Do we underestimate what's coming?

[Dappy777]

I have become quite interested in AI lately and have been watching loads of Youtube lectures. Some of it is really mind-blowing. What struck me most was a talk given by Stephen Fry in which he said humans are like children playing on a beach and squabbling over the sand and pebbles. Meanwhile, just over the horizon, waves are gathering to form one giant tsunami that is going to knock us flying. His point was that it isn't just AI. Numerous waves of technology – nanotechnology, gene editing, virtual reality, genetic engineering, quantum computing, etc – are uniting. Any one of them on its own could transform the world. But they are going to combine, and in some cases speed each other along (AI could speed up nanotech, for example).

One AI expert thinks we could see all illness and disease brought under medical control within ten years. Even Jeffrey Hinton, who won the nobel prize, thinks AI will wipe out all illness and disease within 20 years. Human ageing may be halted and even reversed!! Another expert thinks that, thanks to regenerative medicine, by the late 2030s 50-somethings will look like 20-somethings. Stephen Fry himself thinks the first person to live beyond 200 has already been born.

Yet we carry on as if the future will be more or less like the present. Is it sensible for a 25-year-old to marry and have a child when we're on the brink of regenerative medicine that could extend her life for centuries (assuming climate change and nuclear weapons and bio-terrorists and hackers and so on don't wreck everything)? My friend's daughter is due to start secondary school in September. They are already wondering what GCSEs she'll enjoy, what A-Levels she might take and what career she'll choose. They are carrying on as if her life will be just like theirs was. But if she goes to university, that will be 2032. By the time she completes her degree it will be 2035. By 2035 AI, nanotechnology, gene editing, VR, quantum computing and god knows what else (not to mention climate change) will have made the world a very different place. There might not be any jobs. Should we be educating children in a completely different way? Do they need to study traditional subjects at all!?? Should we overhaul education and focus on things like empathy, relationships, life skills, meaning and purpose?

The problem, I think, is that ordinary divs like me have zero understanding. For all I know these experts could be exaggerating. Because I'm so bad at science, they could tell me the moon is made of cheese and I'd believe them. The one thing they all agree on, however, is that the pace of change is accelerating. One of them said we'll live through 100 years of scientific progress in the next ten years. Shouldn't we be constantly talking about all this?

People are inefficient and so will implement AI innefficiently (slowly). I also have no ability to influence future technology so I don't worry about it - it's something I have no control over. Also, Stephen Fry is a wanker and his intelligence is overrated.

Your friend's daughter will likely need to retrain multiple times in her life in any case.

Stephen Fry is not an expert in anything to my knowledge. He is a television broadcaster who has facts piped into an earpiece.

Check out the "Paperclip Apocalypse" which was from a thought experiment by Nick Bostrom in 2014 from the Oxford University. This is indeed a very scary scenario in which AI becomes out of human control as it supersedes human intelligence.

I am not so sure I want to look into that to be honest..

Where’s the laughing emjoi when we need it, quite :)

@sparrowflewdown would there be signs of other advanced civilisations destroying selves if had happened? Could this have happened on Mars for example & earth ‘seeded’ for life as final act?

Again, we're discussing the future for humanity, and how it will be affected by AI and its capabilities, the whole of the planet's future will not be bound to English law! The whole of the UK is not even bound by English law. These systems are already in use in other countries, but not automated. They will be though.

It’s the breakneck speed of escalation that scares me, too late for checks & balances.

It’s definitely going to help save lives in some areas. For instance fetal heart ctg interpretation for labouring women. At the moment relies on humans and mistakes are made, it’s the biggest area of litigation for obstetrics and obviously a massive personal human cost if a baby dies or is disabled. If AI can accurately interpret the traces in real time that would be amazing.

Cody Barrow warns that AI tools are lowering the barrier for impersonation scams, urging simple safety measures like private codes. As AI-generated images grow increasingly lifelike, he as a cyber security expert has warned that families should create deepfake scams.

AI has already fooling people into thinking that we are talking to family members and criminals can get hold of these technologies. It's alarming that the people who are creating these things are just throwing them out into the ether for criminals to use with voice cloning.

