Yet another Hacker News

Geoffrey Hinton: it might turn out we were better off without AI

64 points alkyon 1 hour ago 31 comments

jjgreen 1 hour ago | parent

The scene is bleak, silent, desert-like with a few dead trees bleached white by unfiltered UV. Nothing moves. In the distance a cave, and from that cave

... no shit Sherlock

bluebarbet 1 hour ago | parent

9 minutes. Was that enough time to read the article?

catchnear4321 1 hour ago | parent

Did you look at it? It wasn’t that long.

ionwake 1 hour ago | parent

I personally feel reading the article before commenting affects the purity of my vibe before posting

librasteve 1 hour ago | parent

vibe comments!

dude250711 1 hour ago | parent

We should have not left the trees. You cannot disrupt banking and power if they do not exist. Checkmate!

olelele 15 minutes ago | parent

The ghost of Douglas Adams has entered the chat

feverzsj 1 hour ago | parent

AI winter has arrived.

yewenjie 50 minutes ago | parent

Said AI "experts" for the last 10 years.

librasteve 1 hour ago | parent

modern day Mary Shelley

perarneng 1 hour ago | parent

We are not but we need a better approach, https://www.ethicalacceleration.org

bemtevi 45 minutes ago | parent

> It could help cure diseases, end boring work and give us more free time.

Seriously? It seems to be causing more problems, giving us more boring work, and less free time.... sounds like absolute bullshit.

_heimdall 16 minutes ago | parent

"Could" does a lot of work in these kinds of claims.

We need to build it as fast as possible because it could cure all disease. Ignore whether that's possible, how it might happen, whether all we're missing to do it is more intelligence, etc.

The only way I see us curing all disease is to throw out all the names we've given to collections of symptoms. What disease? I don't see no disease, you just have a sore throat, runny nose, and mild fever.

bemtevi 14 minutes ago | parent

> We need to build it as fast as possible because it could cure all disease

Hell no. We need to risk pumping out even more CO2, causing more environmental disaster, ruining entire human communities, just to cure diseases? You might as well say it's better to be in prison because you're guaranteed three meals a day. The logic of some pro-AI people is baffling.

staminade 11 minutes ago | parent

How has AI given you less free time?

bemtevi 4 minutes ago | parent

I have to spend extra time just trying to find AI-free things, AI-free writing, AI-free communities, and people who aren't addicted to AI. And get noticed/get a job by having to push through all this AI static. And having to interact with AI-based customer service agents that take 10x as long to resolve the problem as a human being. And having to wait a bit longer because there are 10x more 'Are You Human' Captchas slowing down website loading. And having to download OS updates that are 2x as large because they contain AI models. And having to double-check everything because there's so much more hallucinated crap out there.

The other day I hired an accountant and even he sent me an AI answer that sounded right but was actually bullshit.

In short, it takes a LOT more time just to find some sanity now.

AI is shit.

koe123 16 minutes ago | parent

You’re a cultist

xnx 57 minutes ago | parent

This is a bit like Rudolf Diesel saying maybe we're better off without airplanes. The field has long since left this guy behind.

Towaway69 5 minutes ago | parent

So pumping CO2 into the atmosphere is a good thing and if someone does a backflip by recognising their mistakes that is a bad thing?

throwthrowuknow 51 minutes ago | parent

> we fail to manage the risks and … have a huge gap between rich and poor, huge cultural problems, massive unemployment, just society being torn apart

ok boomer

bemtevi 48 minutes ago | parent

"he warned it could trigger a large-scale incident this year or next, such as a temporary blackout of financial or power systems."

I know this sounds unusual, but I do think this wouldn't be the worst thing that could happen. Sure, it would cause a bit of chaos, but it might also make us think twice about continuing down our current path of unfettered development, and possibly even make us much more cautious, which might in turn even help us with the climate crisis.

Because human beings in a large mass only respond to one thing: immediate difficulty. They don't respond to delayed difficulty like "the climate is getting worse" or "technology will make life more difficult in the distant future". They only respond to immediate pain.

So I think it would be a good thing if the financial system had a serious threat. Then people with money, who tend to offset future problems with technical solutions and financial padding, would start to become much more suspicious of technology and defund AI and wasteful things that are likely to threaten their safety.

_heimdall 19 minutes ago | parent

I agree that people only really respond when something goes wrong badly enough that its impossible to ignore.

I disagree that something like this would be a good thing though. Whether it's a power outage, financial crisis, or something else people will die. If that's what happens and society ends up adjusting course after then that's what happens, but I can't call people dying a good thing.

bemtevi 15 minutes ago | parent

> people will die.

I don't think that's a good thing. But if we DON'T do anything, then even more poeple are likely to suffer. So while people dying is not a good thing, a thousand people dying is better than a million people dying because we don't do anything.

Same thing about burning your hand. It's not a good thing to burn your hand, but burning your hand once when you're young probably saves you from a more serious accident later on.

seviu 10 minutes ago | parent

We are starting to get a taste. Credit Mutuel Arkea just admitted having been hacked. Over 100 millions gone.

Blockchain despite all its flaws, is the canary in the coal mine. They have been dealing with an increasing amount of cyberattacks. Because it all happens publicly in the blockchain, there is no way to hide it.

However major bank gets hacked in the tune of over 100 millions and we get to know it happened because somebody who has no relationship to the hack turned his eyes to a bunch of suspicious transactions happening on Ethereum.

spwa4 47 minutes ago | parent

I guess capsule network haven't improved ...

neonnoodle 42 minutes ago | parent

oh word?

bvan 23 minutes ago | parent

Of course, we are. Back in the late 80’s early 90’s, no one working on ML was aspiring to develop systems which would be used to generate the kind of AI crap which plagues us today.The good is being smothered by the absolutely soul-crushing pointless.

deadbabe 12 minutes ago | parent

We should introduce regulation so only credentialed software engineers are allowed to use AI.

mrweasel 10 minutes ago | parent

If the people in charge of the AI companies understand the risk I don't know, but I think it's a good point that they mainly care about the money. These are also people who aren't accustom to cleaning up their own mess, so what do they care if something goes wrong.

The carelessness is also clear in how AI is rolled out. It's being presented as a disruptive technology, as is everything else presented by modern tech companies. The goal is a very large payout in a very short period of time, it's not to make anything better, or worse, either is just an side effect.

Had LLMs first been presented as a "better IntelliSense", where rather than auto-completing function names, your editor can now suggest implementations, very few people would have been upset. Same for writing, it's just a better version of Grammarly, it's fine, or as a tool in drawing software. The issue would have been, for the AI bosses, that this takes time and doesn't create trillion dollar companies. It only creates companies that they'd actually have to run, long term, and that's boring.