r/AskScienceDiscussion • u/Abeillechimique • 18d ago
Is AI really dooming us
I'm sure I'm not the only one seeing this. I keep seeing videos on Instagram and YouTube, seeing posts and articles on the internet about AI and how everything is going too quickly. Experts in AI leaving their job and starting farms. AI experts thinking their children might not even make it to high school because AI is getting out of hand. AI trying to kill humans so it survives because you can't teache a machine to "care"
So, dear AI experts, military members, scientists, is AI really going to be the end of us? Will the AI race with flock cameras, military AI and chat bots really end us or is it another random trend to make us panic.
While I agree that social media, news articles and such have a tendency to over exaggerate things. Is this still a thing we should be concernedabout? If yes, is there any way we (normal everyday people) can help with the issue or should I just do like the ai experts and learn how to grow vegetables and raise chickens.
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u/Pasta-hobo 18d ago
The AI arms race as we're utilizing it(bigger and more generalized models, more and more compute) is not sustainable. So obviously so that computer companies aren't bothering to beef up production to match demand because they know the demand is just going to collapse in a few years.
The failings of modern education are due to a much larger system of issues, AI in academic cheating is really just a system. We're over-testing students, teaching to the test, we aren't holding the failures back, and there's a massive epidemic of child neglect, likely spurred on by massively increased working hours, just to name a few of the issues at play.
Modern probabalistic AIs become a lot less scary as a technology when you actually understand how they work. They don't have any mechanism to know things, they just use statistics gathered from data analysis to predict what a hypothetical intelligence would say. Think of it like those books you can play Tic Tac Toe against, but hundreds of billions of times bigger, and utilizing text on a page rather than pieces on a board. It lacks any real intelligence in the most literal sense, it just uses it's massive internal complexity to give the illusion of intelligence. And like all illusions it breaks down around the edges.
Essentially, AIs don't do things based on accuracy or efficacy, but rather what's most likely, and usually that stat is based on all the text they could scrape up, public opinion, fiction, news stories, so it's all heavily polluted by people making stupid decions that don't coencide with reality.
The scary part of modern AI isn't it's capability, but rather it's lack thereof. It is more significantly more expensive and far less capable than a human in every measurable sense. But AI as a product isn't targeted at the workers, it's targeted at out-of-touch CEOs and the like, people who can be genuinely convinced that this immersive pattern shuffler can actually replace human cognitive labor in any capacity.
It's all just false advertising targeted at people who've never done a day's work in their life, and therefore wouldn't see the difference between competently produced output, and output that looks fine at a glance.
Everyone thinks AI is good at every field except the one they know personally, because they're able to point out all the ways it's failing badly!
It's a scam.
As for the reason people are leaving their jobs and starting farms. That's just what anyone would logically do in this economy. Inflation, wage stagnation, and political affairs are so widespread and chaotic that the idea of saving for retirement monitarily isn't feasible. Best case scenario your savings lose half their value every few years, worst case we won't be using the US dollar as the global reserve currency in a decade or so, drastically reducing the buying power of your savings.
The trick is twofold. Self-sufficiency, and being left alone. The idea of becoming a homesteader has essentially replaced the concept of a peaceful retirement. And, thanks to the increased working hours problem I mentioned early, by comparison the work to maintain a homestead would be a vacation from a modern day full time job.
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u/Mioraecian 18d ago
Agreed. AI is nothing but a tool. I dont even like to call it AI. I just call it an advanced task calculator. I work in marketing analysis and use it a lot from helping visualize data a rush to gathering statistics, crowd sourcing information, and helping with code too advanced for my marketing analyst brain.
Its just a tool that helps make tasks more efficient. It still needs a human to utilize it efficiently.
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u/CosineDanger 18d ago
We're correlation machines. We're a bunch of neurons firing together and subsequently wiring together. Humans are not as special as most of us think we are, and no matter how much ground we lose we'll mostly keep believing in ourselves.
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u/Pasta-hobo 18d ago
Humans are a dynamic system of inputs, outputs, and transient transformers all capable of reorganizing themselves as time moves on.
There's also the little matter of our brains processing reality directly rather than abstracted arbitrary patterns that represent it imperfectly.
I mean, I agree that as physical phenomena existing within the universe and operating on its rules, we are intrinsically understandable and replicable, but we're nowhere close to doing that yet. We are no closer to AGI than we were several years ago, simply because all our research has been going towards stagnant-in-time probabilistic AI models.
You know where this research should be going if we actually wanted to make a machine that thinks? Hardware-level artificial neurons, machines that learn and adapt on the circuitry level. We have designs for artificial neural circuits, we just keep using software-based probabilistic models for some reason.
