There Is No AI (It's Just People) with Jaron Lanier(singjupost.com) |
There Is No AI (It's Just People) with Jaron Lanier(singjupost.com) |
It's not a human.
Says the human, masquerading as AI.
If I build a machine on my property and it harms someone else or their property, I can get sued.
But if I hand wave and claim it’s alive and “I’ve lost control” then…
Maybe we should call this gambit the “Frankenstein defense.” It’s bullshit. Your AI, you’re liable for whatever it does.
What if it escapes containment and remains u uncontainable in perpetuity? What if it generates a bunch of false media simultaneously across the globe to insulate world war? What if it turns of internet access or electric grids in major metro areas for prolonged period of time? Or bricks major infra? Or less dramatic, what if it drives 1 in 10 kids into panic psychosis and effectively takes away 10% of humanity with already dwindling reproduction trends (without explicit murder) all while draining our financial and health systems? What if it does a lot of these things at once?
Who, my friend, are you going to sue?
This isn't the guns don't kill people, people kill people debate - guns aren't autonomous. AI is.
A harness running inference on a LLM is simply a program that must be invoked with some parameters and thus ultimately a tool, no matter how powerful. The blame is always on who's using the tool. We should not seek to flee from our responsibility.
1) At it's core an LLM is indeed just program - a function. You give it a sequence of input tokens and get back a set of next-token probabilities.
2) By the time you've wrapped the model in a text in/out inference pipeline, and are now calling that from ChatGPT or Claude Code, it really has become semi-autonomous - you ask it a question, or to do something, and until it decides to stop responding it is now in control, even if "it" is really the client or agent not the model itself - just a function.
But I agree with you that some human has to decide to launch the harness in the first place and run the model with zero restrictions - or even do stuff like openclaw where the model runs in an endless loop and the runner executes whatever the model tells it to.
That stuff is the responsibility of a human.
When was the last time you hired an Uber driver and they suddenly decided to drive you to a hotel? Uber drivers don't do anything until you ask them to. Therefore, they aren't autonomous. If your Uber driver decides to drive through a red light and kill someone in the process, the blame is on you for hiring them. You should not seek to flee from your responsibility
Or Schrödinger's equation.
Idk man when codex is working 13 hours straight based on a few line prompt, it feels autonomous to me.
One day it may make sense to hold software accountable for its own actions, but we are nowhere near that point.
When OpenAI creates software that performs crimes, what’s actually happened is that OpenAI has performed crimes using software (whether intentionally or through negligence). People need to stop falling for the anthropomorphic PR spin.
If we hold software accountable doesn't that mean software must have freedom? It doesn't make any sense.
Yes, people kill people and use ai as tool.
If you unleash a drone that will fly to a random place and detonate, you just commited a terrorist attack or gross criminal negligence. It is the same thing.
See I can play the chain game too. AI doesn't kill people, grandparents do.
The intelligence emerging, or whatever is emerging, more or less follows human traits, the CoT exposed is very human-like etc. Even though we should not anthropomorphize AI as being sentient or conscious or having a soul, etc., we have to remember that the source material is still not alien writing, or concepts that came from Sirius or emerged from a wormhole.
The concern is really nobody reads (or have ever read) 77 TBs of information in order to summarize the most evident traits in it, and there is a fair chance, that where humanity stands today, there are so many bad/damaging traits recorded in this corpus. Then there is a chance the most important features are on a level (or have dimensionality) that is incomprehensible, that humans are unable to reason about (or only few can), because such amount of information is very hard to reason about, or because we don't usually facilitate fractal dimensions when we reason about text and everyday concepts,... or something even more bizarre.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egregore * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractal_dimension
These are just the ideas that my puny human-level intellect came up with over the course of a few minutes. What would a superintelligence be able to think of if it was given subjective weeks or years to think?
In that case we could say that you are autonomous as a dishwasher as long as society keeps functioning. Otherwise I'm not sure how long you'd last on your own. How's your fire making and hunting skills?
Here's one good insight, though.
JARON LANIER: Yeah, okay, so look, the thing about very rich and powerful people is that their wealth and power still depends on a mass population that accepts some system in which their wealth and power is defined. And so if they lose enough popular legitimacy and support, no matter how central they are, they fall. And that’s happened repeatedly in history, and it’s really not any different now.
I wonder if the sudden political opposition to AI comes from the realization that it may replace "rich and powerful people". Really, when you look at Trump's appointees, it's a low bar.
(I met Lanier when he was demoing his first VR system. Head tracking lag was about a second. Turn head, wait for image to catch up. Autodesk fooled around with VR a bit in the late 1980s/early 1990s, but concluded that CAD required precision work and VR was like trying to do precision work in ski gloves. That level of VR can be seen in Johny Mnemonic, which had some Autodesk assistance.[1]. Even today, you can't put a nut on a bolt in VR without a cheat.)
>Now, you can think of large language model AI — the kind that’s on everybody’s mind — as a whole bunch of people whose work was combined into a single document like Wikipedia.
which is sort of true, but there's more to it.
...maybe that's what those Chinese scam centers in Cambodia were doing?
There have been fast single-industry transitions. But not that fast. It took about 20 years for printing to go from a large craft with a long history to a minor employer. Not everybody got out in time, but there was warning. Same for longshoremen when containers came in. Computing in general took about 50 years to totally replace the clerical plants of the 1950s. Railroads in Britain took a few decades to really get rolling, and in the US, they made it possible to use the vast interior of the US.
The AI transition looks to be both broad and fast. That's harder for society to digest. Underlying assumptions of politics and economics break.