Most of this thread is about dangers which seem far off, but these things are happening now and are more immediate.

@User14March Panspermia is the idea that life hitched a lift through space on things like comets, like cosmic seeds blowing in the wind. It might explain how life started here, but it doesn’t solve the big “Where are all the aliens?” mystery. If life’s so easy to spread, why haven’t we seen anyone yet?

If life’s so easy to spread, why haven’t we seen anyone yet?

Advanced, intelligent species have taken a look at Humanity and agreed to completely ignore us because interaction with us would be more bother than it's worth. They're just going to wait it out while we destroy ourselves.

@fixingmylife some French woman got scammed by an AI enhanced scammer who’d made himself look like Brad Pitt in videos and she thought she was in an online relationship with him for months, left her husband and sent Brad Pitt loads of money!

Watching the show Paradise (admittedly out there in terms of plot) made me think that some of the situations that occurred are actually possible.

DC is at uni now studying pharmacology/drug discovery, they already do something on AI and how it will (is starting to) replace actual drug testing. At this stage you need physical testing to provide the data for the simulations, but you can see where it is heading.

…. It’s called Insilico

We assume life is carbon based and in our image pretty much. AI would have no interest or use for us unless as an energy source & prob lots of stars re: energy.

I find it all absolutely overwhelming OP, and would definitely like to understand more and talk more about what is to come…

Because it’s AI & introspective or Wall/E scenario? Say AI destroys ‘us’ what would it seek to do next? Would it effectively fizzle out? Is this what happens, life, AI take over a la ‘Skynet’…fizzle?

In this galaxy Mars poss had life as well as oceans & atmosphere & ‘seeding’ earth a last hurrah or even message in a bottle for future civilisations?

Just popping in to say, Stephen Fry knows fuck all about science and technology. Clever guy, totally different expertise. Any time he talks about maths or science it’s honestly just embarrassing - not the person to listen to in this instance.

Yes, possibly - all the planets falling like cascading domino's and earth will do the same back to another planet still doesn't help and it is again part of the fermi paradox as we can't get beyond this.

Interesting. Tangentially, I’ve often wondered if the ‘space battle’ event witnessed in Germany with ‘black arrow’ & failing ‘spheres’ was AI versus life elsewhere: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1561_celestial_phenomenon_over_Nuremberg

It really doesn’t fit brief for natural or ‘Sun Dog’ event & the carvings of time bear witness.

I’m not exactly Nobel prize level but I know a fair bit about AI, especially things like chat gpt and a little about ai for science.

One thing to note is that there is enormous hype around everything.

There are a few big businesses at the moment spending billions of dollars each on developing the best language model / chat bot. Open AI and Anthropic, two of the biggest players in that race, are not yet profitable companies. Developing and running these big language models is crazy expensive. They rely on investor funding. After many years of not turning a profit they need a good story to keep getting that investor funding, and that means constantly feeding the hype machine. Anthropic also positions itself as an AI safety company so has an incentive to tell scary stories about what might happen if…

Deep mind, who did the most famous protein folding research, do some great work but they are also known for their marketing genius. It’s actually quite annoying if you work in one of their fields. They often present their stuff like it’s a massive break through but it’s just a normal incremental improvement over what others are doing, which itself will be improved on in the next months and years. It’s good research, don’t get me wrong, but the hype is unwarranted for the most part.

Undoubtedly things are moving fast, we’re going to see lots of disruption over the next few years as we figure out how these technologies fit in. But in another way, it’s not moving that fast. Language models today are essentially the same as they were in 2019, they’ve progressed because thousands of clever people and many billions of dollars have been dedicated to them and still there’s been no major technical or conceptual breakthrough in that time.

Right now, I remain much less worried about AI than about HS (human stupidity). The reason the economy is struggling, the reason for layoffs and lack of good jobs, the reason for cost of living crisis, lack of housing, and everything feeing a bit shit is absolutely not AI or tech advancement. It’s inequality. The siphoning off of shared resources and the consolidation of power by a few people while the rest of us (including governments) are left to get by with less and less.

Is no one else horrified at the thought of living to 200! Not for me thanks.