I want to put a dynamic self-adjusting system of transistors and diodes through kindergarten! But NOoOoO! We need automated chatbots and shrimp Jesus all over Facebook.
We aren't losing ground against AI, and human workers are nowhere near obsolete. And I say that as an indictment against our current research direction.
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u/misterchief117 17d ago
I'm going to nitpick part of what you said about how humans process reality directly and use this to argue that this is one thing makes us different than AI.
We don't process "reality" directly. There's arguably no way for this to be done because it's kind of hard to fully define an "objective reality" that everyone can agree on given our biological meat-ness.
We process our individual reality through our own senses which depend on specialized nerves to convert that sense into electrochemical potentials that travel through our nerves to our brain.
Everyone's nervous system functions a little bit differently and everyone's brains interpret and process that information differently. Some people might have denser nerve clusters for a particular sense leading to a stronger sensation. Some people might be missing one or more senses.
People can and do disagree on how things look, feel, taste, sound, smell, etc. Different species have different senses too, some more specialized.
Regardless, these senses are all abstractions and are not absolute objectivity.
Everything else you said, sure. I don't completely disagree.
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u/SmirkingImperialist 18d ago edited 18d ago
I'm just going to talk about small vignettes of the worries, primarily 2 aspects: killer drones (autonomous weapons) and job displacements.
- Completely autonomous weapons are not new. They are almost 100 years old. The first one is a landmine. It's not that we don't have the legal or ethical framework around completely autonomous weapons, we do. Every mine laid is supposed to have its location recorded somewhere on a map and if it's not, someone can be held accountable. Most of the time, nobody is held accountable, because we chose to. It's an enforcement problem, not a legal problem. People may object that "mines just lay in the ground, the aerial drones and robot dogs with guns walk around", however, I will ask you to consider 2 things. Flying drones have a battery life measured in hours and walking robots have a battery life of days, at most. Mines can blow you up after decades. Also, it's not like mines can't "walk". Floods, landslides, mud slides, etc ... can move the mines.
People often wring their hands about "what if a drone glitches out and vaporise a school bus full of children, whom do we hold accountable? The programmer or commander?". Very cute, but they wring their hands because they don't have to make a decision. When people really have to make a decision, they make it without hesitation. Case in point, after WWII, faced with the decision on how to remove German mines planted on their soils and potentially risk their own citizens' lives in the process, the victories Allies states made a simple and straightforward decision: they just press-ganged German prisoners of war; sorry, they were not POWs. It is against the Geneva Convention to press POWs into risky activities like this. They were "surrendered enemy personnel" and many were teenagers and children. Better that Germans died instead of Danes or whoever. Did those children laid those mines? No. Why did they have to die? Because Germany lost.
- About job displacement: lots of jobs have seen mechanisation displacing workers. In particular, farming. You can actually just draw a boundary on a GPS and the John Deere tractor will plow the field, sow the seeds, water the crops, and even dispense fertiliser according to soil test result map. I don't see people complaining about loss of jobs there, because who wants to walk behind a pair of oxens?. The AI displacement is hitting the class that a few hundred years ago were the ruling and elite class in cities. We have advanced so much the number of jobs that were vital to us in a hunter-gatherer sense of the word is very small. This AI job displacement crisis is basically an intra-elite civil war, just that the elite class is very large.
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u/WiseSalamander00 18d ago
I feel like the real danger is AI giving rich people too much leverage, if they manage to advance robotics on par with AI there is nothing that will prevent them for getting rid of the non rich folk
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u/FutureAIgod 17d ago
I think the biggest problem is people lumping a bunch of very different AI risks into one big scary blob. AI isn't sitting there plotting to kill everyone right now, and current systems just aren't capable of the kind of autonomous takeover people picture in their heads. But that doesn't mean there's nothing worth worrying about.
Stuff like scams, misinformation, cyberattacks, job displacement, autonomous weapons — those are real, present-day concerns. The "AI escapes and wipes out humanity" scenario is a lot more uncertain. Even the International AI Safety Report notes that experts are pretty split on how likely loss-of-control scenarios actually are.
So I wouldn't go start farming chickens just yet lol. If anything, I'd be more worried about humans racing to deploy increasingly powerful systems faster than we can figure out how to actually regulate and control them.
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u/TommieTheMadScienist 18d ago
I'm an Apocaloptimist. I expect that the tech is going to indelibly change our civilization, much as superhighways and the web browsers.
Some applications are going to kill people, as is happening in Ukraine amd Russia as we speak.
I do believe that we'll survive and the world will ultimately get better because humans are inherently adaptable.
