[HN Gopher] AI as Normal Technology
___________________________________________________________________
AI as Normal Technology
Author : randomwalker
Score : 184 points
Date : 2025-04-15 20:05 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (knightcolumbia.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (knightcolumbia.org)
| bux93 wrote:
| "We view AI as a tool that we can and should remain in control
| of, and we argue that this goal does not require drastic policy
| interventions"
|
| If you read the EU AI act, you'll see it's not really about AI at
| all, but about quality assurance of business processes that are
| scaled. (Look at pharma, where GMP rules about QA apply equally
| to people pipetting and making single-patient doses as it does to
| mass production of ibuprofen - those rules are eerily similar to
| the quality system prescribed by the AI act.)
|
| Will a think piece like this be used to argue that regulation is
| bad, no matter how benificial to the citizenry, because the
| regulation has 'AI' in the name, because the policy impedes
| someone who shouts 'AI' as a buzzword, or just because it was
| introduced in the present in which AI exists? Yes.
| randomwalker wrote:
| I appreciate the concern, but we have a whole section on policy
| where we are very concrete about our recommendations, and we
| explicitly disavow any broadly anti-regulatory argument or
| agenda.
|
| The "drastic" policy interventions that that sentence refers to
| are ideas like banning open-source or open-weight AI -- those
| explicitly motivated by perceived superintelligence risks.
| evrythingisfine wrote:
| The assumption of status quo or equilibrium with technology
| that is already growing faster than we can keep up with seems
| irrational to me.
|
| Or, put another way:
|
| https://youtu.be/0oBx7Jg4m-o
| dijksterhuis wrote:
| i appreciate the additional thought and effort that went
| into this comment
| randomwalker wrote:
| We do not assume a status quo or equilibrium, which will
| hopefully be clear upon reading the paper. That's not what
| normal technology means.
|
| Part II of the paper describes one vision of what a world
| with advanced AI might look like, and it is quite different
| from the current world.
|
| We also say in the introduction:
|
| "The world we describe in Part II is one in which AI is far
| more advanced than it is today. We are not claiming that AI
| progress--or human progress--will stop at that point. What
| comes after it? We do not know. Consider this analogy: At
| the dawn of the first Industrial Revolution, it would have
| been useful to try to think about what an industrial world
| would look like and how to prepare for it, but it would
| have been futile to try to predict electricity or
| computers. Our exercise here is similar. Since we reject
| "fast takeoff" scenarios, we do not see it as necessary or
| useful to envision a world further ahead than we have
| attempted to. If and when the scenario we describe in Part
| II materializes, we will be able to better anticipate and
| prepare for whatever comes next."
| cootsnuck wrote:
| Read the OP. They talk about that.
| dakiol wrote:
| AI won't become "normal technology" until the open source
| versions are more powerful than the closed ones. Just like Linux
| is the "best" kernel out there, and that doesn't prevent other
| kernels to be proprietary (but that doesn't matter because they
| are not better than Linux).
|
| Imagine for a moment what would happen if suddenly one company
| "buys" the Linux kernel, and suddenly you need to pay per the
| number of processes you run in your machine. Awful.
| falcor84 wrote:
| I don't think that's a hard requirement.
|
| Spreadsheets for example became normal technology long before
| we had a good open source one. And arguably we still don't have
| an open source one that's more powerful than the closed source
| ones.
| tilne wrote:
| I agree with you. I think OP's point becomes more valid if
| you limit the discussion to tools used while
| developing/maintaining software, as opposed to tools used by
| a wider audience.
|
| I don't fully believe that either, but I see where the point
| would come from.
| torginus wrote:
| Linux isn't the "best" OS - on platforms that are not servers,
| Linux (and open source OSes) are in the minority
| dijksterhuis wrote:
| > Linux is the "best" kernel
|
| > Linux isn't the "best" OS
|
| kernel != OS.
|
| kernel makes the OS possible. and the linux kernel makes it
| possible for a lot of linux OSes to exist.
|
| also... android?
