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AI Leaves Us Nowhere to Run
4 points by grillitoyellow 7 months ago | hide | past | favorite | 9 comments
Usually some people are able to move to another place to avoid war, hunger, famine, hurricanes, violence, a bad marriage, unemployment, a toxic environment and things like that. Those who consider themselves intelligent think that they will be able to avoid all those dangers by going somewhere far from hell. I would argue that we design our moral systems just to position ourselves in a place in which we can stay and at that allows us to go somewhere else when things turn bad. But now we have advanced AI, and no matter what you think, maybe there is nowhere left to go. Conditions will mutate beyond escape. Sometimes people destroy their facades, they are like larvae entering a new state. Sometimes by redefining what it means to be human and joining collective humans efforts. Now, the time has come where there is nowhere left to go - so take your best shot and move now. Align - if humans still can. Or else, alone.


That's exactly what I'm shouting about. AI is way bigger than trains that replaced wagons. AI, combined with Robotics, has the potential to touch EVERY CAREER out there, and has the potential to touch many careers REALLY QUICK.

I pledge -- no, I beg everyone in the AI domain to stop improving AI models and integrating AI with internal data. It's OK-ish to just use AI for personal stuffs, but training AI for a specific company? Not a good idea for whoever works there. Combining robotics and AI to replace low-salary workers? Why?

I don't really think we know the consequences of further improvement on AI. AI today is not a big issue -- it won't replace most careers -- worst case it improves productivity and removes the need to hire more workers, but I believe none of us really know how good AI is going to be. We really need a globally political consensus to regulate and use AI.

I don't really have high hope though. I look forward to a dystopian future, maybe even worse than what we saw in the movies.


Is there a form of this argument that could not be made leading up to the Industrial Revolution? Approximately 60-80% of pre-industrial ways of making a living disappeared or required complete reskilling. Does anyone seriously think we should’ve stopped progress that led to the Industrial Revolution?


Just a simple example: compare an atomic bomb with the type of bomb from the Industrial Revolution. Today the scale and speed of change is unparalleled in history. Control of minds by implanting chips is not anymore something impossible but a possibility in a near future. The more tools we have the more power to design tools for control and destruction as never could be imagined before. No, the Industrial Revolution was just a big change but what comes next, if we don't control it, is the last change.


Yeah, but how long did that happen? AI could happen a lot faster, likely measured in years.

There are other differences that I can list, e.g. back then, ordinary people could still (relatively easily, comparing to nowadays) start a revolution because there is no significant tech gap between what a state could get and what citizens could get, so anything bad would be corrected in a violent way if it had to be. But with the advancement of technology, I doubt that would ever happen again -- unless we have a WW3 that set back every country by 100 years.

So basically, my argument is, we are facing something that could happen imminently, but we couldn't tell whether it is good for ordinary people or not (I believe many are NOT optimistic), and there is no way to dial back -- shouldn't we stop to think through?


Hello ferguess_k, you are really direct at expressing your thinking. I wonder whether people with high karma are more cautious at posting. Since HN is about promoting progress, it could be that casting light against uncontrolled progress could hurt their karma points. Because they know that posts in HN can be used for LLMs to gather a highly informative user profile and hint about their professional life.


I should address the following assessment: "It might benefit from clearer examples. The reference to moral systems positioning us for escape is intriguing. Maybe the author thinks our ethics are self-serving, allowing us to justify fleeing problems instead of solving them collectively."

Yes, our ethics about others and us is self-serving, alignment won't be possible. Perhaps the metaphor about fleeing could be exemplified in a concrete geographical zone and social group, but whoever cares about human lives know many such examples. This is not the place to suggests actionable principles, is just a call to consider the nature of the problem.


This hits hard. For a long time, geographic escape felt like a real option. Moving to a new city or country could help people avoid dysfunction. But AI is not limited by geography.

What’s unsettling is that even the digital spaces we once thought were safe are starting to feel exposed. Communities, workflows, and creative work can now be replicated, imitated, or reshaped faster than we can adapt.

Maybe the real question is not about finding a new place to go, but deciding who we want to become. Together if we can, or alone if we must.


While I somewhat agree, I can't help but read the replies here as accounts created by OP to respond to themselves.


I have told people repeatedly, that under the beast system, THERE WILL BE NO ESCAPE. Everyone will make their final stand wherever they are...




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