WSJ Reports on 'Hard-line Activists Ramping Up for the War With AI' (msn.com)
- Reference: 0184422458
- News link: https://slashdot.org/story/26/07/12/0643218/wsj-reports-on-hard-line-activists-ramping-up-for-the-war-with-ai
- Source link: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/the-hard-line-activists-ramping-up-for-the-war-with-ai/ar-AA27IpTr
"The Bay Area's AI boom is drawing young disillusioned men and women to join the fight against it. They are upending their lives and leaving behind careers for think tanks, nonprofits and street protest groups."
> Their cause is now riding a surge of [2]anti-AI backlash . Many Americans are souring on the technology amid mass layoffs, data center sprawl, [3]reports of chatbot-fueled attacks by unstable users and hacking tools that have panicked [4]cybersecurity professionals . Seventy percent of U.S. adults believe AI will cost jobs, and 55% believe it will do more harm than good in their daily lives, according to a recent Quinnipiac University poll. But for activists on the front lines, the driving fear is often more dramatic: human extinction. They cling to dire predictions, like Geoffrey Hinton's. The Nobel laureate, dubbed the "godfather of AI" for his work on artificial neural networks, warns of a 10% to 20% chance AI will wipe out humans.
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> At its most extreme and troubling end, some believe they must stop an AI apocalypse by any means necessary. In April, an unknown assailant fired 13 shots at the home of an Indianapolis councilman, leaving a note: "no data centers." That same month, authorities arrested a 20-year-old Texas college student for an attack on OpenAI CEO Sam Altman's home in San Francisco, and charged him with attempted murder and arson. The student was carrying an [5]anti-AI document with a section on "our impending extinction," according to a federal criminal complaint. He has pleaded not guilty and his lawyers have said his actions appear to have been driven by an "acute mental-health crisis, not a desire to harm."
[1] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/the-hard-line-activists-ramping-up-for-the-war-with-ai/ar-AA27IpTr
[2] https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/the-american-rebellion-against-ai-is-gaining-steam-94b72529
[3] https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/chatgpt-ai-stein-erik-soelberg-murder-suicide-6b67dbfb
[4] https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/anthropic-urges-global-pause-in-ai-development-flags-self-improvement-risk-99cefb73
[5] https://www.wsj.com/us-news/altman-attack-suspect-called-for-luigi-ing-tech-ceos-in-online-messages-2f1702da
Responsibility not terror (Score:5, Insightful)
The real problem is that the companies are going to try and refuse the responsibility for the AI actions.
As in:
Yes my AI was empowered to set prices, but we did not want it to set a price less than a $1000 and it set a price of 10 cents. No we do not want to give up all other transactions the AI approved.
Yes the AI hired only christian white woman and illegally asked if they had children, but we did not mean to break the law. That was the LLM, not our fault.
Yes the AI illegally rejected every rental applicant that was single but we did not mean to violate the Fair Housing Law. We never told it to do that, it is just the algorithm.
You can't sue us if we did not intend to break the law.
No. They can definitely sue you for unintenionally breaking the law.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
In the end you are just restating Wilholt's law
> “Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”
It's getting the people who haven't yet been visibly targeted by this to understand that only a tiny tiny set is really in the in-group and that they, unless they are actual billionaires of the right group, aren't in it which is the difficulty.
smh (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm just throwing out ideas here, but maybe the current crop of AI execs shouldn't have gone around issuing dire warnings while claiming they had no choice but to continue developing the very technology they were warning about. That has pretty predictable consequences.
Re: Who is funding these groups (Score:2)
Do you have a link where I can get funding to be anti generative AI? I've stupidly been doing it for free.
Re: (Score:1)
Indeed the US has solved all of it's problems, and has become a paradise on Earth. Therefore any criticism must be the work of the Enemy. Especially if this criticism comes from the younger generation, who definitely have a future, like being able to afford to own homes and to have children.
Re: (Score:2)
I could use some extra income, do you have a signup url?