| torginus wrote:
| I know the difference between an OS and the kernel, still a
| lot of devices don't run on the Linux kernel. Windows isn't
| Linux, macOS/iOS is not Linux, PS5/Xbox/Nintendo don't run
| on Linux, Xiaomi and Huawei are transitioning away from
| Linux.
|
| I stand by my point that Linux isn't particularly dominant
| in the consumer space, even if we include Android, whose
| Linux-ness and open source pedigree is questionable.
| dijksterhuis wrote:
| i'll try another way
|
| > the internal combustion engine is the "best" engine
|
| > lorries/hgvs are not the "best" vehicles
|
| then
|
| > lorries/hgvs are in the minority, so the internal
| combustion engine cannot be the best vehicle
|
| > ... cars?
|
| nothing you've said refutes the statement 'linux is the
| "best" kernel'.
|
| like, i geddit. you don't like linux OSes. you're
| entitled to have an opinion.
|
| i personally disagree. but that doesn't matter. my
| opinion is not really worth much.
| torginus wrote:
| I don't have any particular feelings for or against
| Linux, and even if I had, they would be irrelevant for
| the sake of this argument. I'm just saying for something
| to be the objectively being 'best' at something, means it
| makes little sense to use anything but that thing,
| excepting niche cases.
|
| Which is why you could make a credible case for Linux
| being the 'best' server OS, but you couldn't make the
| case for it in other spaces (consumer, embedded etc.),
| because the alternatives are preferred by huge chunks of
| the market.
| owebmaster wrote:
| > I stand by my point that Linux isn't particularly
| dominant in the consumer space
|
| what if we add Steam deck? chromebooks? smartTVs,
| smartwatches, amazon echo, google home? GoPro and similar
| cameras? Maybe we should add some drones too. There are
| way more devices using linux in the hands of consumers
| than all other OS's together.
| anonzzzies wrote:
| I think seeing the world in current times but hoping for more
| advancements is the best way. I see what there is now as a tool
| that is useful, I hope and sometimes even assume it will improve,
| but that does not help me now so what is the point in thinking
| about that? I am a programmer, not a philosopher.
|
| And of course there is no viable path at this moment to make AIs
| actually smart so he, we use it and know the issues.
| roxolotl wrote:
| This is a rare piece on AI which takes a coherent middle of the
| road viewpoint. Saying both that AI is "normal" and that it will
| be transformative is a radical statement in today's discussions
| about AI.
|
| Looking back on other normal but transformative technologies:
| steam power, electricity, nuclear physics, the transistor, etc
| you do actually see similarly stratified opinions. Most of those
| are surrounded by an initial burst of enthusiasm and pessimism
| and follow a hype cycle.
|
| The reason this piece is compelling is because during the initial
| hype phase taking a nuanced middle of the road viewpoint is
| difficult. Maybe AI really is some "next step" but it is
| significantly more likely that belief is propped up by science
| fiction and it's important to keep expectations inline
| historically.
| pdfernhout wrote:
| From the article:
|
| ====
|
| History suggests normal AI may introduce many kinds of systemic
| risks While the risks discussed above have the potential to be
| catastrophic or existential, there is a long list of AI risks
| that are below this level but which are nonetheless large-scale
| and systemic, transcending the immediate effects of any
| particular AI system. These include the systemic entrenchment
| of bias and discrimination, massive job losses in specific
| occupations, worsening labor conditions, increasing inequality,
| concentration of power, erosion of social trust, pollution of
| the information ecosystem, decline of the free press,
| democratic backsliding, mass surveillance, and enabling
| authoritarianism.
|
| If AI is normal technology, these risks become far more
| important than the catastrophic ones discussed above. That is
| because these risks arise from people and organizations using
| AI to advance their own interests, with AI merely serving as an
| amplifier of existing instabilities in our society.
|
| There is plenty of precedent for these kinds of socio-political
| disruption in the history of transformative technologies.
