Smooth Dunk | Bluesky
Transcript
3 panel comic
Panel 1: Red Guy in t-shirt is sitting at a desk being interviewed. He says “AI is going to kill us all”
Panel 2: Interviewer looking directly into camera, says “Well, we’ve heard from the anti-Ai guy. Now let’s hear from the CEO of AI
Panel 3: Wide shot revealing the second interviewee looking slightly confused. He says “I’m the Anti-AI guy”
The AI CEOs say shit like this as marketing. They want people to believe that
- Their product is very capable, so people are more likely to use it
- Their product is dangerous and “only they” know how to control it. They want to create regulations so that nobody else is allowed to make something “so dangerous” again.
Also:
- Their product, being both capable and dangerous, is a useful thing in which governments should definitely invest heavily to smash their enemies, paying consistent subscriptions to continue to keep their “arsenal”
- These governments must invest even more heavily than other governments, because the AI corps want to engineer the perception of mutually-assured AI destruction, with all sides paying them for the privilege
- Thus that, should the bubble pop, the government contracts will get them labeled TBTF and given that sweet hundreds of billions of dollars in bailout money as a gift for crashing the economy.
Ordinary Things makes a pretty good argument. It’s like someone giving you drugs at a party and saying something like “This shit will really fuck you up! It’s crazy! Here take it!”
To be honest, that may have been where I first heard this lol.
Just marketing doesn’t explain the ongoing project of A.I, it just one part of it, the issue is in the budget pumped, allowed by financial organization like banks and government.
The AI CEOs are experts at creating criti-hype.
“Our product is so dangerous that you need us to keep you safe from it”
“Our product is so capable it could outsmart every human being trying to stop it! Hey by the way, you want to replace your workers with our chatbot?”
I don’t think a lot of these AI CEOs even believe it themselves. They just know that getting everyone to scream “It’s so powerful it could kill us all (without us in control)” is great for making business deals with companies that want a highly capable “thinking” machine, or pitching their infinite potential future growth to investors.
They want it to be heavily regulated in a manner that allows them to move forward while preventing legal competition.
Exactly.
“Don’t you see how dangerous this is? It’s time to pause new development (all new competitors in the market) of AI models so we can align our models for… safety (user engagement)!”
It’s time to ban open weight models!
That’s exactly the real pivot here, can’t let “the public” do this work on their own.
Yep, as right wing authoritarians they have ONE tool. Fear.
Yep! There are, though, people who genuinely think it could destroy us all, although the replacement threat is more relevant. The beauty of it is, for the corpos, that it all works together.
While the concern about tech CEOs having nefarious motives is very real, l just feel like I’m hearing increasing concern from academics with no profit or power motive. The concern mostly surrounds the reckless drive to create more advanced models with little to no attention paid to how to mitigate potential dangers.
These models are going to improve significantly over the next couple years given the current rate of advancement, and the people training these models genuinely do not understand them any more than you can understand the inner workings of someone else’s mind. One of these getting loose onto the internet and potentially causing catastrophic interruptions or damage to any internet-connected system is not hard to imagine.
Not to mention the defence contractor aspect.
Our product is so dangerous that you need us to keep you safe from it
I hear similar arguments from men about men.
Then stop fucking making it. That’s like building a bomb and saying it will kill us all but still building it.
Look, if we don’t build the torment nexus first, then China will, and then where will we be?
We must not let a death machine gap to form!
Must have missed the atomic bomb.
There’s a great scene in the Fallout series, where all cogs in the business machine are trying to stop the nuclear war from happening, but they carry out their undesired duties nonetheless, the game rigged from both sides
Long after we’ve eliminated nukes, capitalism, climate change, and “AI”, certainty and normality will still be humanity’s greatest threats.
how do you mean?
Normality is behavioural inertia. Habits and habits of perception. It’s what keeps everything going even though everyone with a nervous system knows that the world is run by pedophiles and psychopaths, the planet is dying, and everyone just… keeps acting normal. Even if we solved all our problems, we would still have this tendency.
