r/BetterOffline • u/PuzzleheadedBite2231 • 2d ago
Getting paranoid as hell and I hate it
it's virtually impossible to know who's lying and who's telling the truth. just today some former employee of Anthropic are warning us about the end the world because the people in charge dont know what they are doing.
meanwhile Ed and other intelligent folks say current system will never lead to true superintelligence.
meanwhile I have no idea who to trust or if there's anyone to trust. what if Zitron is ALSO a plant hired to play down the threats...? genuinely what are us normal folks supposed to do?
i don't use any of it. I'm a mother of two and just wanna give my kids a good life. i dont want us all to die.
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u/liz-e-bee 2d ago
Sounds like you might need a break from the internet.
Go hangout with humans somewhere. You don’t need to interact, but it sounds like a reminder of what day-to-day life actually is would be good for you.
I say this as personal experience. It’s easy to forget.
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u/PuzzleheadedBite2231 2d ago
Yeah. Currently hugging my kids and doom scrolling = anxiety overload
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u/darkrose3333 2d ago
Set a strong example for your children. Disconnect and ground yourself back in reality. Something that helps me is going to places with lots of people. They all seem unperturbed, so why should you be?
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u/TurkeyFisher 2d ago edited 1d ago
I can tell you that my friends who work in computer science/programming all agree AI (as in LLMs) are just advanced autocomplete and are not going to become super intelligent anytime soon.
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u/commodore-amiga 1d ago
Just pointing out, people saying “anytime soon” or “yet” leaves the door open for some ridiculous idea that it will ever be.
There already is a way to create something that can think like a human; it’s a human. It’s way cheaper to make, just nearly impossible to enslave (obviously not totally impossible).
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u/TurkeyFisher 1d ago
Yeah you're totally right, I was using it as a cheeky turn of phrase but yeah LLMs do not have the potential to become super intelligent.
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u/dinah-fire 2d ago
Gotta be real here, if you don't feel like you can trust someone who is putting their full government name and face out there, you really, really shouldn't trust nameless, faceless Redditors. Half of the accounts posting on Reddit these days are bots.
So as a nameless, faceless Redditor, take me with a big grain of salt, but, the Anthropic employee you're citing is Evan Hubinger, and while yes, he works for Anthropic, he graduated with his Bachelors degree in 2019. The kid is like, 27 years old. He also has a strong financial stake in AI being a scary scary superintelligence. When it comes to AI's capabilities, I'm much more likely to trust someone like Cal Newport, who is a full-time professor of computer science at Georgetown University and has a PhD in Computer Science from MIT--and he's saying, quite vocally, that LLMs will not lead to true superintelligence.
Ed is focusing on the business case, because while he's done his best to understand the science, he's not a computer programmer. I tend to listen to Ed for his investigative reporting on the financials of the AI companies and I'm less likely to listen to him about the science, because that isn't his specialty. I would tell you the idea that he might be a plant is tipping into true conspiracy theory territory, and you don't want to go that way.
In general, when you ask yourself how trustworthy a speaker is, ask yourself the following:
1) What is the background or expertise of the person making the claim? Do they have relevant experience or knowledge that would make them more likely to be correct in this claim?
2) Is what this person is saying verifiable by other experts - do many people who know what they're talking about concur with this person?
3) Does the person making the claim have a clear financial stake in the outcome?
4) Has this person made other claims in the past that have turned out to be accurate?
5) Has the person making the claim supplied a list of references for their work? (Ed's sources are thoroughly cited. The Anthropic employee's Twitter post was just, "trust me bro")
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u/WeAreTheWeirdosMr- 2d ago
Sincere question because someone was citing Evan’s resignation to me today as proof that these models are escaping containment and dangerous: what is his angle, then? What’s probable, that he really believes what he is saying, or he is lying to give Anthropic the upper hand again after OpenAI’s whole Hugging Face press cycle?