| Notably, the Industrial Revolution led to rapid mass
| urbanization that was characterized by harsh working
| conditions, exploitation, and inequality, catalyzing both
| industrial capitalism and the rise of socialism and Marxism in
| response.
|
| The shift in focus that we recommend roughly maps onto
| Kasirzadeh's distinction between decisive and accumulative
| x-risk. Decisive x-risk involves "overt AI takeover pathway,
| characterized by scenarios like uncontrollable
| superintelligence," whereas accumulative x-risk refers to "a
| gradual accumulation of critical AI-induced threats such as
| severe vulnerabilities and systemic erosion of econopolitical
| structures." ... But there are important differences:
| Kasirzadeh's account of accumulative risk still relies on
| threat actors such as cyberattackers to a large extent, whereas
| our concern is simply about the current path of capitalism. And
| we think that such risks are unlikely to be existential, but
| are still extremely serious.
|
| ====
|
| That tangentially relates to my sig: "The biggest challenge of
| the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in
| the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity."
| Because as our technological capabilities continue to change,
| it becomes ever more essential to revisit our political and
| economic assumptions.
|
| As I outline here: https://pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-
| a-key-to-transce... "There is a fundamental mismatch between
| 21st century reality and 20th century security [and economic]
| thinking. Those "security" agencies [and economic corporations]
| are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing
| mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy.
| Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier
| (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based
| approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us
| all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance,
| designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could
| well ironically doom us all whether through military robots,
| nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or
| alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we
| could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant
| and secure for all. ... The big problem is that all these new
| war machines [and economic machines] and the surrounding
| infrastructure are created with the tools of abundance. The
| irony is that these tools of abundance are being wielded by
| people still obsessed with fighting over scarcity. So, the
| scarcity-based political [and economic] mindset driving the
| military uses the technologies of abundance to create
| artificial scarcity. That is a tremendously deep irony that
| remains so far unappreciated by the mainstream."
|
| A couple Slashdot comments by me from Tuesday, linking to stuff
| I have posted on risks form AI and other advanced tech -- and
| ways to address those risks -- back to 1999:
|
| https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=23665937&cid=65308877
|
| https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=23665937&cid=65308923
|
| So, AI just cranks up an existing trend of technology-as-an-
| amplifier to "11". And as I've written before, if it is
| possible our path out of any singularity may have a lot to do
| with our moral path going into the singularity, we really need
| to step up our moral game right now to make a society that
| works better for everyone in healthy joyful ways.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| The idea of abundance vs scarecety makes sense on the outset.
| But I have to wonder where all this alleged abundance is
| hiding. Sometimes the assumptions feel a bit like "drill baby
| drill" to me without figures and projections behind it. One
| would think if there was much untapped capacity in resources
| today it would get used up. We can look at how agriculture
| yields improved over the 19th century and see how that lead
| to higher populations but also less land under the plow and
| fewer hands working that land, vs having an equal land under
| plow and I don't know dumping the excess yield someplace
| where it isn't participating in the market?
| noddingham wrote:
| I think to the parent's point it is as you say: there is
| already untapped capacity that isn't being used due to
| (geo)political forces maintaining the scarcity side of the
| argument. Using your agriculture example, a simple Google
| search will yield plenty of examples going back more than a
| decade of food sitting/rotting in warehouses/ports due to
| red tape and bureaucracy. So, we already can/do produce
| enough food to feed _everyone_ (abundance) but cannot get
| out of our own way to do so due to a number of human
| factors like greed or politics (scarcity).
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| The surest defense against fashionable nonsense is a sound
| philosophical education and a temperament disinclined to
| hysteria. Ignorance leaves you wide open to all manner of
| emotional misadventure. But even when you are in possession of
| the relevant facts -- and a passable grasp of the principles
| involved -- it requires a certain moral maturity to resist or
| remain untouched by the lure of melodrama and the thrill of
| believing you live at the edge of transcendence.
|
| (Naturally, the excitement surrounding artificial intelligence
| has less to do with reality than with commerce. It is a product
| to be sold, and selling, as ever, relies less on the truth than
| on sentiment. It's not new. That's how it's always been.)
| mdp2021 wrote:
| > _sound philosophical education and a temperament
| disinclined to hysteria_
|
| Sound good common sense suffices - the ability to go "dude,
| that's <whatever it is>". Preferring a clear idea of reality
| to intoxication... That should not be hard to ask and obtain.
|
| > _it requires a certain moral maturity to_
|
| Same thing.