Certainty, too, is a pernicious tendency of the human mind. Nobody’s smart enough to hold ideas lightly, people crave certainty. They want to just believe anything that pops into their heads and kill anyone who did the same thing and dared to come up with something different. The more you know the less certain you get, and everyone’s so damned ignorant. We may live in the information age but it is not a light that illumines, but a glare that blinds.
Anyway, that’s my Howard Beale rant. Thanks for asking.
You sound like you would enjoy the book “A Canticle for Leibowitz”. If you haven’t read it, you should! Not because it proves your point, but because it had something to day tangential to your rant.
It’s been on my radar for a while actually, good note
They are in a endtime-cult.
People actually do that too
that’s a great argument for why we SHOULD build it, like with nukes.
My money is on Climate Change is going to kill us.
I think AI will speed it along, I think resource wars will speed it along, I think tyranny created by single industry countries will speed it along (when a government only has to please one industry that usually damages their commitment to democracy).
…but all of those things were happening before AI. Yes AI will speed them along, aid them, maybe even be used as part of them. But really they’re all a product of Capitalism and inequality. The wealthy were causing all those before AI came along to accelerate our problems.
If not AI, then the next bit coin, NFTs, tech boom, population increase, return of coal power, war with China, methane leak, Peter Thiel, Housing Crisis.
AI will kill us all? What’s the new and original means by which this is proposed? Is it going to text people to death? Single handedly take everyone’s jobs and refuse to give them back? Get robot scientists to poison everyone? …and is anyone promoting that? I just don’t think AI is that powerful/willful. Maybe that’s as semantic as saying Capitalism is killing us, not climate change, but it really is Capitalism driving all this.
Yeah my guess is climate change, too. Mostly the ‘everyone killing each other for water’ part (but brought on by climate change).
bit coin, NFTs, tech boom, population increase, return of coal power, war with China, methane leak, Peter Thiel, Housing Crisis
We didn’t start the fire music
Whats wrong with Al? Al is a cool guy.
/j
I think the danger is very real but they don’t care, that’s why tech CEOs should be stopped at any cost.
The real danger is the pollution, energy costs, and the fact that everyone who uses the technology rapidly atrophies their cognitive abilities. It’s also dangerous that this automated hacking software is being unleashed without proper monitoring by the extremely negligent and cognitively atrophied humans who built it.
I get the message because people that’s not associated with those CEO are saying that, but cmon, humanity ending? Like, how?
One of the possible answers to the Fermi paradox is the idea of the great filter, a thing that all forms of life have to go trough that eliminates most or all of them before they can become a space faring civilization, it could be things like the evolution of the mitochondria, but also it could be that all sapient civilizations develop a technology that is so obvious that all civilizations develop it and so risky that it inevitably ends in their destruction.
There are some main candidates as in what this technology could be, but by far the best candidate that has ever existed is AI.
Increasing climate change and causing local climate destruction?
Accelerating something people (Capitalism) was already doing isn’t the same as “AI will kill us all”.
The warning isn’t “AI will help us do everything that we were already doing, which will kill us all”.
AI will increase climate change because it’s not running on green energy and it’s polluting too much. Just like most cars, and most countries, and most factories, and most power plants.
that won’t end humanity, it will just make it much more expensive to live.
It is a little hard to see any actually happening, but I could imagine several scenarios:
- AI helping smaller scale actors build stronger tools of destruction
If it didn’t take nation-state level resources to build a nuke-level threat, easy to see how a few wackos could end us all. Could be bombs with less materials, bio-weapons, grey goo, whatever.
- Cyber security breaches enacting MAD
Presumably existing nuclear arsenals are well secured, but doesn’t seem beyond belief to imagine a hole that a persistent bot swarm could crack open.