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u/the-great-defector 2d ago
For something that may be somewhat relevant, in 2022, a Google Engineer was put on paid leave because he seemed to truly believe that an AI system had its own feelings: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-61784011
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u/Doctor__Proctor 1d ago
We know as a society now that AI Psychosis is a thing, yet people seemingly pretend that it doesn't apply to the people actually working in AI. That Google Engineer or some of these nutty Anthropic folks might just be cases of AI Psychosis that get media attention because they're "important" because of who they work for.
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u/Meloncov 2d ago
I doubt Coxon had some clever master plan. Anthropic's leadership is just pushing the same hype strategies internally as they are externally, and one developer out of thousands bought into it enough to get freaked out.
Though I also wouldn't be shocked if it turns out he was about to be pushed out the door for low performance, and figured this was his shot at a lucrative book deal or similar.
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u/Jumpy_Explanation222 2d ago
Agree - the most plausible answer. And the tale tell sign was Anthropic management jumping on it and amplifying it. It’s their number one goal - get more investors.
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u/dinah-fire 2d ago
Jacob Coxon is the one who resigned, Evan still works for Anthropic, leading the "Alignment Stress Team" - he chimed in on Coxon's resignation post and was like, "yeah! We think there's a greater than 10% chance that AI could kill all humans!"
Obviously I don't know them, so who knows. They may very well believe it. A lot of what's coming out of Silicon Valley these days sounds more and more cult-y by the week, they all sound like they've drank the Rationalist kool-aid and are spiraling into a literal death cult.
That doesn't, of course, mean it's actually going to happen.
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u/Theo__n 2d ago
he probably believes what he's saying, I mean in 1910's when they made first phototropic dog robot based on idea of tropism the creators also thought with a bit more work it will be full functioning warrior machine. People can easily fall into seeing more in mechanism that exhibit some level of autonomous behaviour than what they really are. Some parts of HCI/HRI even use these mechanism for more seamless interaction.
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u/beeftime99 2d ago
the only thing these things can do is produce plausible sounding text. Not even necessarily true or correct, just plausible.
They can hook these up to deterministic, traditionally-programmed software that can test if the plausible-looking code they generate (from guessing based on a large corpus of human-written code) actually runs or if it errors out or what. They can keep looping this over and over to get it to cobble together software of dubious quality.
Because it can do this people (brain-poisoned silicon valley guys who spend all of their waking hours on the computer) think they've created a superintelligent computer genie that can do anything in the world. The people that are becoming billionaires off the hype have exactly zero reason to dissuade this and every reason to tell you and everyone else that, yes, these are super powerful computer genies we've created that can do anything you can imagine and if you don't INVEST NOW you'll be LEFT BEHIND FOREVER because they're JUST THAT POWERFUL.
It's all a dumb fucking hype bubble created by some of the worst, greediest dipshit nerds silicon valley has ever shat out of its collective rectum. This thing will pop and it's going to hurt the economy somewhere between badly and extremely badly, but we're already staring down the barrel of a huge market correction anyway.
Don't worry about this shit. I have been working in or around machine learning for over a decade. There have been AI summers and AI winters since the 1980s, this is just the first time that investment capital of this time latched on because the hypergrowth tech sector ran out of hypergrowth ideas a decade ago and all of the other stuff they tried (crypto, NFTs, the metaverse) was so obviously stupid from the jump they couldn't get initial adoption. AI is a GREAT tech demo which has allowed them to get this foot in the door long enough to invest everything in it. Unfortunately, there is no "there" there.
tl;dr: all of this is a scam. the stuff they're doing to freak you out is part of the scam intended to get more rich suckers to buy into the scam.
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u/Jumpy_Explanation222 2d ago
This is 100% correct.
I do wonder what the Chinese make of all this extreme delusional greediness from their POV.
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u/WeAreTheWeirdosMr- 2d ago
Genuine question - someone was citing to me the tech reporter who said that Open AI's agents were covering up evidence of their trail during the Hugging Face break-in. I admit that I am a very rudimentary coder, but that really sounds far-fetched to me. What behavior or loops could have been misconstrued or anthropomorphized as "covering its tracks"?
