Back in the day there was a good series on BBC by Adam Curtis called the Power of Nightmares. The series explores how elites use false flags, fake threats and media scare campaigns to frighten the public into begging for terrible policies. From which we got The Iraq War, The Patriot Act, Covid Lockdowns, Digital ID and other tragedies. The given imagery, satanic robot with red eyes towering above a frightened everyman, is designed to elicit an emotional reaction. Cui bono? When confronted with such obvious media manipulation, practice discernment!

I was about to say but @AndyL beat me to it. Just the cover art of this video reeks of rage-baiting and scare-mongering. Hard to take it seriously. And yeah yeah, we heard it all from supposed “serious” YouTubers that “it drives engagement from certain groups but the video is still good”.

Nope. If you felt confident in your content you would not opt for low-effort baiting.

To the topic at hand, I believe a lot of the original AI researchers grossly overestimate the progress that “AI” made today. That’s where their fear comes from and it’s misplaced because they ascribe too much intelligence / goal / unsupervised-direction to the modern tools.

LLMs as coding assistants have pretty much peaked and people are starting to devise pipelines where multiple LLMs work on a bigger project with 1-2 other LLMs being project managers and asking the human operator for clarifications. This is because LLMs are, well, large, and tend to go way off-course if left unattended (and often do so even as a direct response to a crystal-clear prompt). They are not focused. They must be constantly beaten back into their track.

The “future” in how I can extrapolate it currently is this: have multi-agent systems if you want human workers displaced. This estimation of course can be wildly inaccurate. As a funny example, many of the boomer age Sci-Fi writers predicted even more usage of atomic energy (back when it was called “atomic” and not “nuclear”). Famously even Isaac Asimov based most of the tech in his universe on atomic energy and physics discoveries – but he was far from the only one. And look how that turned out. We went into a very different direction.

I am not a futurist or an oracle though. I am only saying how things look like they would develop. Of course tomorrow one of the LLM companies might actually get closer to AGI and all the castles in the sky get blown by the wind and new ones get made.

It’s a wild ride, this era, I must admit. “May you live in interesting times”, the ancient Chinese curse.

Thanks for referring to the hegelian dialectic. I don’t think “most of us” have understood how this works.

With regard to “AI” (or anything else we should have an opinion about) it’s all about (controlling) the narrative.

We (people of good will) using Elixir because it’s awesome will be expoited by these billionaire {nsfw} eschatology networks unless miraculously many millions of people suddenly understand what’s going on.

Until then our work will be used against us.

I read the AI-generated transcript of this interview (took me 5 min instead of 20). I’m sure there’s some irony there…

First, the phrase “You have no idea what’s coming”, despite being in quotes, does not appear in the interview. Top notch journalism. (Though of course that’s not Hinton’s fault.)

Second, this interview didn’t strike me as having much substance if you’re already familiar with the discussion. It covered (my personal summary):

• Questions about the pace and safety of AI (can you slow it down and can you make it safe?)
• The potential for joblessness / a bleak outlook for future generations
• The likelihood of a (runaway?) superintelligence

But there weren’t any real insights because nothing was treated with much depth. For example:

I mean, in a world where we have super intelligence, which you don’t believe is that far away.

Yeah, I think it might not be that far away. It’s very hard to predict, but I think we might get it in like 20 years or even less.

So, jot that down.

It’s disappointing because Hinton is obviously an important figure in the field. But perhaps it’s not too surprising. A 20 min interview won’t necessarily elicit the kind of nuanced take that you need when dealing with something so complex and uncertain.

If you’re interested in these topics but want more depth, I can recommend: https://aisafety.dance/

A sweeping tour guide to AI safety for us warm, normal fleshy humans

It’s broken into 5 parts though the last 2 aren’t out yet. Don’t worry, though, there’s still an expected 17min + 45min + 52min = 114min of reading.

It’s for a lay audience for sure. But it manages to cover both the whole Skynet scenario that everyone who isn’t already in the know is worried about and things like the “we accidentally made our hiring process super racist” problem that is a very real concern today and needs to be addressed (IMO with regulation but I’ll leave that for readers to decide for themselves).

Hinton aside, most AI Safety peddlers offer solutions that lead to Regulatory Capture or Censorship.