To not have children due to the potential threat of AI

[NP101]

I realise this probably makes me sound like a fully paid up member of the tin hat society but I'm increasingly worried about the threat of AI.

It has made me re-evaluate having children as the future looks pretty bleak - I can envisage the internet more or less being unusable in 5 years time and then the subsequent fall out of this - both socially and economically.

I realise I probably would have had similar feelings had I been around in various other points in history and subsequently regretted not having children but this current threat seems even more existential.

Bottom line is that most species don't last...why are we different? I guess weare aware of it which makes it scary.

The key is to understand that the most effective use of chat gpt & similar is to increase the productivity of skilled humans.

I use it in my role. It won't replace people, it just allows me to get more done, and explore some areas of work that otherwise wouldn't be worth putting time into.

The people who refuse to embrace change will end up being perceived as unproductive - much like when mechanical tractor drawn ploughs came in and were swiftly more productive than the horse drawn variety.

I wonder if AI may have come just in time to find solutions to the climate crisis? And not be wiping us all out.

I suspect we'll all be partly AI in the future, with enhancement chips implanted in us. From simple things to making payments to improving our memory to helping to us to see in the dark/ whatever else you can imagine.

'Going analogue' will be an alternative lifestyle choice and probably the analogues will be the survivors.

Now I’m curious, why are you asking? What do you think I think The Cloud is? 😂

The Cloud: https://www.cloudflare.com/en-gb/learning/cloud/what-is-the-cloud/

AI will always require power. It is quite easy for humans to take control and cut off/disrupt power supplies and probably always will be, its the type of fail safe built into the ways things operate, to ensure human oversight.

I felt like after 9/11 but have four kids now. You can't plan for everything. At some point the environmental damage we wipe us out. Or if AI Wipes out its on own heads so maybe the species time is up. Its got to be up one day, the sun's going to die. Everything has its end point but we aren't close enought to know it's coming relatively soon. If your religious then surely its still worth being born to die? If your not its all going to finish one day anyway.

I get not having kids for environmental reasons, but as a biologist I also belive life has no greater meaning and is just a happy accident of evolution at a perfect distance from the sun. I know the only driving for life is passing on DNA and once the earth dies everything we ever strove for will be wiped out forever. Because that's the order of it all.

Until then, I'm expecting me and kids to die of old age or disease

Because "infecting the cloud" isn't a thing, since "the cloud" isn't a singular thing - it's just virtualised systems, millions-to-billions of which exist in some form of Internet-connected manner.

As a functional "thing", it refers to thousands (if not millions) of entirely distinct networks with very different architectures run by completely different companies in different countries, made out of many different (often proprietary) technologies, almost none of which are capable of running AI workloads (statistically speaking) with even orders of magnitude higher latency than ChatGPT.

Given how much of the Internet's exposed services run on virtualised architectures, you're functionally asking "What if an AI infects the entire Internet?", which I'm pretty sure I answered earlier.

As a programmer I think you have too much faith in programming. There is always the plug however, as long as it your plug of course.

When I build my killer robot it will be solar powered.

OP ignore the naive and ignorant commenters that think you're mad. They just don't understand AI and haven't really thought that deeply about it to understand it. What they don't realise is that most of them won't have a career in the future. So Yanbu to think twice about having children.

I haven’t read your comments.

I posted on the thread yesterday and came back to respond to a question I was tagged in. I haven’t read any of the pages inbetween and if the tone of the thread is anything like the way you have responded to me (mocking, patronising and pretending not to understand metaphor) I’m deffo not bothering.

I personally believe that AI is a more immediate threat to humanity than climate change.

AI has lots of negative potential, one of which involves losing human control over some really dangerous hardware. As in, weapons of war.

I don’t let this keep me up at night because everyone dies and life is what happens before that.

https://time.com/6295879/ai-pause-is-humanitys-best-bet-for-preventing-extinction/

I wasn't mocking or belittling you; I was genuinely trying to figure out where you were coming from - specifically whether you have technical knowledge of the subject, or if you were coming at it from more of a philosophical/ideological angle.

I'm not entirely sure which metaphor I'm supposedly pretending not to understand, but then...I'm autistic, so being accused of being malicious when missing a subtle hint is something I'm kinda used to.

Apologies, yesterday was very hectic so I haven't had a chance to check back on this thread until now - thanks for all the replies!

My main concerns were in the short term (within the next few years) information will be increasingly challenging to sort through making elections and the like difficult - this could lead to a lot of social unrest.

In the longer term when there is general artificial intelligence and singularity there won't be a way to stop it - we will become like pets to AI.

It is too late to 'turn it off' as that would mean getting rid of the internet which will also have huge economic and social ramifications.

I realise there have always been existential threats but this seems more all encompassing somehow. Nuclear weapons require a great amount of resources, most likely need to be state backed. AI can cause havoc by some kid in his parents basement.

An AI point of singularly is by no means an inevitability! It's a theoretical concept, only slightly more than a science fiction concept. And it won't arise from some kid in a basement, if it ever does.

Information is shit on the internet already because of human behaviour, nothing to do with AI. Teaching some basic fact-checking ability and critical thinking skills to children would be an easy way to address that. We're not helplessly adrift at the mercy of machines.