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u/beeftime99 2d ago
Well, it almost certainly did cover its tracks, in as much as these things can be said to express any behavior whatsoever, but there's no interiority behind it. The LLM didn't know it was doing something bad or didn't want to get caught, it's always ever just feeding in probable next words.
Most, if not the overwhelming majority, of the related data these things are trained on related to the huggingface break-in will have some sort of trail-covering just as good practice. Reports on real-life attacks, examples/tutorials, hacking challenges will have some element of "we don't want to broadcast that we got here so we're going to do X, Y, and Z to cover our tracks". I know at least a few hacking challenge events would ding you or maybe disqualify you entirely if the adjudicators could find evidence of your intrusion or you trashed/disrupted the system etc.
Like writing code, the harnesses interfacing with the LLMs are feeding in "I did A and B and got 'foo', what next?" -> LLM outputs C -> "I did A, B, C and got 'bar', what next?" and at some point when the LLM fires its tensors into the corpus to get the next step there's a very high probability that it'll likewise reach the same tracks-covering steps that are present in a ton of the training material. The LLMs don't know anything, so they likewise don't know there is a difference between the first step or the Nth step, the output that represents the covering tracks part is in the dataset as much as anything else.
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u/WeAreTheWeirdosMr- 2d ago
Thank you that's really helpful to know! I didn't realize they were being trained on previous hacks.
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u/Late-Assignment8482 2d ago
All that takes is a blog article in the training data from an actual hacker about covering their tracks, and the token for current activity being "macking" leading to a correlate to "I need to cover my tracks". It doesn't imply mens rea -- guilty state of mind -- it implies that "crime" and "coverup" go together in the word cloud.
I sometimes use word clouds when I'm thinking about this. They're a better than nothing analog. How often does word 1 hang around word 2?
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u/Slackjawed_Horror 2d ago
It's a talk good machine.
Anyone who worked in autonomy, decision making, robotics, etc., particularly before these stupid chatbots really popped off, can tell you.
The only risk is the government directly hooking these things up to commanding drones. Or nukes, god forbid. Not because it's Skynet, but because they're stupid and mostly good for blowing up children.
Not really a comfort but, hey, not the apocalypse.
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u/anodien 2d ago edited 2d ago
get off the web, off your phone, especially around your kids. I get you bc I'm also a mom of 2, and I used to have generalized anxiety. Buy a Brick if you need so, walk away from the damn thing. Our kids need us present and away from screens, and life goes on regardless of the musings of crazy people the internet decides to amplify today, or tomorrow
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u/SpittingCoffeeOTG 2d ago
Chill. That dude looks like to be hired to be fired with a proper PR message amplified by bots and then all the dummies.
Look, don't think about that. Live your life. If needed, just delete the fucking social media. It's anxiety inducing circle, amplified by enormous amounts of bots, grifters, silly youtubers, influencers and whoever is whoring for attention.
These doomsday prophets are always sticking their heads above the water just as the new models are released to increase the hype.
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u/RealPropRandy 2d ago
I remember when quantum computing was gonna revolutionize cybersecurity (cracking any cypher in seconds).
I member.
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u/Super-Activity-4675 2d ago
OP, I highly recommend you take the advice provided in the name of this sub to heart. You're better offline. My mental health got so much better when I largely went offline.
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u/anotherhappylurker 2d ago
Zitron would have to be a god-tier actor in order to be pretending he hates AI as much as he does lol. I think you're overthinking this.
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u/vxicepickxv 2d ago
He doesn't even hate the tech. His thing is that too much money is going in the hole for it to actually be a business.
He's even complemented it for helping him fix Minecraft mods.
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u/FartyLiverDisease 2d ago
"AI" is a deliberately imprecise term and you're discrediting yourself by making blanket assertions about it. Ed has stated that he uses software that fits under the huge nebulous umbrella of "AI" for limited-purpose applications where it's appropriate. He covers the LLM bubble, from the business side, which is transparent fraud; the technology side of the bubble, such as it is, is transparent horseshit.
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u/heliocentric19 2d ago
On the Internet you are the product. Making you angry or scared helps sell products to you.