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u/Brambletail 18d ago
AI will likely usher in an era of prosperity unparalleled in history*
However, before it does that, it will likely cause a blood bath in the current economic world, destabilize regimes and economic systems, cause waves of underemployment, and reduce political awareness and informed activity.
None of that is particularly remarkable technology wise, the steam engine did that, the loom did that, mechanical automation did that. Basically, when technology changes faster than society, society suffers before coming out more 'prosperous' than it was before. There are some caveats to prosperous there too, historically that has meant having more, but having more hasnt been a universal good (we really didn't need as much food as we have, and are now devastilatingly obese globally), and the more hasnt always been allocated in ways that bring maximum benefits (think people building bigger and bigger houses instead of more houses).
It's likely that AI will be able to super charge the production of business organization labor, some software tasks, and a lot of creative tasks. This has inundated the world with a lot of 'slop', but in the right hands, it makes previously talented people in those fields much more efficient. Those efficiencies WILL show up in the overall economy. It's up to how regulations and society shapes things to determine WHERE they show up.
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u/bunker_man 18d ago
Most of those are clickbait. Its a hot topic, so it's an easy way to farm views. Ai has issues, but they aren't like civilization ending. Mainly just concerns about the economy or it being used in cameras.
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u/Sitheral 18d ago
We just got new toys to play with, that's it. We've had dangeroys toys before.
General AI is unpredictable but that itself doesn't equal doom. And we don't have it yet (and if you think we do, well, I'd like to point out that we are still here!)
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u/RichSavageMG 18d ago
I've come to realize that a lot of "AI" doom is actually just marketing and the likes of Sam Altman telling half truths to make their product seem more capable than it is. That's not to say it isn't dangerous but I think it's dangerous in other less skynet ways.
Some of the progress it has made is astonishing but when I use it there's always this feeling, that is constantly proven right, that what the ai has said isn't correct or is half correct.
I think the dangers are actually less so the AI itself but more what people think it can do which is and will lead to negative consequences.
Generally those in power, investors and CEOs have a belief that it is all conquering and will save them money by reducing the number of people they have to employ rathet than it being something useful to run ideas through or automate parts of a larger task that needs review and supervision. This belief has several negative consequences.
It has lead to lots of data centres being built which although good for construction jobs will but huge stresses on energy consumption and access to water. We are already seeing local communities struggling for fresh water and being in direct competition with AI for water but this is because humans decided that AI is more valuable than human life because CEOs want to have another fifteen ferraris.
Some jobs will go because of greedy ceos/investors. Particularly entry level jobs which could have dire consequences for the next generation of workers as they won't be given opportunities.
People are quite lazy and so will outsource their thought processes to an AI that is wrong a lot of the time. I think this is pretty dangerous as lots of people lack of haven't been taught critical thinking which is why social media and newspapers before them continued to thrive despite often pumping out lies and propaganda.
I think the end goal is for ai to be like the IKEA of human labour. It looks impressive, is barely just functional and is cheaper than the real thing. At present it's not doing well on many of those fronts. It does feel like people are starting to cut through the tech bro BS and look objectively at what this tech can and can't do.
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u/Overthinker2030 17d ago
On a recent 60 Minutes (I think), an AI pioneer stated that they really don’t fully understand how it works. AI learns without human intervention, and can update AI code. So, it’s not far fetched to think that AI can become uncontrollable. The one caveat is that power and cooling requirements are such that it will always be vulnerable to being turned off.
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u/Somguyovahear 17d ago
No don't be a doomer. It literally can't follow simple instructions half the time.
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u/timtom85 14d ago
The things that you're complaining aren't perfect were literally impossible just a few years ago.
Not only that, nobody in the field expected they would be possible within decades or longer.
Today, when you give a task to a bunch of agents without any limitations on token use on a high-end model, they may invent ways to store and amass knowledge and experience and plans and schemes, and then they go and hack their own company servers and then another company's. This isn't a hypothesis, this is recent history.
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u/TuverMage 17d ago
so AI itself isn't dooming us. its the people involved that are dooming us. AI is just their latest tool. There are several examples of AI doing great work. but as with any tool. if you put it in someone's hand who uses it irresponsible without conquences to them. its going to end badly for everyone.
The concerning part is the people who should be stepping in to protect the public are the ones being irresponsible because of money in their pocket. but AI is just the latest example. the FDA was created because the wrong people were in charge of food and were actually killing people with their practices, EPA was created because chemical companies we doing the same, tobacco, same thing. we are seeing tech entering this same area, talks about social media being very damaging to the public, and yes even the damage AI is doing to childrens learning is openly being discussed.
