Comment on AI is the digital equivalent of an atom bomb. You can refuse it but you can't prevent others from using it... and there may be dire consequences if only the worst people have it.

• dfyx@lemmy.helios42.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  I warn about AI. I don’t care about AGI (yet) because we are far from it.

  I’m worried about (in no particular order):

  • Software companies amassing technical debt because AI-generated code gets used without proper review
  • Massive security problems in critical infrastructure, for the exact same reason
  • Cost savings being used to make the rich richer while the people who used to do the work are just fired
  • Companies forcing AI into every single product even if it doesn’t make sense, just to make their shareholders happy
  • Rapidly increasing prices of RAM, SSDs, HDDs, graphics cards and consequently pretty much all electronic devices
  • The environmental impact because companies would rather build new power plants than optimize AI for efficiency
  • A lack of education about the limitations of current implementations. People tend to feed every question they have into ChatGPT and trust the results even when they’re completely incorrect
  • The inherent privacy nightmare that comes from funneling that much data into a centralized service

  Nothing about this is small or cute.

  I would be totally fine with something that can run locally on my laptop without cooking it and doubling my energy bill. Also an economy where productivity gains benefit the workers, not the CEO. If I can do the same work in half the time, let me have the rest of the day off at full pay instead of firing half your staff.

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  • Iconoclast@feddit.uk ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Nothing about this is small or cute.

    Compared to AGI it is. We don’t know how far away we are from creating it. We can only speculate.

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    • dfyx@lemmy.helios42.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      Compared to AGI it is.

      The same way the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear bombs are small and cute compared to a modern hydrogen bomb…

      If we don’t solve the AI problems we already have, there is no point speculating about AGI because our lives will be unbearable long before it arrives.

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    • ell1e@leminal.space ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      AGI talk seems for now to be merely hype to get investors.

      LLMs seem likely to be dead end for any logical thought: forbes.com/…/intelligence-illusion-what-apples-ai… This means at the end of the day you just get a sloppy illusion with no useful coherence as soon as it exceeds the complexity of a literal lazy copy&paste job: fortune.com/…/mit-report-95-percent-generative-ai…

      There is currently no technological innovation to fix this. Instead, AI progress seems to be stalling: futurism.com/…/experts-concerned-ai-progress-wall

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      • Iconoclast@feddit.uk ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        We could’ve never invented LLMs and I’d still be equally worried about AGI. I’ve been talking about it since 2016 or so - LLMs aren’t the motivation for that worry, since nobody had even heard of them back then.

        The timescale is also irrelevant here. I’m not less worried even if we’re 500 years away from it. How close to Earth does the asteroid need to get before it’s acceptable to start worrying about it?

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  • TexasDrunk@lemmy.world ⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Hey! They also destroy communities by forcing them to pay for infrastructure upgrades while the companies get tax holidays in return for a bunch of jobs that only last 2 years during the construction phase and only add about 25-50 permanent jobs to the local economy long term.

    Let’s also not forget bringing back mothballed coal plants instead of building new ones.

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• BigTuffAl@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  AGI is fake

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  • DScratch@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    I don’t think AGI is fake, conceptually. Humans are just meat-based computers. Eventually we will build something of comparable power and efficiency.

    However, LLMs don’t seem like a viable path to AGI imo.

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    • BigTuffAl@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      We disagree about genies being real (they are not) so don’t worry about expressing or defending your points further.

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      • Iconoclast@feddit.uk ⁨21⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        Nobody’s saying AGI is here right now - it’s a concept, like worrying about an asteroid wiping us out before it actually shows up. Dismissing it as “fake” just ignores the trajectory we’re on with AI development. If we wait until it’s real to start thinking about risks, it might be too late.

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• verdigris@lemmy.ml ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Yeah no only people who don’t understand the tech are worried about AGI. There is zero evidence to suggest that we’re anywhere on the right path to develop it. The chatbots are not intelligent, they are just a big bag of all the data the trainers could scrape and an algorithm to pull things out of that bag in a way that humans like.

  Actual AGI would require us to understand how consciousness works. We don’t at all.

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  • Iconoclast@feddit.uk ⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Where does it say that AGI needs to be consciouss?

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    • verdigris@lemmy.ml ⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      The general definition.

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      • Iconoclast@feddit.uk ⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        No, it doesn’t. It’s a reasonably safe assumption that something that intelligent is probably also conscious - but it doesn’t have to be.

        We also don’t need to understand consciousness in order to create it in our systems. If consciousness is just an emergent feature of a high enough level of information processing, then it would automatically show up once we build such a system whether we intend it or not.

        Hell, in the worst case we might create something we assume isn’t conscious - but it is - and it could be suffering immensely.

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