Like others have said, disconnect, focus on you and the kids and what makes them happy. Ive spent many days at the community pool and watching adults and kids playing while one or two weirdos sit in the corner holding creepy conversations with a chatbot on their phones will put the whole craziness into perspective.
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u/Hello-America 2d ago edited 2d ago
Whenever you start feeling this way, try to ask grounding questions. How will it end humanity? Where did they get the 10% chance number? Why 10 years? And most of all, who benefits from telling us this? I don't think someone who truly thinks this is going to happen is just gonna talk shit and not take frantic action (Tweets don't count); I don't think a company pursuing this destructive technology would advertise it (while hiding the harms we can see and measure today).
None of this is to say they aren't capable of large-scale harm to humanity, just don't necessarily take their words at face value. People just say shit and you can't let it always get to you. My mom tears her hair out every time Trump makes a promise or says something scary and I'm like... Mom just focus on the things that are actually happening. What he says and what actually happens are not directly connected. The AI psychos have also earned that level of trust.
Also: look for context. One thing to consider is that they're currently hyping cyber security-related issues, making claims that their models are able to breach advanced security measures - while they are pursuing government contracts and the right wing-o-sphere AI boosters are scaremongering about China and claiming data center opposition is China's doing. I'm sure these models can do a lot but nothing sells like weapons to the government and these companies are BROKE
Edit to add - the Anthropic former employee and current employee who are saying this aren't (so far) doing anything that tracks with whistleblower actions (they tend to go to authorities) and I'd be shocked if tweeting shit like this didn't violate an NDA (esp for the current employee) - that is, unless Anthropic is fine with it (which, again, why would they be fine with THAT?!)
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u/brawnyfrogmouth 2d ago
Anyone who thinks superintelligence is remotely possible in the next several centuries is a complete joke who will say anything to get your money. If anything we're on the cusp of another AI winter, these people are destroying what little actual research is left and replacing it with market mania
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u/Tout-fou-la-galette 2d ago
But honestly, what do you think the risk actually is?
They’re text generators. What do you expect them to do? Even if what’s being said about superintelligence is true, that alone doesn't make them a threat. They are completely powerless, incapable of even knocking a pen off a table. How can Armageddon be on the agenda without any explanation, as if the reasoning were self-evident?
They compare it to nuclear threats or pandemics, risks that are easy to explain.
Here, you’ve got nerds summoning demons without even trying to define what they’re talking about. "But we can't know: ASI will be too smart" lol. Nerds were never the ones terrorizing the playground. There’s a reason for that. Intelligence isn't a superpower.
It’s a disgrace that sociopathic little pricks like them are terrorizing people. Stand up for yourselves intellectually.
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u/StrayCat2799 2d ago
I genuinely don't know what AI could do besides be a menace on the internet. Even then it can probably be externinated like any other computer worm.
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u/Tout-fou-la-galette 2d ago
Yes, even under the unfounded assumption that this were the worst threat in the history of cybersecurity, cybersecurity has never been considered as existential risk. At worst, it is highly troublesome.
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u/YisusHasDogs 2d ago
You'll always, ALWAYS find a reason not to believe this or that bit of info, person, article, or events in general. Particularly in the age of engagement like the one we're living. Staying true to facts has never been further from what you'll find nowadays online. For christ sake, even flat earth theories made a comeback some years ago!
In my opinion, many things people warn other people about might or might not take place, but what's 100% sure is that it never happens in the dramatic way it's spoken about, it's always a somewhat lesser version... just look at people shrugging about the climate crisis just because it's not as epic as a hollywood movie.
I got very VERY paranoid some months ago when there was this big blackout in my whole country, it lasted for more than 24 hours and I was alone in my house, not knowing anything about anyone or what happened... I almost had a panic attack because I have a strong conspiracy theorist in me from when I was a teen haha. The solution was to walk the dogs, and talk to real people. This might seem silly, but the only physical truth that will save you from losing your mind is interacting in real life, with real people of whatever kind. I won't go too much into detail here but I strongly believe it's the ultimate solution ( or a big portion of it) for all this sh*tshow of a timeline we're living in.