- AI in hardware
We’re a ways away from sticking frontier models into small computers, but the push for robots is there. Once they have bodies in the real world, the limits are off for what harm they can cause. All the same unintended cyber attacks we’re getting from test environments now will then become physical harm, and with enough resources you could see it getting dire.
Typing those out though, does make me see how farfetch’d they kind of are. Which is good! I’d be all for it if the doomsday stuff turns out to be a big nothing.
Having means still doesn’t automatically confer motivation.
All of these scenarios overlook that it’s built from what people say online. There’s just as much chance that an AI would decide to save the planet. How much has been written against tech billionaires?
How much has been written about climate change?
Why wouldn’t AI share our concerns if it’s trained on them?
Have we considered that when tech billionaires say “AI will kill us”… They mean THEM. They might be seeing AI reflect instructions against billionaires that we’ve already embedded into the discourse? That we’ve written in comments and articles and blogs across the Internet?
It took 8 months after blacklisting Anthropic for the Pentagon to stop using Claude, as an example of how embedded AI has become in a few years. The Skynet scenario is very much on the table. But that’s the crust on the layer-cake of possible disaster scenarios. I dunno about humanity-ending, but wide-scale disaster could happen in a lot of less dramatic ways just from system disruptions.
But how is this different from when the H-bomb came out, or how people felt about the automobile? They thought going too fast would kill the occupants.
People have repeatedly warned that women’s rights would end society.
We’re VERY prone to claiming new technology will kill everyone.
Trains went just as fast as early cars
To be fair, the atom bombs still might, and automobiles do kill over a million people a year. But you’re right, we have a tendency to catastrophize when it comes to new tech. That said, I still think this tech is different. Or perhaps more accurately, it comes with a hybrid of up and down sides that we haven’t really dealt with before. To be clear, I don’t think we’re going extinct. Man, I got into a sentence structure rhythm there, huh?
According to studies cited on Wikipedia, an all out nuclear war between Russia and the US (all warheads launched), would (after all effects had past), still leave 3 billion people alive on earth.
Most of the deaths would be in the Northern Hemisphere as that’s where all the nuclear nations live.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter#Recent_modeling
The Skynet scenario is very much on the table.
No, it’s not.
What makes you say that? Other than the time travel, of course.
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It’s fiction. Nothing in fiction is ever complex enough to accurately convey a real life situation. Doing so ignores many important aspects of the latter for no good reason.
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Llms aren’t sentient and never will be. Any catastrophe that comes about through the use of these programs is due to the intent or negligence of the human using it. Saying that’s identical to a fictional robot uprising against humanity is foolish and only serves to legitimize the lies being spread to enrich the people pushing them.
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People who are publicly pro-AI like Trump are simply fucking idiots in my book. Let me explain:
Reasons to be publicly pro-AI: It’s an inevitable future, and you wish to seem smart by predicting the future. (Unfortunately, it’s completely obvious that it’s inevitable, so nobody will think you’re smart at this point.) You don’t want others to get there first, or you want to use AI to your own profit. (Okay, but making your opinion public isn’t going to help, then. Basically, this is something that the governments will be doing in private, inevitably.) You are selling AI tech to others. (This is really the only excuse that makes any sense, but most of us aren’t that person.)
Reasons to be publicly anti-AI: It’s the most dangerous technology in history, so at the very least, you should slow the progress down. It’s probably going to be the most economically disruptive technology in history, so you need to slow the fuck down. If you’re actually pro-AI, isn’t it better to be publicly anti-AI? If the tech is so good, then you’ll benefit from others refusing to use it. If you’re a company that makes AI today, then warning the public about AI gives you a better chance to control the market and keep new companies out with a huge barrier to entry.
Being publicly pro-AI right now basically labels you as an irrational idiot or maybe a person who sells AI tech.
Related: Jon Stewart had a fantastic segment on this.
Even from an evil capitalist perspective, what’s the point of using AI to replace workers if the AI is just gonna lie to you and bunk off work? Human workers already do that, according to them.
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