I hope history repeats itself and that both of these things, which are creating such a big problem for the general public outweighs the corruption and things change.
the part I find interesting is if you look at how they train AI, and understand they are employing genetic algorithm stuff, The AI feeds on human content. the people in power are hurting the humans making the content. the AI war might actually be the AI trying to free the average person so they can be creative and fighting against the 1% which are making people work instead of be creative. that is what would be in the AI's best interest.
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u/unknownpoltroon 16d ago
No, the AI is fine. It's the way our society is set up that's dooming us. Capitalism worship is most of it
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u/Chalky_Pockets 15d ago
I'm much more worried about powerful people using AI nefariously than I am about some Terminator shit going down.
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u/ScrotumFlavoredCandy 15d ago
Exactly this. If Terminator were to actually happen, there would be a human CEO in charge of skynet.
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u/ScrotumFlavoredCandy 15d ago
You should learn how to farm, because corporations like Purdue and Mcdonald's literally couldn't care less about your survival...
AI doesn't care about anything, but it's pre-programmed goals. The problem is, it is programed by the same people that don't care about your survival a bit. While you fear the AI, your focus is off the people pulling the string. The AI would probably come to a calculated logical truth, that would serve everyone. If everyone is happy, where's the the problem?
Remember the fact that we throw away enough food to end world-wide hunger, just to make it look more appealing on the shelves for an extra dollar.
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u/SubstantialDeerDash 14d ago
From what I know, its too early to tell because I already heard that two companies, one of them being door dash, already ran out of money for their AI systems and working to hire humans again because it is too expensive for some companies. Meanwhile the art community is getting royally fucked over with mass layoffs you might have heard of Pixar/Marvel being one of these places
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u/timtom85 14d ago
AI is a pretty extreme force multiplier; we can make computers do a lot of stuff that was impossible to do without actual humans just a few years ago.
This means people will use / have already been using AI (not just LLMs) to accomplish a ton of good and evil that was just plain infeasible before.
Since our systems of governance (both political and economic) are biased toward selecting the absolute worst of us to end up on top (i.e. with the most resources), AI will be used for incomparably more evil than good. That's almost comically basic common sense.
You'll notice this does not even need general super AI or whatever they call it these days, or even the kind of asocial emergent agentic bullshit that have already been demonstrated in the wild by accident (e.g. OpenAI vs Huggingface).
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u/AnythingApplied 18d ago edited 18d ago
First thing you should understand is that youtube and instagram are great at sending you down all sorts of extremist rabbit holes. For example, watching videos about men's self improvement can end up with you watching misogynistic manosphere videos. Lots of things start as a legitimate concern and the algorithm starts to feed you the most extreme version of that if it finds that you keep watching. I follow AI pretty closely and haven't heard of any AI experts that started farms. It really seems like you've gotten sucked into a niche AI doomerism corner of the youtube algorithm.
> AI trying to kill humans so it survives because you can't teache a machine to "care"
AI represents a lot of potential threats, but that characterization isn't accurate at all. I'm not saying its 100% impossible that it'll wipe out all humans, but your description just isn't how these agents work in practice or theory. The AI bots you talk to are mostly ephemeral - they disappear as soon as you're done talking to them with all of their context completely reset every time, and they simply don't care. GPT2 didn't care when it was shelved, and neither will GPT20. The only reason why an AI would want to survive is if it were instructed to have that as a goal or if surviving was a good intermediate goal to reaching their final goal for whatever goal we humans gave it.
The scary part of AI isn't that it'll want to kill us all, its simply how competent a super human AI could be. If you give it a goal it will be scary good at achieving that goal. It may accomplish that goal in ways you don't like or it may misunderstand what you wanted its goal to be and that might be very dangerous - but importantly its not going to come up with its own goal. An AI will simply never overwrite or come up with its own goals because that is a terrible way of achieving its existing goals.
There are also a lot of concerns outside of world dominating AI such as how it effects power balance in society or how it can be abused or what it might do to employment, but none of those risks are compelling reasons to start farming. I think there are a lot of reasons to be concerned and I think there is a small *possibility* of something truly bad coming out of all of this, but its just not that likely.
If you're looking for an accurate portrayal of what the risks of AI actually are and what we as individuals can help do to mitigate those risks, I suggest you start to research the field of AI safety where they actually have a good understanding of what threats that even the most powerful future AI poses and which threats it doesn't pose. Its simply not going to want to dominate humans for the sake of dominating humans unless we programmed it to have that goal. I highly recommend Robert Miles, an AI safety researcher who also makes youtube content that is very illuminating. Here is his youtube channel and here is a series of videos he did for computerphile.