Technology

If anybody was paying attention, they'd have realised long ago that this was the goal. I'm surprised this constitutes news.

You mean to say, the thing that only billionaires can own, is making billionaires richer?
People are fucking stupid. AI goal is to make 95% of humans expendable and/or slaves.

On the negatives:

• Online abuse: AI is fueling the spread of sexual abuse material and sexually explicit deepfakes, with women and children most at risk.

Eh. I don't see this as that fundamental. I mean, Photoshop lowered the bar too to making synthetic pornography, to slapping a head on someone else's body. The ability to do image warping allows resizing body parts in a convincing-at-first-glance look, and I remember when that was a fad. It just doesn't seem to have changed society all that much in the past. It may be that people just stop caring much about pornographic images of a particular person. I'm not saying that it won't have an impact, but I have a hard time seeing a scenario where it really deeply alters society.

• Disinformation: AI can generate false information that is as convincing as the truth, undermining trust in public debate and democracy.

Yeah, that's a bigger issue.

It is not one that is impossible to deal with. It was a situation that we had to deal with prior to recording technology. And there were problems

like accusing politicians of going to one place and saying one thing in their speeches, and then to another and saying something else was a real thing in the US back when the only record we have was from newspapers printing summaries of what they said. We had solutions for that era, like people who would put their reputation on the line to attest to various facts. We could do it again. But we've benefited from having easy technology that made it pretty easy to make a credible record cheaply and easily of all sorts of things, audio recording, photographs, and video recording, and the bar for that might rise.

It was always going to happen one day, whether-or-not neural networks were involved. Computer graphics and audio synthesis have only gotten more-accessible and convincing over the years.

I think that one new issue is the ability to synthesize propaganda using the bandwagon effect on social media. That is, it used to be just financially impractical to have a zillion people online trying to influence people. But...if chatbots drastically lower the cost to that, that could be a real issue, and one that we haven't had to deal with before, ever.

Crime: Criminals are using AI to carry out cyberattacks, fraud and social engineering scams.

Yup. Some of this we can fix, and is because we have outdated authentication mechanisms (like recognizing someone's voice on a phone because the phone network has basically no authentication mechanism). Some of it is going to be harder. I think that this is largely not fundamental problems, but some things are going to have to change.

• Mental health: Some AI systems can reinforce harmful beliefs or behaviours, leading to mental health crises, including suicide.

Ehhh. I mean, yes, but so can all sorts of other things. Sitting alone watching TV all the time. I remember distress when the Internet became more widely-available about how people could enter into harmful forums. And we've always had crackpots with weird ideas out there.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Cube

Ray didn't need AI to develop his theories.

Honestly, I'm kinda more concerned about stuff like cults and scams, cases where someone is actively attempting to maliciously manipulate people than "random person goes and spends time talking to a chatbot and feels that it reinforces his crackpot views".

• Loss of control: As AI becomes more autonomous, experts warn it could become harder to monitor and govern without stronger safeguards.

Yeah, this is a big one. The Friendly AI problem is a hard one. I don't know if there are practical solutions, not for self-improving advanced intelligences, which we are certainly going to try to build.

• Environmental impact: The energy-hungry data centres which power AI are contributing to greenhouse gas emissions which leads to global warming.

Eh, yeah, but this is basically the same as our existing energy problems. Like, we were already emitting an unsustainable level of carbon dioxide emissions. The answer has to be shifting to different generation methods. The answer was never going to be "we keep burning coal and whatnot and everyone just reduces energy usage enough on a per capita basis to keep human-driven carbon dioxide emissions at a sustainable level".

Woah the thing the rich people are spending all their money on is to make them more money??????

"May"?!? It already has!

Intelligence may worsen global inequality.

The United Nations is supporting a new international architecture to help countries make informed decisions about AI.

In 2025, the UN General Assembly established the Independent International Scientific Panel on Artificial Intelligence, made up of 40 experts from every region of the world serving in their personal capacity.

The panel's role is scientific rather than regulatory. It assesses, on a regular basis, the latest evidence on AI's opportunities, risks and impacts and produces independent reports that governments can use when developing policy.

This is approximately what I recommended some time back on Reddit. Can't have Sam Altman or advocacy groups driving it

need reasonably objective, unexcitable observers. Also, not just to governments but to the public.

There are a lot of unknowns, but at least we can start building consensus on some points and identifying the known unknowns.

It's also not just computer, technical unknowns. Like, one of the big questions is how much existing stuff done by humans can we realistically automate (Sam Altman has an incentive to say "everything, tomorrow"), and what. Economists can't predict the impact without technical data on capabilities, and right now, we just don't know a lot of that, and we don't know where we'll be in a decade. But they can firm up a set of questions to ask and to watch for. "If we can achieve capability X, then this is what the likely global impact is."

Those predictions will probably be bad at first. But...that's science. You start with a model and start refining and revising.

I'm also interested in coming to some kind of firmer consensus as to superintelligence risks. Right now, we have a lot of ideas flying around that run the gamut from If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies to "it's impractically hard to build and is thus a non-issue" and little consensus as to what lines we might cross that would expose us to superintelligence risk. Needless to say, this is is basically useless if you're trying to do anything from a policy standpoint.

I don't think that we should kick the can down the road on that. The problem is that our major advantage, as humanity, in dealing with superintelligence, is time. We get to make the first move, structure the environment. So we don't want to throw that away. If we need to figure out how to contain, how to control superintelligent systems, we likely need to do so before we have people actually building them. And there's a lot of potential economic and military and so forth benefit in building a superintelligent system, so people are probably going to try to build such systems. But there aren't similar incentives associated with safety surrounding superintelligent systems. People may not just go out and do that on their lonesome. So if we need to fund them or whatever, we should be doing so without waiting for those systems to exist.