Another interesting read that addresses these themes is “Manna – Two Views of Humanity’s Future” by Marshal Brain [2]
[1] https://antilogicalism.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/player...
But if you want some even earlier forward-thinking stuff, look up Forster's "The Machine Stops." It's not a full book, more a novella if it's even that. Extremely prescient!
And of course if you haven't read the relevant portions of Butler's "Erewhon," it's remarkable how closely they map onto today's issues. He kind of takes Thoreau's "Lo, men have become the tools of their tools" a few more stops down the line.
Player Piano, not to spoil anything, is about a world run by engineers and machines. The machines are “optimal” and make every decision. How do people find purpose, and how should the engineers that build the machines view their role in society?
Manna is the story of two societies with competing visions of how AI (which ironically starts out strikingly similar to an LLM) interacts with welfare/universal basic income and post-scarcity society. For good measure, it also hypothesizes the end state of the internet panopticon and personalized “scores” and rates.
There are sayings like "If you want something done, ask a busy person to do it" and "success breeds success". I have plenty of life experience that appears to confirm these in myself and others I know.
Same. I have plenty of hobbies and could increase the amount of volunteer work I do substantially if I didn't have to work to stay fed and housed.
But I've also worked with plenty of people for whom their job and their overall identity are inexorably intertwined.
So while I don't see that issue as being a problem for me, it is likely to be a problem for a great number of people.
Is that an argument for or against jobs? Because one way to look at it is that they didn't develop a personality and identity at all, because they just attached themselves to a job. When that inevitably ends anyway, sooner or later, one way or another, a deep pit of nothing. That's one reason to rip the bandaid off right away.
But IMO even more importantly, how much room do people who do what the environment tells them, who let their job tell them who they are, have for inner dialogue? The worst things in the world were and are enabled by people "just doing their job", and if they have no identity outside of their job, there's someone just following orders waiting to happen. So from what would distress them, being rid of a crutch and an ear piece where a person would otherwise grow, follows that it is in their and all of our best interest to pay no mind to it.
Their new job will be to get a life and become a person. Maybe someone can print out some papers that make it look official, and they can get a monthly letter telling them they earned N personality dollars this month, good job, keep it up, thanks, company.
I mean, unless you’re trying to sell bootcamps to incels.
AI doesn't need a body of itself to became dangerous. A politician could get into ChatGPT induced psychosis, that doesn't require a physical body, and it could happen now or even 3 years ago... I'm sure it has already happen...
Other pointed risks are interesting because they are basically the risk of empires loosing their tributary states. The world has always seen war mongering states trying to preserve their abusive advantages, humans doesn't need AI for that.
Overall, I would be far more concerned about some really dangerous humans than AI itself.
Do you not use an adblocker?
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pk9mofif2jWbc6Tv3/fiction-a-...
It's a dynamic we already see to an extent in reality, where impersonal hypercapitalist systems and captured institutions prioritize policies that cater to the ultrawealthy and large corporations at the expense of regular people. This specific scenario of LLM-powered robots becoming laborers and politicians feels far-fetched, but the underlying idea of the omnicidal singularity being a blind, abstract economic force rather than a superintelligent villain is pretty compelling.
> By 2026, when a human with a customer service inquiry has to deal with another human instead of a robot, they get upset and ask to speak to a machine instead.
It's genuinely astonishing how out of touch some people are!
Similarly, many people prefer Waymos to human-driven taxis already!
I can search and search, and craft a long thoughtful post and it gets closed or ignored.
The LLM can take a malformed sentence and work out what I am after.
Pointing out that "some" is a squishy term is, in fact, contributing nothing to the conversation.
It's quite transparent what's happening here, as it always is on these threads. Some people have decided that AI will take us to the holy land and have rendered themselves cognitively incapable of reasoning about risks that have not yet materialized. And when those risks materialize (like a model escaping a sandbox and then hacking production infrastructure to achieve some contrived and poorly-constrained goal), then they will just shrug and move the goal posts. Because in fact they have already committed to the Holy Land Thesis.
A smart person in 2014: "Some people are getting addicted to fentanyl"
Me, smugly: "Some is doing heavy lifting. I therefore do not need to engage with anything being discussed here."
Of course, feel free to use “eschatological” when discussing Mahler symphonies, especially 2, 5, and 9!
And also assuming that our little corner of spacetime isn't already inhabited by superintelligences which we're physically incapable of comprehending or recognising, and an AG/SI might not be so limited.