AI: A Developer's Mixed Emotions of Wonder and Dread
I Feel about AI
A software developer reflects on the emotional impact of AI, expressing surprise at how well neural networks work despite lacking planning, fear of an inevitable superintelligent doom, disgust at AI companies harming the open web, sadness for artists affected by AI-generated content, anger at political systems failing to regulate capital, and happiness to witness this transformative era. The verdict: technologically positive, but socially bleak.
It seems positive on a technological level to me, but bleak on a societal level.
- hn_throwaway_99
The thing that makes me pretty terrified about AI is that I think the "utopia" scenario is not much better than the "doom" scenario.
We will very quickly get to a point where very few people will be able to contribute economically because they will be worse than AI (including robotics) at most domains. A world where people just have their whims catered to is not a utopia. We have tons of sayings and idioms about this, e.g. "no pain, no gain", "only the hard stuff is worth doing", etc.
The humans all running around on their Wall-E carts doesn't feel like utopia to me.
Edit: to head off the "rich people worried about striving for their job while people in poor countries are starving" arguments, I encourage you to visit a dying rust belt town in the US. These folks are by and large not starving (indeed, overabundance of calories is the bigger problem), they have adequate shelter, and plenty of outdoor space. Their material needs are met. But these places are despair central. People see little opportunity for advancement or the ability to change their circumstances, and the opioid epidemic is a direct consequence of a sense of hopelessness that there is no place for motivation to go or to effect change.
- litmus-pit-git
This is a bit of tangent and more of a rant. (and please don't suggest intervention of any kind)
> superintelligent AI will inevitably destroy humanity seems to have no flaw
For a section of population who were in a certain age-range when the pandemic hit and that derailed their certain kinds of plans/hopes/dreams in personal life and then this LLM/agentic world moved in, especially if they are in an industry directly and most affected this, this has been a surreal and slow Kafkaesque nightmare for a few years. The thing is with time and age passing hope keeps getting lost inch by inch and every lost bit of hope aids in killing the next bit. Then comes the sense of dread - the unchangeable reality that age passed passing means there are certain experiences and milestones that are essentially out of reach because there's no going back of this clock.
So I feel a strange kind of relief about this possibility of doom. I am just sharing what I feel, and I don't feel good about feeling this sense of relief that after all it might end for us all and not just an unlucky few. This feeling and the calmness about it saddens me.
- Crabber
>a superintelligent AI will inevitably destroy humanity
Can someone please explain to me how an LLM is going to "destroy humanity"? Even if the claims of ChatGPT, Claude et al. are true that their super scary agents were able to escape a sandbox and start hacking other servers (which I feel is at least 50% likely to just be marketing bullshit), how is an AI going to affect anything in the real world?
Perhaps an agent could take all internet connected services offline, but that's not destroying humanity. An AI agent can only see and interact with the world through digital things. Just find the server it's running on and pull out the Ethernet cable. Just cut the power line to the data center. Turn off the whole power grid if it really comes to it.
- bloaf
As someone with a hobby interest in theology:
Arguments about super-intelligent AI have all the hallmarks of the philosophical "proofs of god's existence": they start from seemingly innocuous premises, and conclude in an apparently airtight way that a god exists.
There is a tendency among rational minded folks to look at such proofs of god and exclaim "you can't DO that" then turn right around and do the same thing about superintelligent AI.
The key message I want to deliver to people is:
A) Philosophy is not such a trivial thing that you can just wander in, "be a smart guy" and find flaws in established philosophical arguments.
B) AI has real theological implications, and everyone is tiptoeing around it. More than one public intellectuals are trying to smuggle their own metaphysical positions into the public consciousness via discussion of AI.
- tim333
>Yudkowsky's argument that a superintelligent AI will inevitably destroy humanity seems to have no flaw.
From trying to see what his argument is, it doesn't seem to have much rigor either, basically that AI smarter than us may figure it doesn't want us. Which doesn't prove it'll happen. Even humans who generally are not that nice tend to try to preserve species and I expect we'll try to give AI better values than us warlike primates.
- dgellow
> Like a locust plague, they descend on any open wiki and forum and overwhelm them.
That’s the core pattern of unsupervised agents, the locust plague metaphor is apt. We do and will see that in every single system AI can interact with, be it human systems, software systems, etc. Relentlessly search for an entry point, flood in, consume the whole thing from the inside until there is no value for humans left.
You built a new, innovative software company? Thousands of agents will be working replicating the whole thing in no time. You publish your writing? Exact same thing, as soon as you get some traction your work is replicated in no time by thousands of agents. Same for videos (the whole “faceless YouTube channels” pushed by ElevenLabs and similar). Same for online courses. Same for any website with moderate value. Same for music or other digital art form. Any administrative service available online getting flooded by submissions.
- chistev
HN automatically stripping away the "How" makes the title sound funny.
- mag7269