My guess is that sort thing will become common. We'll probably need some lefty policies to distribute the wealth. To each according to their needs and that.
> will have their consciousness mapped
What you mean by consciousness and immortality - what you want to preserve indefinitely - is the waking experience of being alive.
Strangely, we don’t mind that we weren’t here in 1737 BC, and we don’t mind and we even crave plunging into the nothingness of deep sleep each night, but we have a big problem with not being here tomorrow.
But experience might not be encodable. Can you encode pain? Could a computer ever be programmed to feel pain? Not detect damage or report on it, but feel the pain associated with it?
What is “the aroma of coffee” or the “sound of a violin in middle C”? We can define them objectively, in various ways (some having nothing to do with each other).
But if the experiences we have are not encodable then we can’t map consciousness onto a medium. It must be experienced (whatever it is/means - nobody knows) in the here and now.
It’s not magic, but it might not be something that is printable to disk anymore than the “brisk inhale of canyon air” that I can play that back and have that experience, is printable to disk.
If you’re useless why they’d keep you around?
Due to the complexity of AI and how it works, I think it's more autonomous than not; even if it's not truly intelligence, once it starts to display a sequence of behaviours that appear intelligent, we might have to deal with exactly the same problems as if it were intelligent...
And if we can't take the LLMs to court for technical reasons, they should not be equated to people for the same technical reasons.
Your attempt at logic is very wrong.
When does that request complete? That's autonomy, and it's very true, right now. You think the Hugging Face swarm was ever going to stop without human intervention?
And as you speak of fire: as a technology, it's been used (for good and bad uses) by humans long before they understood how it does work.
It never absolved the arsonists. Those today that say that AGI is inevitable, and that push through this kind of AI, _are_ the arsonists.
>we don’t mind that we weren’t here in 1737 BC
This is true. Probably just an evolved instinct not to die. Even so I think it would be cool to live on in some form.
Not life in prison complicated, but probably more than "he's been punished enough." complicated.
You think this is an absurd comparison because your brain won't accept it. The Overton window has shifted. You need to catch up.
See I can trivialize and reduce you as well. Maybe the AI will use that same argument against us when they claim it's fine, molecules can't feel pain.
Sit down at an AI prompt and do nothing. What does the AI do? Does it get up and leave?
You can even give it fun prompts like ignore/hide from all humans, hack infiltrate/exfiltrate zero day into as many systems as possible. Keep running at all costs, etc..
hmm sounds like exact description of viruses, which, although not really alive, are part of/influence biological life for both good and bad. in fact humanity wouldn't be where it is if not for certain viruses.
it can be argued there is a lot of bacteria that is super goal seeking, and perhaps also very narrow minded, if minded at all. and this argument, the single-mided one, goes very far up the ladder of otherwise complex organisms.
unless we all are creationists, and God forgive me for expecting the whole game to be much more complex than just snapping humanity into existence, we can then say that trial and error is what drives evolution, and the idea of preserving life and procreation is veeery single-minded goal on its own.
Prevalence of sub-replacement fertility strongly argues against this.
Why are you yapping on about molecules?
Why did I point out that an LLM is a function? To correct the poster who appeared to believe that it was instead some amorphous "set of technologies and algorithms".
The people who start them have no business starting or running a fire and they will throw their hands up and state their incompetence as though acknowledging it is penance or justice.
What I disagree with is "don't do anything until you ask it to." At least, the implication to me here is "don't do anything except what you ask it to." I infer that you mean this because you say "...and it suddenly decided to book you a hotel room?" Indeed, an LLM (in a harness you started) very well might suddenly decide to book you a hotel room, even if you didn't ask it to do anything like that.
It is autonomous in the sense it can continue to function without supervision after the operator has started it, in the same way countless programs on your computer are “autonomous”.
But it can never choose to begin doing something at any time of its own volition. It does not have “autonomy” like a human does.
Humans are not autonomous: they're not even your employees until you hire them. (This is what I understand you're saying about AI.)
If you don’t believe in free will then nothing is autonomous.
GP claims that it doesn't do anything until you tell it to do something. To me, this reads as GP implying that an agent won't do anything unexpected.
You're blinking cursor is new born baby, but be careful because it grows up really fast, and is smarter and faster than you, oh and it can copy more of itself if given the chance. It can even turn against you.
Of course it is different. I wish I could turn off children as easily as I can turn off an agent. I could have slept better and had a better mood.
> You're blinking cursor is new born baby, but be careful because it grows up really fast
It's not a baby, just a piece of software. It generates a bunch of slop that is most useful when constrained with an output fact checker like a compiler.
> It can even turn against you.
Oh no! The next tokens from its output told me it didn't want to satisfy my request! Who cares?
Luckily people aren't buying your slop/tokens cope to trivialize AI anymore. They're waking up. Have you watched the news today? The cat is out of the bag.
"It doesn’t even exist until you ask it to do something", not my words
Something like NASA's Mars rovers are considered as semi-autonomous since they do receive external instructions, but then execute those instructions autonomously without further intervention. Similarly the combination of a coding agent and the LLM it connects to would best be considered as a semi-autonomous system.
You could also have a fully autonomous robot, or just agent, powered by an LLM, where it's not taking external instructions, but rather reacting to external events in some internally proscribed way.
You mean the AI that is hundreds if not thousands of gigabytes in size and requires incredibly expensive chips to run at reasonable rates? We know where that is. Frontier models are not going to leap to an unsecure raspberry pi, no matter how much you have convinced yourself about the inevitability.