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| It's a fair point, broadly speaking. If which case, then
| what we're observing in the tech sector is not merely an
| oversight, but a pervasive absence of basic common sense.
| datadrivenangel wrote:
| AI will transform everything, and after that life will continue
| as normal, so except for the details, it's not a big deal.
|
| Going to be a simultaneously wild and boring ride.
| t0lo wrote:
| Everything changes, but everything stays the same.
| jsight wrote:
| All of these things have happened before and all of these
| things will happen again :)
| owebmaster wrote:
| > AI will transform everything, and after that life will
| continue as normal
|
| 100%. It just happened with the advent of the internet and
| then smartphones.
| throwup238 wrote:
| And thanks to both, future trends are getting established
| faster and faster. It took about a decade for the internet
| to go mainstream, maybe five years for smartphones, and now
| just a year or two for LLMs. It's pretty fascinating
| watching that process get more and more compressed over a
| lifetime.
| owebmaster wrote:
| I think LLMs are actually taking quite some time to
| become economically and socially relevant. The
| smartphone/apps boom created a lot of opportunities for
| thousands of app developers while now besides some toy
| apps most people are not creating nothing too
| interesting. Which is funny because LLMs were supposed to
| make people code faster but everything is still bloated,
| broken, boring.
| Elextric wrote:
| first telephone vs first iphone
| fzzzy wrote:
| The ability to code faster leads to everything being
| bloated and broken even more.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| I think the problem I have is that it still doesn't feel
| like society has really caught up to the impact that The
| Internet and Smartphones have had, and we keep getting
| disrupted faster and faster it seems
|
| I know that there have always been disruptive technologies,
| but I the the rate of "technologies that are disrupting
| _everything_ " as opposed to "technologies that are
| disrupting just one thing" has been kind of crazy
| owebmaster wrote:
| > I think the problem I have is that it still doesn't
| feel like society has really caught up to the impact that
| The Internet and Smartphones have had, and we keep
| getting disrupted faster and faster it seems
|
| Indeed. For the past 30 years, every 10 years people were
| raised in a completely different environment. TV ->
| Internet -> Smartphones and now the next 10 years of
| people growing up influenced by LLMs.
| datadrivenangel wrote:
| We've made the world run on machines, and gotten better
| about machine intelligence and distributing software, so
| the speed at which the world's machines can operate
| smarter has increased significantly.
|
| An innovation by one person can be distributed to the
| majority of people on the planet within minutes. It's
| amazing and all of our social and political norms aren't
| built to handle this.
| cryptopian wrote:
| It's said that the most disruptive technologies are the
| ones that change the way we communicate.
|
| I'll admit, a lot of the reason for me being reticent of
| jumping into the AI game is an increasing amount of
| distrust towards the current state of the tech industry.
| Social media giants rose up, made everybody excited about
| the opportunities to communicate with _anyone_ (which are
| perfectly valid, I was on board too) and years later, we
| come to realise the addictions, the fractured information
| landscape and the surveillance. Now a bunch of companies
| from the same part of the world come along asking for
| billions to change the world again and I 'm just
| exhausted by the whole conversation.
| JimDabell wrote:
| I wrote this a few days ago:
|
| This is a permanent part of the software industry now. It
| will just stop being such a large part of the conversation.
