The majority of U.S. adults don’t believe the benefits of artificial intelligence outweigh the risks, according to a new Mitre-Harris Poll released Tuesday.
The majority of U.S. adults don’t believe the benefits of artificial intelligence outweigh the risks, according to a new Mitre-Harris Poll released Tuesday.
You don’t have to understand how an atomic bomb works to know it’s dangerous
Prime example. Atomic bombs are dangerous and they seem like a bad thing. But then you realize that, counter to our intuition, nuclear weapons have created peace and security in the world.
No country with nukes has been invaded. No world wars have happened since the invention of nukes. Countries with nukes don’t fight each other directly.
Ukraine had nukes, gave them up, promptly invaded by Russia.
Things that seem dangerous aren’t always dangerous. Things that seem safe aren’t always safe. More often though, technology has good sides and bad sides. AI does and will continue to have pros and cons.
Atomic bomb are also dangerous because if someone end up launching one by mistake, all hell is gonna break loose. This has almost happened multiple times:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_close_calls
We’ve just been lucky so far.
And then there are questionable state leaders who may even use them willingly. Like Putin, or Kim, maybe even Trump.
…and the development and use of nuclear power has been one of the most important developments in civil infrastructure in the last century.
Nuclear isn’t categorically free from the potential to harm, but it can also do a whole hell of a lot for humanity if used the right way. We understand it enough to know how to use it carefully and safely in civil applications.
We’ll probably get to the same place with ML… eventually. Right now, everyone’s just throwing tons of random problems at it to see what sticks, which is not what one could call responsible use - particularly when outputs are used in a widespread sense in production environments.
Alright, when the AI takes my job and I can’t feed my family while the billionaires add another digit to their net worth I’ll consider the pros.
There’s about 0% chance we reform society for AI, it will just funnel more wealth to the rich. People claim it will open new jobs but I don’t see it.
People have had the same concerns about automation since basically forever. Automation isn’t the problem. The people who use automation to perpetuate the systems that work against us will continue to find creative ways to exploit us with or without AI. Those people and those systems-- they are the problem. And believe it or not, that problem is imminently solvable.
It’s fair to compare but you can’t dismiss concerns based on that.
Past automation often removed duplicate or superfluous work type things, AI removes thought work. It’s a fundamentally different kind of automation than we’ve seen before.
It will make many things cheaper to do and easier to start some businesses, but it will also decimate workers. It’s also not something that’s generally available to lower classes to wield yet.
It’s here but I don’t have to be optimistic.
I fully agree with everything you said. My point is more that if we look at AI as the culprit, we’re missing the point. If I may examine the language you are using a bit-
Employers are the agents. They remove thought work.
Employers will decimate workers.
It would be smart to enact legislation that will mitigate the damage employers enabled by AI will do to wokers, but they will continue to exploit us regardless.
Using language that makes AI the antagonist helps tyrants deflect their overwhelming share of the blame. The responsible parties are people, who can and should be held accountable.
Technology tends to drive costs down and create more jobs, but in different areas. It’s not like there hasn’t been capture by the super rich in the past 150 years, but somehow we still enjoy better lives decade by decade.
If you’re from one of the countries with nukes, of course you’ll see it as positive. For the victims of the nuke-wielding countries, not so much.
That’s a good point, however just because the bad thing hasn’t happened yet, doesn’t mean it wont. Everything has pros and cons, it’s a matter of whether or not the pros outweigh the cons.
I don’t disagree with your overall point, but as they say, anything that can happen, will happen. I don’t know when it will happen; tomorrow, 50 years, 1000 years… eventually nuclear weapons will be used in warfare again, and it will be a dark time.
Except the current world war.
You need to understand to correctly classify the danger though.
Otherwise you make stupid decisions such as quiting nuclear energy in favor of coal because of an incident like Fukushima even though that incident just had a single casualty due to radiation.
I’m over here asking chatGPT for help with a pandas dataframe and loving every minute of it. At what point am I going to feel the effects of nuclear warfare?
I’m confused how this is relevant. Just pointing out this is a bad take, not saying nukes are the same as AI. chatGPT isn’t the only AI out there btw. For example NYC just allowed the police to use AI to profile potential criminals… you think that’s a good thing?
Sounds like NYC police are the problem in that scenario.
you also don’t have to understand how 5g works to know it spreads covid /s
point is, I don’t see how your analogy works beyond the limited scope of only things that result in an immediate loss of life
I don’t need to know the ins and outs of how the nazi regime operated to know it was bad for humanity. I don’t need to know how a vaccine works to know it’s probably good for me to get. I don’t need to know the ins and outs of personal data collection and exploitation to know it’s probably not good for society. There are lots of examples.
okay, I’ll concede, my scope also was pretty limited. I still stand by not trusting the public with deciding what’s the best use of AI, when most people think what we have now is anything more than statistics supercharged in its implementation.
I can certainly give that “you” don’t need to know but there are a lot of differing opinions on even the things you’re talking about inside of the people that are in this very community.
I would say that the Royal we need to know because there are a lot of opinions on facts that don’t line up with actual facts for a lot of people. Sure, not you, not me but a hell of a lot of people.
I don’t disagree that people are stupid, but the majority of people got/supported the vaccine. Majority is sometimes a good indicator, that’s how democracy works. Again, it’s not perfect, but it’s not useless either.