Bryan CantrillLLMs are not a threat to humanity -- humanity is a threat to humanity. The concern should not be for LLMs in and of themselves, but rather the actions that they will induce in humans. This feels obvious?
nepi@bcantrill So is this just gonna end up like MAD but with AI instead of nukes? One nuke isn’t really a problem for greater humanity, but the problem is the actions it induces in others, right?
@nepi MAD but without the "D"? Having grown up with the fear of annihilation in a nuclear holocaust, a software program -- however stochastic and clever -- just doesn't feel anywhere near as likely to kill people.
@bcantrill I think the “D” is still there, but not as obvious as an immediate threat to life.
If you’ve got LLMs shoveling tons of content out into the wild, useful digital communication becomes a lot harder than it is today. Hard to quantify, but still a very big problem, I think? Which makes the whole thing even more worrying IMO.
If you’ve got LLMs shoveling tons of content out into the wild, useful digital communication becomes a lot harder than it is today. Hard to quantify, but still a very big problem, I think? Which makes the whole thing even more worrying IMO.
Zimmie@bcantrill @nepi I don’t know. Tesla, Uber, and others have deployed software in deeply irresponsible ways which have resulted in deaths. Definitely not on the same level as nuclear weapons, but likely to have a constant, low trickle of deaths attributable to the software.
@bcantrill @nepi Absolutely, and that’s probably the main method by which irresponsible deployment of large language models will result in deaths.
That said, I almost expect one of these “Self-driving cars aren’t the future, they’re today!” companies to hook ChatGPT up to the wheel of a car. What they’re already doing is only slightly removed.
@bob_zim @bcantrill Probably not more than the average, I think.
Software being in the fault chain of someone’s death is terrible, but I think MAD implies a destructiveness that’s several orders of magnitude higher than automation faults resulting in loss of life in some isolated incidents.
Software being in the fault chain of someone’s death is terrible, but I think MAD implies a destructiveness that’s several orders of magnitude higher than automation faults resulting in loss of life in some isolated incidents.
meejah@bcantrill @nepi In some ways, "D" feels like a better end than some Matrix-esque hellscape where we're all stuck in small spaces doing the obscure bidding of "algorithms" directing human capita....oh, wait