|
| Once upon a time, all software was local, with no
| connectivity. The Internet commercialised and became
| mainstream, and suddenly a wave of startups were _like X,
| but online!_ Adding connectivity was a foundational pillar
| you could base a business around. Once that permeated the
| industry and became the norm, connectivity was no longer a
| reason to start a business, but it was still hugely popular
| as a feature. And then further down the line, everybody
| just assumes all software can use the Internet for even the
| smallest, most mundane things. The Internet never "died
| down", it just stopped being the central thing driving
| innovation and became omnipresent in software development.
|
| Mobile was the same. Smartphones took off, and suddenly a
| wave of startups were _like X, but as an app!_ Having an
| app was a foundational pillar you could base a business
| around. Once that permeated the industry and became the
| norm, being on mobile was no longer a reason to start a
| business, but it was still hugely popular as a feature. And
| then further down the line, everybody just assumes you're
| available on mobile for even the smallest, most mundane
| things. Mobile never "died down", it just stopped being the
| central thing driving innovation and became omnipresent in
| software development.
|
| Now we've got _intelligence_ as the next big thing. We're
| still in the _like X, but smart!_ phase. It's never going
| to "die down". You're just going to see intelligence became
| a standard part of the software development process. Using
| AI in a software project will become as mundane as using a
| database, or accessing the Internet. You aren't going to
| plan a project around it so much as just assume it's there.
|
| -- https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1jylp6
| y/ai...
| sanderjd wrote:
| I think this is my take as well. Like, the web and smart
| phones and social media have transformed everything ... and
| also life goes on.
| TheGRS wrote:
| Right, but society changes around this stuff pretty
| substantially. A lot of the discourse gets spent debating
| whether we like the changes or not, and the solutions to
| the new problems are usually very pie-in-the-sky or
| completely unachievable. Like we can't really put the
| social media genie back in the bottle, its here and society
| has reshaped around it. But banning phones from schools is
| pretty tangible and I'd probably argue its for the
| betterment of students.
| schnable wrote:
| Add birth control to that list too.
|
| After these technologies, certainly life is "normal" as in
| "life goes on" but the social impacts are most definitely new
| and transformative. Fast travel, instantaneous direct and mass
| communications, control over family formation all have had
| massive impact on how people live and interact and then
| transform again.
| cootsnuck wrote:
| I wouldn't call it a "middle" road rather a "nuanced" road (or
| even a "grounded" road IMO).
|
| If its a "middle" road what is it in the middle of (i.e. what
| "scale")? And how so?
|
| I'm not trying to be pedantic. I think our tendency to call
| nuanced, principled positions as "middle" encourages an
| inherent "hierarchy of ideas" which often leads to applying
| some sort of...valence to opinions and discourse. And I worry
| that makes it easier for people to "take sides" on topics which
| leads to more superficial, myopic, and repetitive takes that
| are much more about those "sides" than they are about the
| pertinent evidence, facts, reality, whatever.
| LiquidSky wrote:
| >If its a "middle" road what is it in the middle of (i.e.
| what "scale")?
|
| That's pretty clear. We already have two "sides": AI is the
| latest useless tech boondoggle that consumes vast quantities
| of money and energy while not actually doing anything of
| value vs. AI is the dawn of a new era of human existence that
| will fundamentally change all aspects of our world (possibly
| with the additional "and lead to the AGI Singularity").
| pineaux wrote:
| No this is not the middle that should be considered.
|
| Nobody really thinks that AI is useless anymore. We
| disagree on timelines, we disagree on how useful it will
| be, but the extremes are not between useful and useless
| (although some people believe it will not change anything,
| but pretty fringe). The real extremes here are "evil god
| AGI" and "benevolent god AGI". This piece takes the road
| where they say: it's pretty powerful/useful, but it's not a
| godlike something because it's not everywhere, all the
| time, at once. It will change the world, but over a pretty
| long timespan and it will feel like normal technology. It
| will be used for evil and good.
| klik99 wrote:
| You might be in a bubble, there are a lot of people who
| consider AI to be useless. It seems you do not take them
| seriously writing it off as fringe, which is why you
| consider the discussion to be between evil vs benevolent.
