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.
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“What do the opinions of people who are not in the slightest educated on the matter affect”
Judging by the elected leaders of the USA: quite a lot, in fact.
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So you’d rather only the 1% get the right to vote? How about only white land owners? How about only men get to vote in this wonderful utopia of yours
Stop stop there isn’t any straw left!
Making a mockery of the workforce who rely on jobs to not be homeless is not appropriate in this conversation, nor is it even an argument to begin with, it’s just a snobbish incel who probably lives in a gated community mocking poor people
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.
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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.
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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.
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In general, progressive taxation can do quite a lot to ease the widening wealth gap. One such strategy is the robot tax. There exist other, perhaps better, legislative solutions, but more broadly we need to restore voting rights and diminish the influence the wealthy have on our political system so that smart, progressive legislation doesn’t have to fight tooth and nail against lobbying and other mechanisms that tie wealth to political influence.
What’a your solution to Automation reducing the number of workers needed in several industries?
I want to avoid using the term solution, not least of all because implementation has its own set of challenges, but some of us used to dream that automation would do that work for us. Perhaps naively, some of us assumed that people just wouldn’t have to work as much. And perhaps I continue to be naive in thinking that that should still be our end goal. If automation reduces the required work hours by 20% with no reduction in profit, full time workers should have a 32 hour week with no reduction in income.
But since employers will always pocket that money if given the option, we need more unionization, we need unions to fight for better contracts, we need legislation that will protect and facilitate them, and we need progressive taxation that will decouple workers most essential needs from their employers so they have more of a say in where and how they work, be that universal public services, minimum income guarantee, or what have you.
We’re quite far behind in this fight but there has been some recent progress about which I am pretty optimistic.
Edit: for clarification
This was so very thoughtful, and after reading it, I feel optimistic too. Fuck yeah.
Edit: thank you.
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.
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.
Yeah sure “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” is an outrageous take.
The take is “let’s not forget to hold people accountable for the shitty things they do.” AI is not a killing machine. Guns aren’t particularly productive.
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.
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.
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I don’t think most people think ai is sentient. In my experience the people that think that are the ones who think they’re the most educated saying stuff like “neural networks are basically the same as a human brain.”
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What a terrible thing to say, they’re human beings so I hope they matter to you
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Well, at least you admit you’re a terrible person
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Lot of words to just say you’re a terrible person, we got it already, you don’t need to explain why you’re terrible
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Well and being a snob about it doesn’t help. If all the average joe knows about AI is what google or openAI pushed to corporate media, that shouldn’t be where the conversation ends.
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Because they live in the same society as you, and they get to decide who goes to jail as much as you do
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Are you familiar with juries?
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There are a lot more countries than yours, believe it or not, and some of them don’t have the same justice system as yours. Do people in your country have the right to vote? Same sentiment, do you think that’s a stupid system?
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Corporate lawyers.
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You can not know the nuanced details of something and still be (rightly) sketched out by it.
I know a decent amount about the technical implementation details, and that makes me trust its use in (what I perceive as) inappropriate contexts way less than the average layperson.