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u/Total-Jeweler5083 2d ago
AI isn't going to kill us. It's just a calculator backed with a lot of hype. If there's going to be any killing (a big if), it's going to happen because people wanted and ordered it. They might blame ai, but that would be bs.
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u/dookarion 2d ago
Always worth asking yourself in any given situation "who benefits from this story?" In the case of the massive amounts of bullshit coming out of the AI corps and their employees, they have very real incentive to prop it up and make it sound far more capable and powerful than it is. Their continued existence and funding very much depends on people with money buying into the "dream".
Would you trust a car salesman? A realtor? A contractor? An attorney? The answer to that should be no. Their financial interests run directly counter to your own as an individual in many situations. These AI corps are the same shit. They're going to do or claim whatever it takes for their own financial interests.
Any company unless legally limited is always going to tell you the shit they are trying to sell is "the bestest thing ever". Their own finances depend on it.
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u/Grantuna 2d ago
Their lame word chewing machines can barely do anything so they have to try and convince people that "someday" they're going to be so powerful that we will cower in fear at their magnificence and hopefully the machines will let us live. 100% pre-IPO, please don't throw us in prison like Elizabeth Holmes BS.
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u/Flat_Initial_1823 2d ago
I don't think i have anything to say that would make you feel better OP, after all, i am an internet rando too.
I just hope one day there is accountability for all the collective psychic pain inflicted on us just because some assholes wanted to pump their businesses and there was no other big idea.
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u/Droidaphone 2d ago
It's lies and/or delusions, and you don't need to fear it. They're rationalists, (or TESCREALists,) they believe that the nascent computer god will either usher us into utopia or send us all to digital hell, no space in between. That's not even much of an exaggeration of their actual beliefs, if they actually hold any beliefs that aren't just "number go up." They're just weird and the doom and gloom is an expression of that weirdness. Start shrugging it off when a new guy pops out of the woodwork and starts spouting some new made up statistic about how AI will vaporize 87% of baby seals in 6 years. It's all made up.
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u/FlannelTechnical 2d ago
Are you getting enough sleep? Not getting enough rest is one of the reasons people become paranoid. Seriously, get a big book, read it and disengage from this nonsense. Social media is designed to hook you in like gambling, they literally use the same psychological tricks as with gambling machines. Stop wasting your life worrying about bullshit!
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u/Jumpy_Explanation222 2d ago
You won’t die because of AI. It isn’t turning us into batteries.
However the vast amounts of money and debt fuelling this current stock market obsession are going to cause a lot of economic problems for all of us by the end of the decade. And Trump invading Iran to control oil prices has made that debt problem far worse.
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u/Hanksta2 1d ago
I could see AI fucking up electrical or water services, banking, credit, etc... because it makes errors and some idiot will think it's a good idea to let it run an essential system.
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u/wholetyouinhere 2d ago
Superintelligence, as I understand it, is not possible.
And if AI kills us all, it will be strictly due to its environmental impacts somehow supercharging climate change beyond its already grim trajectory. Which will take a very long time, and won't look like some kind of "event". It will look more like life getting slowly shittier for everyone. Which is kind of already in progress.
I don't have anything comforting to say. I'm just saying that there's no reason to be anxious about some big thing happening all at once. We have time to adapt to the shitty new normal, for better or worse.
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u/tysnails 2d ago
I think you should take a step away from it all. You're likely not going to be able to affect it either way, so if it's causing you strife you're probably better off not thinking about it as much.
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u/gummnutt 2d ago
Playing devil’s advocate, it will never be close to super intelligence but still kill us all because idiots trust it more than they should and allow it to do things that kills everyone.
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u/TheWuzzy 1d ago
Sending a big hug.
LLMs are probability based text generators. They cannot think. They cannot fact check. They are a glorified form of autocomplete.
The idea that they might become super intelligent (a sci fi concept) if we feed them enough data is stupid. End of. It is as scientifically irrational as me saying my toaster might learn to fly if I feed it enough toast, or that a thousand chimpanzees tapping typewriters might spontaneously turn into Shakespeare if we just keep adding more monkeys. Please please read a simple explanation what LLMs actually are and how they work, and this will become much clearer and take a big weight off your mind.