Organiztions do what they are paid to do (Score:1)
The Wall Street Journal used to be a very good newspaper with a moderately conservative viewpoint and an extreme (some would say nutty) Radical Right editorial page. Now it just exists to provide a veneer of respectability to whatever scheme the hard Radical Right has cooked up to demonize a new Other (or resurrect the demonization of a previous Other) and hoover more money out of the pockets of the median Citizen.
Re: (Score:3)
You should look up what happened to newspapers like the (London) Times when Rupert Murdoch bought them up. His entire shtick is buying up journalism and converting it into what the lawyers politely describe as "entertainment". He, or rather News Corp has been doing clickbait from before people even started clicking.
Re: Organiztions do what they are paid to do (Score:1)
Nothing happened to The Times. It's the best selling broadsheet in the UK and is far from being a right wing tabloid. Perhaps try reading it sometime instead of spouting some 3rd hand BS you saw on reddit.
LLMs = human extinction? (Score:2)
Anyone who looks at the current state of LLM technology and fears human extinction either doesn't understand LLM tech or is wildly extrapolating.
Re: (Score:2)
Well, LLMs have been wildly mis-marketed, contributing to people not understanding them.
Re: (Score:2)
Or they are assuming stupid humans will use tech not suited for the purpose of thinking like a human to replace thinking humans. How much do we "assume" by our own nature and life long learned lessons that is missing from LLMs is being ignored by the forcing everyone to adopt people? Humans have a learned set of "institutional knowledge" that is learned in an incremental way along with wired instincts for group survival that LLMs don't have. So what happens when you put this type of tech in charge of things
Re: (Score:2)
Hopefully people will eventually realize when LLMs aren't good at a particular job and change course.
Re: LLMs = human extinction? (Score:2)
I suspect sunk cost fallacy will come into play for a fair few. Some companies are merrily slurping the cool aid as their software quality falls off a cliff. One I contracted for took offence when flawed code was pointed out. Their solution was to put more AI into the system not less. I can't imagine they'll last too long at that rate.
Re: (Score:2)
Anyone who thinks that the bots are going to wipe us out is overestimating the bots; but it seems like there is a disconcertingly large supply of people who are just chomping at the bit to replace people regardless of whether the bots are up to the job or not.
Re: (Score:2)
> there is a disconcertingly large supply of people who are just chomping at the bit to replace people regardless of whether the bots are up to the job or not.
I'll quibble with this a bit. They are chomping at the bit to replace people with something they think will yield equivalent or better results than people at lower cost. That may or may not materialize in any particular situation. Remember the recent article about [1]Ford rehiring engineers [msn.com] after replacing them with AI didn't pan out?
[1] https://www.msn.com/en-us/autos/news/ford-rehires-more-than-300-engineers-who-were-replaced-by-ai/ar-AA26TOCN
Re: (Score:2)
The current crop of bots (physical ones), certainly... wait until the AGI comes along and starts designing the robots and tasks the factories with building them.
The AIs (which aren't bots) taking the jobs are good enough for now... just like eventually the room full of monkeys will type Shakespeare... once they get to AGI, it'll all be just one central computer running everything.
Re: (Score:3)
I think it is a IQ bell curve meme.
Low IQ: LLMs may kill us all
Average: LLMs are just programs that produce text
High IQ: (People with) LLMs may kill us all
I don't believe in Anthropics fear mongering about the treacherous AI or what their current bad vision is. But I believe that some people are quite interested in wiring weapon systems to AI.
This won't yield Skynet, but it may yield some literally inhuman wars, where some stupid computer makes kill decisions and the human operator is detached enough to not
"the most extreme and troubling end" (Score:3)
Honestly, the weirdest thing about the 'hard line activists' and the 'war with AI' is how much there isn't to it.
This is an industry that puts out a 'tehehe, we're an existential threat!' press release every time they need another VC round; and whose c-levels openly discuss how they will annihilate all human jobs and maybe someone should think about what we should do about that; and who routinely trample local interests to get their infrastructure builds rammed through; and what's the 'war with AI'? One idiot who tossed a molotov and a disgruntled constituent? That's it?