| And to be clear, my personal view on current LLM is
| closer to this article. But "all AI is useless" is still
| part of the discussion, not that it's literally useless
| but that its use cases are so minor and/or inferior to
| existing techniques compared to its resource usage that
| it's functionally useless.
|
| Edit: I guess I see the discussion along two axes: Impact
| magnitude (useless vs just a tool vs god-like) and Impact
| valence (evil/negative vs neutral vs benevolent/positive)
| - this article is middle ground for the former axis,
| magnitude
| sanderjd wrote:
| I'll echo the other reply: This seems like a bubble.
|
| I come across the AI-skeptical perspective in my real
| life frequently.
|
| I only really run into the "god AI" perspective here /
| among other people working in software.
| dayvigo wrote:
| My social groups are almost exclusively non-techie. I am
| regularly exposed to networks that are very, very far
| away from HN. I assure you, there are people think AI is
| useless and purely harmful (in the sense of creating
| "slop," wasting electricity and water, etc. not evil AI).
| And there are _a lot_ of them.
| srveale wrote:
| To be fair, the general public have been conditioned for
| a while now by things like blockchain and VR to be
| completely underwhelmed, perhaps rightfully so, by
| whatever's coming out of San Fran and Seattle.
|
| So in the public consciousness it's like (NFTs, meme
| coins, metaverse, AI)
|
| When I think it's more like (internet, smartphones, AI)
|
| We'll see who's right in a few years I guess. But I'll +1
| your view that plenty of people put AI in the first
| group, I know a few myself.
| senbrow wrote:
| You're definitely in a bubble if you think "nobody"
| considers AI useless.
|
| There are a _huge_ number of non-technical people who see
| its use as a dangerous outsourcing of human thinking and
| creativity to a machine that is only capable of producing
| derivative (and often incorrect) slop.
| zifpanachr23 wrote:
| There are an enormous number of people such as myself
| that work in tech and believe the same exact thing.
|
| At the end of the way we dont need to argue about this.
| The truth should be empirically knowable. If it's as
| useful as people say, it will show up in the GDP numbers
| (I wonder what's taking it so long...).
| cess11 wrote:
| AI is old. It has been everywhere for a long time. Once upon a
| time logic programmed expert systems were AI, and that's how
| credit evaluation works.
|
| The problem with logical AI is that it can in some sense be held
| accountable. There's right and wrong and an explainable
| algorithmic path from input to result. Fuzzy, probabilistic
| vector spaces remove that inconvenience and make it easier for
| people with power to shrug and say 'computer says no' when they
| deprive someone else of freedom or resources.
|
| This is why it is so important to get technicians to accept and
| preferably get hooked on the newfangled AI. Without buy-in from
| them it'd be much harder to disseminate this regime in other
| parts of society since they're likely to be the ones doing the
| actual dissemination. It's not like there are enough of the
| people in power to do it themselves, and they also don't know
| enough about computer stuff to be able to.
|
| There will be things you like that comes out of it, but it's
| likely incidental, much like dentistry and vaccines and food
| production in the wake of fossil fuel extraction.
| xpe wrote:
| > One important caveat: We explicitly exclude military AI from
| our analysis, as it involves classified capabilities and unique
| dynamics that require a deeper analysis, which is beyond the
| scope of this essay.
|
| Important is an understatement. Recursively self-improving AI
| with military applications does not mesh with the claim that
| "Arms races are an old problem".
|
| > Again, our message is that this is not a new problem. The
| tradeoff between innovation and regulation is a recurring dilemma
| for the regulatory state.
|
| I take the point, but the above statement is scoped to a _state_,
| not an international dynamic. The AI arms race is international
| in nature. There are relatively few examples of similar
| international agreements. The classic examples are bans on
| chemical weapons and genetic engineering.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| The US military probably already has Mendicant Bias in alpha
| build.
| Nevermark wrote:
| What a well reasoned stance!
|
| They note that they don't expect their view to address challenges
| without additional material, but one challenge struck me.