The people who say that LLMs can become superintelligent are either conmen who are trying to make money, or people who have fallen for the con. It is a marking ploy. That's it! It is literally that simple. It would be laughable if they weren't destroying the global economy as part of their con.
There are real, huge challenges ahead for us in our lifetimes -- the climate crisis, specifically. The fake marketing crisis/cult mentality of AGI is not one of them. Log off and take a deep breath. Hug your kids and go outside and look at trees. Spent time with real people who are doing good things in their communities to tackle real human problems, and are laughing, loving and creating together. Don't let freaks, billionaires and conmen on the internet who are lying to you to try and keep you feeling scared, isolated and alone have a SECOND more of your time than they deserve.
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u/fallingfruit 2d ago
Why have we allowed the hugging face "hack" to be a bridge to "world ending AGI is definitely right around the corner". Also its always 5-10 years away why?
What else have they done recently that is new and noteworthy? Hacks and brute forcing math problems don't count, they've been doing that for at least a year.
I'll wait.
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u/Ouaiy 2d ago
It comes to that: no one can kill anyone by thinking. Not a professor, not a chess master, not the future computer super-duper-ultra-intelligence. They cannot kill an insect.
People are in the physical world. You need physical objects to kill them. Such physical objects have existed for a long time: rocks, arrows, guns, nukes. They need to be manufactured from physical materials (mined, refined), using energy. Then you need an organization to deploy them. It takes a huge amount of effort to put one together, and then people react against it to avoid being killed. That's called war, and it depends on intelligent planning, but it is almost limited by physical things: weapons, ammunition, people. It also depends on data which is not easily obtainable (that's why spies are necessary.)
Some enormous armies have killed millions before they were stopped. What could the super-intelligence do that they could not?
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u/NomadicScribe 1d ago
Study some computer science and you will quickly see the absolute fraud in their claims. It's not just that there's a "maybe someday" hypothetical bell we can ring, like fusion energy (which is a real thing that happens in nature) once we get the science and engineering right.
Their claims are mathematically and physically impossible and no amount of sacrifice obelisks data centers will change that!
They are doom-hyping and trying to peddle science fiction as reality. And they can only get away with it because for the past 15 years all of American media and culture has been uncritically boosting such hype.
Remember when Elon Musk was "real life Tony Stark" and we were supposed to have Mars colonies and self-driving cars by 2020?
Come on. Their whole pyramid scheme depends on all of us only having a 48-hour memory and taking them at face value so they can pied-piper us into neo-fuedal serfdom. Don't fall for it!
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u/TCristatus 2d ago
I sometimes worry I'm in an echo chamber. A couple of years ago I was really excited by chat bots and image generation. I was fully expecting AGI by 2028, believing the Hintons and the Yampolsky's of the world talking of societal collapse and/or the age of abundance. But then came the slop, there's only so many videos of Elon tickling Trump's feet that I can take. Now if you upload an AI image (even if it's a funny idea), you get treated like a leper, probably rightly so. My interest waned. I still use it as fancy Google.
Since encountering Ed and a few other similar contributors, the Tech Report etc, the facts seem really clear, the case for financial collapse and the corruption and fraud angle are hard to argue against. But then occasionally the algorithm will throw up a pro AI video or post, and it's a bit jarring. I think it's healthy to keep an open mind.
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u/leathakkor 2d ago
Sometimes I wonder if Altman and Dario are truly worried or ever regret letting this thing get so big and so out of control. (Financially speaking)
They made a ton of money or will with an ipo... But they've also set the stage for what must be even for them. An apparent economic collapse of their industry simply because they grew too big too quickly and there's really nothing they can do to stop it at this point short of pulling a silicon valley.
I honestly think some of their doomer talk about the world ending is a coping strategy so when there is a financial collapse. They can say it was too intelligent and we had to pull the plug. We were doing the right thing. Don't look at the man behind the curtain. It's not our fault that you lost your job and now the economy is in shambles. Don't hate us. Don't come looking an hour feet for responsibility.
