Oh yeah except politics of course. I should have added that.

I totally agree on the AI front. People watch too many movies. If AI goes wrong in any way its going to be because we used it to make a decision, and it would turn out to be a bad one. It’s not going to directly and intentionally kill us all.

We don’t yet know how to give an AI system anything like a “goal” or “intention”, not in the general sense that we can say a human has them. We can give an algorithm a hill to climb, a variable to maximize; but traditional algorithms can’t invent new ways to accomplish that.

What the well-known current “AI” systems (like GPT and Stable Diffusion) can do is basically extrapolate text or images from examples. However, they’re increasingly good at doing that; and there are several projects working on building AI systems that do interact with the world in goal-driven ways; like AutoGPT.

As those systems become more powerful, and as people “turn them loose” to interact with the real world in a less-supervised manner, there are some pretty significant risks. One of them is that they can discover new “loopholes” to accomplish whatever goal they’re given – including things that a human wouldn’t think of because they’re ridiculously harmful.

We don’t yet know how to give an AI system “moral rules” like Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics, and ensure that it will follow them. Hell, we don’t even know how to get a chatbot to never say offensively racist things: RLHF goes a long way, but it still fails when someone pushes hard enough.

If AI systems become goal-driven, without being bound by rules that prevent them from harming humans, then we should expect that they will accomplish goals in ways that sometimes do harm humans quite a lot. And because they are very fast, and can only become faster with more and better hardware, the risk is that they will do so too quickly for us to stop them.

That’s pretty much what the AI Safety people are worried about. None of it is about robots deciding to “go against their programming” and revolt; it’s about them becoming really good at accomplishing goals without also being limited to do so in ways that aren’t destructive to the world we live in.

Put another way: You know how corporations sometimes do shitty things when they’re trying to optimize for making money? Well, suppose a corporation was entirely automated, with no humans in the decision-making loop … and made business moves so fast that human supervision was impossible; in pursuit of goals that become more and more distorted from anything its human originators ever intended; and without any sort of legal or moral code or restrictions whatsoever.

(And one of the moves it’s allowed to do is “buy me some more GPUs and rewrite my code to be even better at accomplishing my broken buggy goal.”)

That’s what the AI Safety people want to prevent. The technical term for “getting AIs to work on human goals without breaking rules that humans care about” is “AI alignment”.)

I don’t disagree with you fundamentally but I do think ai will start changing things in small ways behind the scenes and it won’t be immediately obvious.

If you are old enough, you’ll remember a time when banks had computers in the back but the tellers still used paper. The loan officer was a person who could use their discretion to approve a loan (signed off on by someone else but you get the idea). Gradually that became “gotta see what the computer says but I can probably make this work” to “it’s all up to the computer”.

Sitting at home in 1982, you aren’t thinking that computers are running the economy but if you’re even remotely aware you know they are altering the credit landscape which is a huge determinant of “the economy”.

I think AI will be like that. We’ll hear about overt things like the McDonald’s drive thru will be an AI but we won’t realize that half the shows we watch were written by AI to ensure we couldn’t help but be compelled to binge and also those product placements are very persuasive all of a sudden.

We’ll find out clothing designs and change to better match factories that have production lines optimized by AI and robotic clothing production.

Grocery store pricing and product offerings will change to produce maximum profit while also minimizing supply chain waste in ways we hadn’t considered before. Mm, this bean curd and grasshopper chip I saw on that show Netflix recommended is really pretty good and it got delivered for free just as I started the third episode which is only 18 minutes long for some reason.

Things that kill cancer include:

• Fire
• Polonium
• High-test peroxide
• Most strong acids
• Chlorine

Of course, they also kill everything else.

Medical science or research in general, it’s all spun around to get clicks.

When people think there’s a new “superfood” or “recommendation” from doctors every week, they stop trusting doctors. In reality, the processes and recommendations are very robust and take lots of time and research to change. A study will say that “we might want to look into X” and news will run with “groundbreaking study: x is the sole cause of y”.

I’m not even an expert. Like you said “Almost every science headline was written by someone who never understood science”

xkcd.com/882/

xkcd.com/1217/

This is a huge one in movies and TV shows especially, but part of the problem is that IT security, or counter-security, is not a great spectator event. It’s very dry, does not involve a lot of flashing lights or even really anything on screen except in many cases a command prompt or progress bar, and is in most cases not a quick process.

That said, Mr. Robot, while not perfect, did a really good job of being a more realistic portrayal.