|
| Slow diffusion, which gets bottlenecked by human beings learning
| to adapt to significant new technologies, drops considerably if a
| technology juices startups in other areas than the tech itself.
|
| I.e. existing organizations may not be the bottleneck for change,
| if widely available AI makes disruptive (cheaper initially,
| higher quality eventually) startups much easier in general to
| start and to scale.
| xpe wrote:
| > The statement "AI is normal technology" is three things: a
| description of current AI, a prediction about the foreseeable
| future of AI, and a prescription about how we should treat it.
|
| A question for the author(s), at least one of whom is
| participating in the discussion (thanks!): Why try to lump
| together description, prediction, and prescription under the
| "normal" adjective?
|
| Discussing AI is fraught. My claim: conflating those three under
| the "normal" label seems likely to backfire and lead to
| unnecessary confusion. Why not instead keep these separate?
|
| My main objection is this: it locks in a narrative that tries to
| neatly fuse description, prediction, and prescription. I recoil
| at this; it feels like an unnecessary coupling. Better to remain
| fluid and not lock in a narrative. The field is changing so fast,
| making description by itself very challenging. Predictions should
| update on new information, including how we frame the problem and
| our evolving values.
|
| A little bit about my POV in case it gives useful context: I've
| found the authors (Narayanan and Kapoor) to be quite level-headed
| and sane w.r.t. AI discussions, unlike many others. I'll mention
| Gary Marcus as one counterexample; I find it hard to pin Marcus
| down on the actual form of his arguments or concrete predictions.
| His pieces often feel like rants without a clear underlying
| logical backbone (at least in the year or so I've read his work).
| mr_toad wrote:
| Statistically prediction and description are two sides of the
| same coin. Even a simple average is both.
| xpe wrote:
| > Statistically prediction and description are two sides of
| the same coin. Even a simple average is both.
|
| I'll restate your comment in my language in the hopes of
| making it clearer. First, the mean is a descriptive
| statistic. Second, it is possible to build a very simple
| predictive model using the mean (over observed data).
|
| Ok, but I don't see how this applies to my comment above. Are
| you disagreeing with some part of my comment?
|
| You're using a metaphor "two sides of the same coin"... what
| is the coin here? How does it connect with my points above?
| randomwalker wrote:
| Thanks for the comment! I agree -- it's important to remain
| fluid. We've taken steps to make sure that predictively
| speaking, the normal technology worldview is empirically
| testable. Some of those empirical claims are in this paper and
| others in coming in follow-ups. We are committed to revising
| our thinking if it turns out that our framework doesn't
| generate good predictions and effective prescriptions.
|
| We do try to admit it when we get things wrong. One example is
| our past view (that we have since repudiated) that worrying
| about superintelligence distracts from more immediate harms.
| cainxinth wrote:
| It already is for me. I've been using LLMs daily for years now. I
| don't get the people claiming AGI every two minutes any more than
| the people claiming these tools are useless.
|
| LLM reasoning abilities are very fragile and often overfitted to
| training data. But if still you haven't figured out how to do
| anything useful with an LLM, warts and all, that says more about
| you than LLMs.
| MattSayar wrote:
| I don't believe LLMs will directly lead to AGI. I'm also
| annoyed by the folks who hype it with the same passion as
| crypto bros.
|
| As new "thinking" techniques and agentic behavior takes off, I
| think LLMs will continue to incrementally improve and the real
| trick is finding ways to make them work with the known
| limitations they have. And they can do quite a bit
| cootsnuck wrote:
| Very good read. They've articulated points I keep trying to
| express to people.
|
| I think their stances and predictions will start to be held by
| more and more people as the illusion / frenzy / FUD from the
| current..."fog" created by all the AI hype and mystique subsides.
| It may take another year or two, but public discourse eventually
| adapts/tires of repeated notions of "the sky is falling" once
| enough time has piled up without convincing evidence.
| iamgopal wrote:
| Small fast ( binary ? ) AI will be as simple as storing data in
| database and query it, in fact, very soon specialised software
| will come in to market to do so, guided by large LLM.