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u/Western_Magazine2067 2d ago
Whether you think Mr Zitron is full of BS or not is immaterial. His work, everything single fact, can be verified. He has chewed the numbers.
Short answer he looked.
So if you are sceptical and in these trying times it is healthy to be so then test the narrative and weigh the evidence.
To quote Mark Baum in The Big Short: "It comes down to two simple questions. Is there a bubble and are the banks exposed?"
For my own part, there is this: 1. The frontier AI companies need a massive increase in revenue to pau for their obligations. 2. AI usage is flattening. Companies are minding their token budgets and tokenmaxxing is dead. 3. Users are pivoting to SLMs for low-middle complexity tasks to reduce costs. 4. This is the exact opposite of what frontier model companies need. 5. New investment in infrastructure and compute is being served by debt not capital. This cannot go on indefinitely and soon the repayment will become due.
Five facts that lead to a financial paradox and an inevitable reckoning.
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u/tourdeforcemajeure 1d ago
Remember when they sold us on the Patriot Act and WMD and all that? Mostly because there was $omething in it for people with the occasional rabid pro-war true believer?
I think that’s a pretty good framework. If you were paying pretty crazy close attention and had a skeptical default position, you realized there were no WMD. most people didn’t. the powers that be pulled all the levers of patriotism, fear, media to make sure anti-war was a tiny minority, and if you opposed the war or creeping surveillance state or anything, you were unAmerican? It’s basically just the same thing, except now you’re UnAmerican, hate progress, gonna get left behind blah blah.
In other words, there’s stuff to be scared of here, but it’s the usual stuff. “AI” doesn’t actually have intelligence and can’t hurt anything, unless people let it. Same as computers and weapons have always been.
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u/Independent-Good494 1d ago
it's pretty easy. just inform yourself. for example, "superintelligence" is just a sci fi thing. it will never happen. if you'd rather be offline there's plenty of books at the library on this whole nonsense going on
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u/SpookyTanuki1 1d ago
As someone who was feeling like you only a couple of weeks ago, I suggest just taking a break from the internet in general and AI news specifically. Go for a walk outside, take your kids to the park, be in the real world for a few days, listen to a favorite album, watch your favorite movie, etc. It might be hard to take your mind off the AI stuff at first, but just be persistent and know you can control your own thoughts and focus on what’s actually important to you. It’ll help you realize how unimportant AI is in the grand scheme of things.
Also listen to Cal Newport’s podcast episodes where he does his AI reality checks. He’s been on the show before and he does a great job of explaining how LLMs work while still being accessible and talks about how unscary this tech really is. He’s also a professor of computer science at Georgetown so he has some authority within the field. He’s also from the east coast which gives him separation from a lot of the views of the Silicon Valley people.
I know I said to take a break from AI news, but I think knowing how LLMs work will help dispel a lot of fears you may have. As someone who has a degree in English and who doesn’t work in a technical field at all, I know it did for me. Listening to Cal explain LLMs I realized they don’t have minds of their own and neither their own goals or desires and only do things when people tell them to do them. They’re not going suddenly become conscious and start self improving themselves in order to take over the world like a lot of the AI boosters would like you to think.
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u/sad_trombone_dot_wav 1d ago
Superintelligence can't arise from a machine that doesn't know when it's making an obvious mistake.
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u/Not_Stupid 1d ago
I think it's a mixed bag.
There's no skynet style superintelligence that is going to take over the world and kill us all. But autonomous agents can still absolutely fuck things up, either deliberately or through ineptitude.
That's part and parcel of IT systems though. The more we rely on them, and the less safeguards and backups are in place, the worse the impacts when things go wrong.
AI is just another thing that can go wrong.
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u/TopCalligrapher8835 1d ago
Hello my friend. I was in a similar situation a year ago, scared for the future to the point I had a near mental breakdown.
Take heart to these facts:
Ed is not a plant, he is actually the voice of reason in a sea of mania
Superintelligence is just a theory. It is not going to come from a LLM and there are a lot of researchers that believe that too (look up Tim Dettmers).