As a counterpoint, AI can (and has) been used to design things that humans couldn't come up with. The technology could very feasibly solve the climate crisis, come up with ways to effectively neutralise the threat of nuclear weapons, create vaccines to stop the next pandemic before it even gets that far etc.

Those possibilities are just as likely as the "AGI destroys humanity" narrative - it's not a fait accompli.

From more of a futurist perspective, the whole "pets" thing would appear to be illogical; an AGI is more likely to cooperate with humanity than subjugate it, because apart from anything subjugation requires far more resources and is far more tenuous a strategy than cooperation (just ask Putin). If it does require separation from humanity, it'll probably just build rockets far better than we ever could and sod off to the moon (or further out of our reach, to somewhere that has better and more appropriate resources with no atmosphere to impede its most consistent power source).

Effectively, unless an AGI's core values force it to interact with us, its best and least-risky survival strategy would be to put itself as far out of our sphere of influence as is possible.

I honestly don't care if 'they' know all this stuff. I run a lot on my own, like all day, I purposely use my card in petrol stations for food so that I leave a trail in case I didn't show up at the end of the day. I am tracked on my Strava by my partner, again, I want him to know where I am. I use the tech and surveillance if you like to call it that to help me. I get loads of suggestions on FB related to running, races that I'm interested in, I like that.

I've spent 45 years worried to death about climate change, I'm hoping AI will help with solutions. Of course it will be used for nefarious reasons by lots of organisations but I prefer to look at the useful side of it.

Humans need to create better batteries for that yet....

I'm just thinking of all the non extinction level carnage bugs have caused unintentionally in my carer, yet we have seldom been able to just switch the server off anyway. I wanted to, but your never anywhere near it and you rightly have no way to shut off a live server even if I was the highest level admin. I could however wipe everything from root, but I'd be sacked 😆 unless it was a mistake, which amazingly happened a few times ( not by me).

I'm not sure how something so vastly more intelligent could effectively cooperate with something far less intelligent? There wouldn't even be an effective way to communicate.

Of course there would - it would know every human language. Not to mention that any AGI will never just not exist one moment and exist the next, because the whole point of AI is that it learns and becomes something better with every iteration. How is it going to learn without interacting (in one direction, at least) with and understanding the only available body of data - human-generated content?

Or, for less verbose argument...we can communicate with our children, can't we? They're vastly less intelligent than adults (mostly), but it's not a problem in the majority of cases.

That's quite the stretch, you could do with some fresh air maybe

Plenty of people have been locked up in the past for things they didn't do without the help of AI though tbf.

I was thinking more like the difference in intelligence between a tadpole and a human rather than an adult and a child.

There are lots of people.I can't communicate ideas with as their intelligence in that field far supercedes my own. What happens when AI is million times more intelligent than the smartest person on the planet? Surely communicating ideas and theories will become impossible and we will be left behind.

There are lots of things to be concerned about that will affect future children. I don't think the impact of AI is a major one - it'll do some good, some bad.

The level of the disparity doesn't really matter - the fact that the AGI understands our languages will be enough. Remember, it has effectively unbounded intelligence (since part of the definition of AGI is the ability to modify itself to learn more) - so yes, there are going to be concepts that it understands which we can never grasp; there's a hard line there.

However, high intelligence doesn't mean that it's impossible to communicate with lower intelligence beings. We, for example, can communicate with dogs - it has to be restricted to the things that the dogs are capable of comprehending, though. It's even two-way communication for a lot of things - they can tell us when they're happy/sad/angry/etc, when they need to go outside, when they're hungry and we can give them instructions (which they can elect to obey or not, as anybody who's ever lived with an Akita can tell you).

It would be similar in the case of AGI vs human - yes, there will be lots of things that it will never be able to communicate to us because of our meat-brain limitations, but that doesn't mean it won't be able to communicate with us at all. It'll just be restricted to our brains' capacity for thought, that's all.

I won't quote the whole "the state will know all of this info from the average citizen's 10 minute snippet of day" because it's long. But.

All those individual corporations already have that info, McDonalds knows who you are if you collect points using their app. Your bank knows what transactions you make and where. Your energy company knows what appliances you're using. Google knows your search and browsing history, and keeps a cache.

We're already giving up all this information and it doesn't cause an issue for the majority of people. Search history has been used in criminal cases and in cases of missing people, so police can access if necessary, but I do feel like the idea that governments will want to get hold of all this info to keep files on people constantly is a bit silly - I mean, why? And how? Those corporations aren't going to give that data up easily. Governments don't have the kind of money lying around to pay what they want for it. And storing all that data would be costly and for what? It doesn't have enough of a benefit to do it. I mean they can barely keep hold of people's NHS records or make them joined up - if they wanted to keep a load of data on everyone that would be a start and most people would be in favour of it.

I don't buy it. I don't think that government has an agenda to control individual citizens to that minute a detail. I think most governments want to do a decent job at balancing the interests of citizens with calm and safety as well as some monetary concerns. Also, government officials are human and therefore they are likely also motivated by money and power and make decisions which are less beneficial to the country as a whole because of these things. Maybe this is even something that might be sense-checked by AI in the future. But the idea of a widespread plan to control and track everyone individually and comprehensively just does not make sense. It's science fiction. I don't believe that governments (outside of a few extreme outlier dictators) even want to bother controlling individuals because the benefit is too low and the cost (energy, resources, time) is too high.