| potatoman22 wrote:
| What do you mean
| callc wrote:
| > The normal technology frame is about the relationship between
| technology and society.
|
| There is a huge differentiating factor for LLMs that makes it not
| normal: the blatant disregard for the ownership rights of
| everyone in the world. What other "normal" technology has so
| callously stolen everything it can without consequence?
|
| The music industry? Artists getting inspired and too closely
| imitating other artists? I genuinely want to know. And if there
| is such a suitable example, how did society react? Is there
| relevant history we can learn from here?
|
| Putting aside other the other problems (capital ownership class
| salivating at the prospect of using LLM bots instead of humans,
| reduced critical thinking and traditional learning, environmental
| impact, other societal changes), this is my main turn-off for
| LLMs.
|
| Give me a model trained on a responsible dataset (not something
| our grandparents would scold us for doing) and that I can on
| consumer hardware then I can use LLMs guilt free.
| j45 wrote:
| I find in all the hype, that it's important to remember that AI
| is just software. A remarkable, and different kind of software.
| But software.
| Philpax wrote:
| And software rules the world ;)
|
| More seriously: software can drive hardware, and software can
| be endlessly replicated. The ramifications of these for those
| of us living in the physical world may be surprising.
| Zr01 wrote:
| *software as a service
| j45 wrote:
| It can be but privately hosted it's just an interface.
| pluto_modadic wrote:
| Burning the planet for a ponzi scheme isn't normal.
|
| The healthiest thing for /actual/ AI to develop is for the
| current addiction to LLMs to die off. For the current bets by
| OpenAI, Gemini, DeepSeek, etc to lose steam. Prompts are a
| distraction, and every single company trying to commodify this
| are facing an impossible problem in /paying for the electricity/.
| Currently they're just insisting on building more power plants,
| more datacenters, which is like trying to do more compute with
| vacuum relays. They're digging in the wrong place for
| breakthroughs, and all the current ventures will go bust and be
| losses for investors. If they start doing computation with
| photons or something like that, then call me back.
| FL33TW00D wrote:
| All data centres consume ~1% of global electricity. A very
| small fraction.
| loeber wrote:
| Virtually all of this is false. AI is neither burning the
| planet nor a ponzi scheme. If you're concerned about energy
| costs, consider for just a second that increased demand for
| computation directly incentivizes the construction of
| datacenters, co-located with renewable (read: free) energy
| sources at scale. ChatGPT isn't going to be powered by diesel.
| jzymbaluk wrote:
| The only thing standing in the way of
| nuclear/solar/hydroelectric data centers is local laws and
| regulations. All the big cloud providers are actively
| researching this. see Microsoft's interest in acquiring the
| three mile island nuclear reactor for an example[1]
|
| [1]
| https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/09/26/1104516/three-
| mi...
| woah wrote:
| If only Chomsky and Lisp received this level of investment, we
| would have pure philosophical symbolic logic proving the answer
| to the universe by now
| bilsbie wrote:
| AI having the same impact as the internet. Changes everything and
| changes nothing at the same time.
| tempodox wrote:
| I wouldn't call putting everything into overdrive "nothing".
| bilsbie wrote:
| We still pay bills and have mortgages. Still drink coffee.
| Same dogs and cats. Same roof technology.
| jollyllama wrote:
| Has the comparison to the domestication of the dog been made yet?
| lubujackson wrote:
| I like these "worldview adjustment" takes. I'm reminded of Jeff
| Bezos' TED Talk (from 18 years ago). I was curious what someone
| who started Amazon would choose to highlight in his talk and the
| topic alone was the most impactful thing for me - the adoption of
| electricity:
| https://www.ted.com/talks/jeff_bezos_the_electricity_metapho...
|
| He discussed the structural and cultural changes, the weird and
| dangerous period when things moved fast and broke badly and drew
| the obvious parallels between "electricity is new" to "internet
| is new" as a core paradigm shift for humanity. AI certainly feels
| like another similar potential shift.
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