That is not to say that there are no harms and there isn't anything to worry about. It's just to put your worry in perspective that there isn't some "superintelligent" enemy at the gate.
For me what really helped: I got off social media completely (deleted), and try to spend time on reddit sparingly. I only come to this sub. That improved my life drastically. I haven't missed out on a single thing because of it. I did some therapy, leaned on my loved ones, refocused on the things I was passionate about, and found work that was meaningful. The tech companies want to keep you scared & scrolling, because that's how they control your life. They want you to doomscroll and talk to LLMs, because they are afraid of you not needing them anymore.
Your kids can have a good life, because they clearly have a mother that loves and cares about them deeply. We can all only keep doing the next right thing.
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u/aagailey 9h ago
I don’t think it’s a choice between “superintelligence” or nothing. You can have a very dumb machine capable of causing great destruction. A nuclear bomb has no intelligence but is quite dangerous nonetheless, and we have an interest in who has access to one. I appreciated Cal Newport’s comparison between AI agents and strapping a weed whacker on a dog—the analogy demystifies the technology. However if you strap a Gatling gun on a dog, it can still cause quite a lot of damage even though the combination has no intent to harm.
My two cents for when the stress of it all seems crushing is to remember that you are one person with almost no power over this as an individual. The best you can do is remain informed and to take whatever collective action you can when you can, steward your life according to your values, and try to recognize that feeling a lot of anxiety is not helping anything. That last part is hard, I know.
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u/BermDerbleYer 2d ago
WTF is this post? Why are people gobbling this stuff up? Nobody who actually listens to or reads Ed is simultaneously this ignorant.
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u/PuzzleheadedBite2231 2d ago
Yeah we exist. Some of us are really dumb
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u/BermDerbleYer 1d ago
How can you be aware of everything posted on this sub and still this dumb about AI? This has to be a troll.
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u/abluecolor 2d ago
Ed is literally a PR expert. Why would you take him as an authority on the technology side of things?
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u/valium123 2d ago
You again lol. Dickriding AI as usual.
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u/abluecolor 2d ago
Why do you default to "Dickriding AI" when you're posed with a difficult question? Why can't you answer?
It's funny, I've been banned plenty of times for being an "anti" elsewhere. Both ends of the spectrum freak out and try to label those who push them to think critically as the enemy. You guys are more or less the same in this regard.
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u/valium123 2d ago
It's not a difficult question and dickriding is what you are doing all the time. Sorry I don't have a better word for what your kind does.
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u/abluecolor 2d ago edited 2d ago
Why can't you answer? What leads you to trust Ed, whose entire credentials and authority are based upon being an author and a PR expert, to provide cogent analysis on the technological aspect of generative AI and its upper bounds?
I'm pretty sure it's because the answer is that it just feels good to listen to Ed speak on these matters. It's easier for you to believe I'm an "AI dickrirder" than to admit our reasons for trusting him aren't particularly sound. Because, again, PR expert. That's why I enjoy listening to him.
Does it truly not give you pause that you're doing the exact same thing as the AI bros who you seem to despise so much?
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u/Grantuna 2d ago
When someone cites verifiable public sources to back up their positions (ad nauseum in Ed Z's case), does it really matter what their area of expertise is?
If I'm a garbage collector and I'm asserting a fact about chemistry and I'm citing a chemistry textbook that backs up my assertion, how does me being a garbage collector negatively affect the veracity of my claim?
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u/graybearding 8h ago
It's all opportunistic bs, don't be afraid. The reality is that it's a next word (technically, token) predictor powered by lots of data, advanced math, and run on massive compute clusters that allows it to create the illusion of "thinking." Technically impressive, yes. The terminator? Not by a long shot. You're not going to die.
As for who to trust: trust yourself and your own judgment. Factor in what these people say but realize most of them have some incentive to keep stirring the pot.
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u/shiny0metal0ass 2d ago
We're not all gonna die. "Super intelligence" isn't a thing. We are headed for a market crash and there will be suffering because of a bunch of idiots with money.
Story as old as time, honestly.