use the word… But proper fascism is really, really bad. All my grandparents had to suffer through it. Somehow they survived. But it cost like 70 million lives. And most cities here were turned into burning piles of trash. You kinda want to avoid it. Even at a substantial cost. And my place isn’t the only example. We have plenty wars and fascists on earth. Constantly. Fear isn’t the right tool to avoid it, though. Being clever and education are good strategies.
Ultimately it’s certainly hard to judge some hypothetical future. I still don’t see any reason to completely sell out to some specific big companies. I mean they sometimes do come up with good products. Sometimes their path to profit is scattered with dead bodies. Could be anything unless there’s accountability and regulation. And it’s not either/or… We could as well have some less nasty company do the research. Or do it a bit more slowly… Maybe that’ll take 10 years longer but we get less people killed and less permanent harm done to the environment. There’s not just one path forwards.
I fully agree on the atmosphere and sentiment,. It’s really hard to talk about AI. Especially online. Everyone is yelling and doing identity politics. Most people don’t have a clue how it works. And/or they believe in some falsehoods. I think the best way is to just tell it how it is. Quite a lot of people won’t listen. But they’re not listening anyways.
Be a bit careful with the evil companies, though. I don’t think Meta, Anthropic, OpenAI, Elon Musk or the Chinese government act in your, or my best interest. I’d advise not to be naïve about that. They always tell nice stories. Promise all kinds of stuff. Politicians do the same thing. It’s their job. It doesn’t have to come true, though, by any means. In fact the more they promise, the more likely it is they’re trying to manipulate you.
This isn’t really connected to the technology and science though. Whether AI is going to succeed and improve from a scientific perspective is yet another can of worms. I still strongly doubt LLMs are going to be the direct predecessor to strong AI or something properly “clever”, but we’ll see about that.
To be clear, I’m saying the opposite. Fear is the necessary ingredient that causes fascism. Everyone is seeing wealth inequality, and jobs going away, and cost of living rising, and (depending on the country) healthcare costs rising and quality getting worse. There is a lot of fear going around all over the world, and that’s the classic environment for a demagogue to step in, point at a scapegoat, and stoke populism. As we’ve learned in the US in the last decade, it’s a short jump from there to fascism, and Germany and Italy weren’t the only countries to learn the same lesson back during the great depression. Canada was about to elect their own version of Trump, but instead elected Carney in direct response to Trump’s aggression. So I’m confident if it wasn’t Germany back in the 30s, it would have been someone else, possibly even the US. We did our own internment camp stuff towards the japanese, and there was famously a pro-nazi rally that was held at Madison Square Garden in NYC in 1939. The fear was everywhere, it just came to a head with Germany first.
You kinda want to avoid it.
Hah, understatement. And yet democracies still reliably fall for it. And the reason is they have fears that make them prone to exploitation.
I still don’t see any reason to completely sell out to some specific big companies…they’re trying to manipulate you.
Absolutely not what I’m suggesting. The opposite. As I mentioned before, I tend to believe that any models trained on stolen public data should be made public domain, and to whatever extent possible, the companies using them should need to license the resulting models from us.
Edit: but I’m specifically against any govts taking a stake in these companies, because that’s effectively a bailout for them. They would love to unload their risk on the people.
Hmmh. I’m really unsure about how to compare timeframes. Those were medieval times. Everything was slow to impossible. Nowadays I can communicate information from here to America within a fraction of a second. Back then they weren’t even aware of the Americas. And there wasn’t any hardware store to buy the material needed. They had to invent the oil-based paint, have a bunch of workers dig up the metal, cut down trees, carpenters and goldsmiths… Nonetheless within 40 years they went from invention to 110 printing presses all across Europe. I think that’s crazy fast given the situation. And it really took off after that. Not long after we got it to carry the Reformation. And some century later the Scientific Revolution. (And none of those we’re good things for the kings.)
And 3 years ago is an arbitrary point in time. Neural networks were invented 70 years ago. It’s been 50 years since the first AI hype with expert systems. 40 years since the second AI winter. And now 4 years after the breakthrough of LLMs. It’s really difficult to compare the two. And I personally don’t think LLMs are anywhere close to proper AI. They’re great and all. But also fairly limited in what they can do. For example they can’t update their weights while running. So there’s no learning nor adapting to the environment. Even remembering something isn’t really possible and has to be added on top. And I wonder if we can make them reliable enough for some tasks. Seems impossible to me with current tech. We still need some time to develop the first customer service chatbot which isn’t vulnerable to prompt injection or which doesn’t on occasion “hallucinate” terms and services and procedures. And just lie to the customers.
I don’t really get what you mean by fear. It’s certainly a thing. But I don’t think it is mainstream complaint #1 anymore. I come from a culture where we often meet new things with a healthy(?) dose of skepticism. I don’t see anything wrong with that. And a lot of the criticism regarding AI isn’t concerned with fear. It’s about Elon Musk putting up 6 dirty (and slightly illegal) gas power plants next to your backyard. Sam Altman polluting the environment and making electricity, computer chips and everything more expensive for you. And some idiots starting an investment bubble that requires AI to displace 30% of the human workforce by 203x or it will pop and have catastrophic effects on the stock exchange, including your retirement fund. I mean I’m positive we’ll manage to get by in some form… But I think it’s natural to feel a lot of rejection towards all of that.
