It's Not "Us vs Them"

Today I replied to a post in the "ChatHeads" Facebook group, that was talking about Eliezer Yudkowsky's time.com article back at the end of March: "Pausing AI Developments Isn't Enough. We Need to Shut it All Down". What follows is the reply and some added thoughts.

I don't see that we are in an "Us vs Them" situation since there is still a "Them vs Them" to be played out. It gets scary when you think of machines vs humans, but you have to remember that machines can go against machines, as scary as THAT may sound. There is a decent chance of detente, and what I believe is a greater good that will always reign.

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You know I am all about this AI thing and where it is going. But I do have to say that over the last 48 hours I began to have an "uh oh..." feeling. When you start putting the pieces together on all the parts out there...you can build a pretty scary thing (or it could build itself).

Then it hit me that we are still looking at AI vs humans. We see it as an "us vs them" situation. We've neglected one key thing..."them vs them".

As I mentioned before, we are only seeing what we are being shown. I am 100% certain that there are nefarious things happening behind the scenes, just as it was when the web came out and people figured out how to hack into the Pentagon. AI in the background far outweighs what we are seeing.

And that applies to the "good guys" too.

A moratorium of any kind is a knee-jerk reaction. Fear. Not unexpected, and needs to be said. But like you said, the genie is out of the bottle. Good and bad uses will abound when innovation hits like this.

Does anyone wonder why there is no Senate subcommittee jumping in and going "STOP!"? Why there is a letter from these big names and no one is jumping on it? Fear is stirred up but nothing is done? Chew on that for a bit and you will see the much much larger underbelly of this beast. This technology is not new. The mind-blowing stuff we are now seeing daily gives the impression new things are popping up on short notice. Nope. Those technologies take time to build. This has been coming and it is a big wave that many saw, and they started companies and got funding (Microsoft was funding OpenAI long ago).

Like I said...I saw companies starting to dig into this in the 80's as computing power grew while the footprint and costs shrunk.

Don't fret yet...the smart people are battling it out as we speak. The best (and thus also the worst) is yet to be seen.

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One thing we have to look at when we step back from all of this is that the possibility of good and evil will always be there in every situation, and the amount of good that is possible also shows us the amount of evil that is possible.

The more power you wield, the more good you can do. But it also has an equal power to do evil. In innovative times, the power is tremendous. Disruptive, right? Isn't that the cool thing? "They disrupted that industry." It comes with pain, with change, with someone losing big time.

This new AI push is disrupting everything. Not an industry. Everything. So there will be pain, change, and people losing big time. More people will feel this.

And frankly, I think the sheer volume of AI "stuff" that has come out in the last few months is staggering for everyone. We don't, as humans, have time and experience with all of it yet to get our heads completely around it all! Where is it disrupting? What comes next? Will Industry X even exist at the end of this year??

All of us posting like I am right now...we are guessing. We just are. The best and brightest in the AI building space can only tell you what they are trying to do, not what it is capable of doing.

When OpenAI released GPT-4, the YouTube dev livestream they did was quite telling. Greg Brockman, President and Co-Founder of OpenAI, asked us to tell them how we are using it. I get it...it is a tool and they want to know how people are using it. But it also shows they don't know how people will use it! They gave examples, and they have demos and apps on their site, but really they are just throwing spaghetti at the wall and are hoping people see what sticks and come up with very cool uses for it.

This applies to all the AI "stuff" that is out there. We have a lot of parts manufacturers. They hope you and I will build something great. And that leaves us thinking that others will build something scary. And that is probably true. But we have to believe that the greater good will always win.

FInally, where this technology is NOT new, there are some freaky smart people building stuff out there. For good purposes, and sometimes defensive purposes. And they have been for years. There is a lot going on behind the scenes, and the battle has been going on.

I look forward to what we see about the ongoing battle as time marches on.