The same oddity is true for 'AI' companies and nation states, also very puzzlingly. To go by the rhetoric of 'AI' being an existential struggle for the future of industry and whether the AGI omnimind will speak english or mandarin you'd think that we'd see at least a bit of skullduggery. Prominent 'AI' hires occasionally dying under mysterious circumstances; sabotage of expensive GPU farms, maybe a Rosenberg-style show trial or two. But no. There's some lightweight hacking and ToS-violating 'distillation'; and a few export shenanigans; but aside from that it's basically the same as any other SaaS nonsense but with bigger numbers. Weirdly unserious.
Re: (Score:2)
I don't think those things would work. The knowledge of how to create state of the art AI is widely distributed. Tens of thousands of people have the knowledge and skills to do it, and many more could acquire it if needed. The data centers are a commodity. Currently the demand exceeds the supply, making it an expensive commodity, but it's still just a question of money.
If you started killing people and sabotaging data centers, you'd risk going to prison for life and invite retaliation. And what would y
We are run by 2 liars and a moron (Score:1)
Bare with me this takes a bit of logic
The purpose of the economy is to produce things for humans to consume.
The economy has 2 inputs, Capital and Labour, and two outputs more capital and consumption.
We produce more than we ever have in history.
*Billionaires and Trillionaires do not consume much more food than the rest of us. They consume more luxury items than regular people but not 1000x more. Most of the earnings of the very rich go to producing more capital.
*The over 55 make up 27% of the Canadia
Re: We are run by 2 liars and a moron (Score:2)
wtf has this got to do with hardline AI activists? I doubt many 55+ are in that group. Hope you feel better though.
Sit inside are worthless nonsense (Score:1)
It's a holdover from the 60s. It was one part of a much broader movement that included a shitload of effort fighting voter suppression.
The current tactic for the corporations and the Epstein class is to just prevent just enough people from voting to get whatever the hell they want.
Because of winner take off first past the post voting all they have to do is get 51% of the vote and they can have anyone they want running the show and it doesn't matter what you think or what you want.
About 30% of any
Poor logic (Score:3)
> They are upending their lives and leaving behind careers for think tanks, nonprofits and street protest groups.
That should read "for think tanks, nonprofits or street protest groups". The Venn diagram of people smart enough to work for think tanks and those who engage in street protests is the empty set.
Re: Poor logic (Score:2)
Having seen what some think tanks put out I'm not so sure.
Electricity (Score:2)
While humans are being asked to conserve energy, the data centers are free to buy as much as can be provided.
The bigger risk? (Score:2)
> The Nobel laureate, dubbed the "godfather of AI" for his work on artificial neural networks, warns of a 10% to 20% chance AI will wipe out humans.
The AI apocalypse may be a real threat, and the ten-to-twenty-percent likelihood mentioned above may be valid. But my bigger concern is that all the energy devoted to AI will push global warming farther and faster than we expect it to, and that our species will start to go extinct because we can't feed ourselves and can't survive the heat.
Re: The bigger risk? (Score:2)
Supposedly it already accounts for 0.5-1.5% of global usage already expected to go to 3% by 2030. That's A considerable amount for a working Clippy.
Disingenuous (Score:5, Insightful)
The vast majority of activists appear worried about a financial apocalypse not a human one. The vision where AI takes jobs and fucks over the environment whilst simultaneous oppressing us via improvements in mass surveillance. It's not a war on AI it's a war on the morons pushing flawed AI.
Re:Disingenuous (Score:5, Insightful)
The financial apocalypse will cause the human one.
It's a war on those who think that AI should control every aspect of our lives.
Re: (Score:2)
Exactly... once they replace most workers with AI, an entry level position is going to require five Ph.Ds and twenty years experience in a 5 year old industry, and when they can't find anyone, they just give that position to the AI, and now there's no jobs for the dirty masses.
Soon, a starter job at McDonalds will require an AI programming degree to adjust the robot arms that do everything as needed.
Re: (Score:3)
If such a financial apocalypse materializes, I would put the blame more on the way our economic system is organized and regulated (or not) than any particular technology like LLMs.
Right now, the whole AI thing looks more like a bubble in the technology sector than anything which could rightfully be called a financial apocalypse. AI companies are burning through cash, and other companies aren't willing to pay enough for tokens to make AI companies profitable.