Totally fair. I think the relevant difference is that we’re still in the middle of the advent of this technology, we still have a hardware shortage that limits access to it, and it began as we were already entering a crisis era and economic downturn. From our vantage point, we only see the damage caused by the tech, not the potential long term impact, and we are (rationally) assuming the worst.
But if a new scientific revolution could happen as a result of AI for the betterment of humanity, do we want to accidentally prevent that by throwing it out with fascism?
(And if that is in our future, the next question historians 500y from now will ask is, could it have even been avoided? Much like we could ask now, was there a timeline where the original printing presses were destroyed out of fear of corrupting the masses? And realistically, how long would that have lasted before a new one was built?)
But we both know that when people say “fuck AI” they’re not talking about anything other than generative AI made in the last few years.
Fear has defined the Trump era for the last 10+ years. It is why countries all over the world are tilting to the right. It is the necessary ingredient for fascism to gain traction. It happened during the great depression all over the world, even in the US, and it’s happening now.
I’m not saying it’s an unnatural or unreasonable reaction, I’m saying it’s causing democracies to be prone to rash decisions. If you recall, this thread is about the use of AI in FOSS projects. The most prominent sentiment by 99% of people in this thread is “fuck AI, burn it down and anyone who uses it”. And if that fear-based reaction is what prevents well-meaning, intelligent open source maintainers from being allowed to leverage an objectively powerful phenomenon to responsibly and ethically usher in a new scientific/FOSS revolution, we would be remiss to stifle that opportunity out of fear.
Edit: and to be completely honest, I don’t know who is upvoting me, because it’s very uncharacteristic of randos to follow a thread this dense between two people. I get the sense that there are bots in this thread voting for/against their favorite ideologies.
Hmmh. I sometimes struggle to emphasize. I don’t live in the US. Culture and politics are a bit different here. We certainly have those dynamics as well. But I don’t think we’re (yet) at a majority of the population living in constant fear. We Germans tend to be less open towards new technology, though. For other reasons. We always sell our souls to American big tech eventually. But it’s always met with some initial reluctance/backlash.
I’m not sure about your point about fascism. I mean there’s some inflation with how people use the word… But proper fascism is really, really bad. All my grandparents had to suffer through it. Somehow they survived. But it cost like 70 million lives. And most cities here were turned into burning piles of trash. You kinda want to avoid it. Even at a substantial cost. And my place isn’t the only example. We have plenty wars and fascists on earth. Constantly. Fear isn’t the right tool to avoid it, though. Being clever and education are good strategies.
Ultimately it’s certainly hard to judge some hypothetical future. I still don’t see any reason to completely sell out to some specific big companies. I mean they sometimes do come up with good products. Sometimes their path to profit is scattered with dead bodies. Could be anything unless there’s accountability and regulation. And it’s not either/or… We could as well have some less nasty company do the research. Or do it a bit more slowly… Maybe that’ll take 10 years longer but we get less people killed and less permanent harm done to the environment. There’s not just one path forwards.
I fully agree on the atmosphere and sentiment,. It’s really hard to talk about AI. Especially online. Everyone is yelling and doing identity politics. Most people don’t have a clue how it works. And/or they believe in some falsehoods. I think the best way is to just tell it how it is. Quite a lot of people won’t listen. But they’re not listening anyways.
Be a bit careful with the evil companies, though. I don’t think Meta, Anthropic, OpenAI, Elon Musk or the Chinese government act in your, or my best interest. I’d advise not to be naïve about that. They always tell nice stories. Promise all kinds of stuff. Politicians do the same thing. It’s their job. It doesn’t have to come true, though, by any means. In fact the more they promise, the more likely it is they’re trying to manipulate you.
This isn’t really connected to the technology and science though. Whether AI is going to succeed and improve from a scientific perspective is yet another can of worms. I still strongly doubt LLMs are going to be the direct predecessor to strong AI or something properly “clever”, but we’ll see about that.
To be clear, I’m saying the opposite. Fear is the necessary ingredient that causes fascism. Everyone is seeing wealth inequality, and jobs going away, and cost of living rising, and (depending on the country) healthcare costs rising and quality getting worse. There is a lot of fear going around all over the world, and that’s the classic environment for a demagogue to step in, point at a scapegoat, and stoke populism. As we’ve learned in the US in the last decade, it’s a short jump from there to fascism, and Germany and Italy weren’t the only countries to learn the same lesson back during the great depression. Canada was about to elect their own version of Trump, but instead elected Carney in direct response to Trump’s aggression. So I’m confident if it wasn’t Germany back in the 30s, it would have been someone else, possibly even the US. We did our own internment camp stuff towards the japanese, and there was famously a pro-nazi rally that was held at Madison Square Garden in NYC in 1939. The fear was everywhere, it just came to a head with Germany first.
Hah, understatement. And yet democracies still reliably fall for it. And the reason is they have fears that make them prone to exploitation.
Absolutely not what I’m suggesting. The opposite. As I mentioned before, I tend to believe that any models trained on stolen public data should be made public domain, and to whatever extent possible, the companies using them should need to license the resulting models from us.
Edit: but I’m specifically against any govts taking a stake in these companies, because that’s effectively a bailout for them. They would love to unload their risk on the people.