I don’t think that’s what he meant. They both are surveillance tools. He’s just upset only one of those is making people advertise their leave in protest.
Correct, but advertising was a better disguise for surveillance. AI goes well beyond surveillance and many evil use cases are now obvious to more people.
Advertising has the appearance of representing an on-going revenue source for an increasing number of devices used in our daily lives by way of surveillance and creation of a picture of an individuals habits and psychology in order to manipulate said psychology to induce the individual to spend more money on literally worthless shit.
That is a threat to the fundamental stability of society.
I think it's worse than that. Or at least, the products that have been built because of advertising are worse than that. Instagram/TikTok/Facebook are all ultimately just surfaces to serve ads, but they've wormed their way into their users' consciousness in fairly insidious ways
Advertising turned brains of entire generation (or maybe a few) into mush.
All intellectual, psych and social scores are in free fall since introduction of ad-supported attention grabbing internet.
AI is theorethical threat. Advertising is a constant detriment to our brains, societies and culture.
If AI can mitigate a fraction of the damage that ads do it will have massive positive impact.
We live in times where everyone can pick their own flavor of apocalypse to be scared of. Ads are leading us into Idiocracy since ~2004 and made huge progress towards it.
Google and Meta's wealth came at the cost of civilization getting sucked dry of its attention and mental capacity.
It’s funny how the [very real] thing that normalizes the exploitation of user data, enables “reel casinos,” suffocates creators and replaces them with “influencers,” etc. is compared with the [still very abstract] danger of AI.
Even before big money was on the table, people didn’t blink an eye at starting to work for Google/Facebook, “solving fun tasks.”
(OP here)
FWIW I despise the addictiveness, er engagement optimization that Google and others do. I have said so inside and outside the company many, many times. I would never have agreed to work on that stuff myself. One of the hobby projects I would like to work on is exploring how to use personal AI to beat those algorithms.
I respect the argument for not working for a company that does addictiveness work anywhere, even if you don't work on it yourself. But that's not where I drew the line.
Also FWIW I disagree the danger of AI is abstract. A lot is happening right now, in education for example.
So it is ok to believe (even despise) it is bad but as long as I don't work directly on it but my super big paycheck gets funded by it, all good! Cheers!!
I actually work in education and can share the following first-hand: the things we now build, the ways we now educate, and all the opportunities for reaching out to students are beautiful. I foresee that _many_ people will cut corners now, but I believe that, in the end, we will get a new generation of education that is personal and humane.
I don't mean this as preaching some shiny future that I hope will magically arrive. I already see these things happening. And I also see all the ways people misuse the tools or take shortcuts.
Educators with good intentions, skills, and powerful tools will always beat ignorance and laziness relying on those same tools.
To a guy who knows nothing about nuclear physics, an atomic bomb is very abstract until it blows up and becomes very concrete. Should we wait until it explodes to consider the risk?
Comparison between LLMs and atomic weapons just mystifies the issue.
I wrote about this here: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49685036">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49685036
Is there anything specific you, as an LLM equivalent of a nuclear physicist (if that’s a fair comparison), can highlight in terms of these imminent dangers?
There's no "imminent" danger, but right now we are on a course where ASI will be developed. There are many reasons to believe that ASI will be dangerous. There are some books you could read...
AI is a threat if you're a messy codebase, an unsolved math problem, or cancer. Otherwise you only have an improved quality of living to look forward to IMO.
Spot on. Or because of addictiveness. Or impact on democracy. Or ruining people's ability to focus on anything. Those attention grabbing algos havent been designed by non-technical people.
Is there any particular area of employment for algo geeks that you would approve of? Maybe we should just live off unemployment benefits instead of working?
I could have explained that better, but it was already getting too long.
Personally if I could Thanos-snap AI out of existence I would, but as long as it exists, it seems better on balance to make good use of it where possible than just try to ignore it.
"Focusing more on AI stuff" ... not really? Of course I was using AI a lot in my work at Google, as well as contributing to AI acceleration. Now I won't be contributing to acceleration and I can be as cautious as I want to be about using it.
When the both ends of your platform continue buying and selling you tend to not stand in the way. I personally can't believe these stupid ads sell anything at all. Since they call it a 'business model' software people don't think about it too much.
While I get the spirit of your message, advertising has been around for over a century, and I don’t believe it has done near the damage to society over that timespan that AI will likely do in a decade (if we’re not careful and responsible).
I also don’t believe addiction and other psychological exploits are used for the sole purpose of ad revenue. There are other more direct forms of monetization involved, such as microtransactions and subscriptions.
If you really want to blame something, it really all comes down to one word:
It's a shame so many people only resigned for ethical reasons once their employer's threat level progressed from exploitative to existential. Better late than never, but that does not excuse their tardiness.
Advertising has become 'active', very recently in the overall lifespan of advertising. For most of it's lifespan it was passive, it blared out at you from the TV or radio or bus stop. Now, however, it's reaching out and taking pieces of you back for analysis and reconstruction, and on-selling to any other entity interested in doing the same.
The reason is greed, yes.
We can't regulate human greed, but we can regulate the manifestation of its symptoms.
We can also choose not to work towards expanding the capacity of said symptoms.
> We can also choose not to work towards expanding the capacity of said symptoms.
Not if we need to eat and raise our kids. Then we need careers, which depend on what everyone else is doing, so we can't stop, our own future depends on how competitive we remain in the new context. I see an idealist streak here, some kind of naive platonism that ignores everything runs at a cost and nothing executes for free like platonic heaven. We can't take decisions that contradict our own needs.
Despite what the media leads you to think, there are still jobs that provide a living without contributing much to current social problems. You can do ok in medium tier cities with an average job, and still live in a safe neighborhood. If you pick a state with a good university system, the kids can get a good education without any debt. They won’t automatically get the connections of a top-tier school, but if you teach them the importance of connections early then they will do well (these schools often have strong alumni networks).
Continuing to work for evil people is a choice. Don’t brush it off.
To think greed is some innate human trait seems to not be greatly substantiated by evidence on early human behavior. To see what we call greed all around us in market economy is only proof how we're all drilled from early childhood onwards to exhibit this behavior of greed, in accumulating money to survive, to archieve social status and approval etc. Drastic changes the economic system, and the very behavior set we are all programmed into, would more than likely regulate the behavior of greed. Though obviously that is extremely unlikely to happen.
It will not slow to a crawl because popularity = power. Even if the the platforms themselves stop ads, the users will not, either for other or for themselves.
Ads are what allow these products to exist. Take away ads, and the platform cannot sustain its own server requirements. People won't pay for stuff like this; it's only mainstream because it's ad-supported.
One hand you have proven damage. And if we are honest, the damage is way more than what has been proven; especially 2nd/3rd order which are easy to reason but hard to prove.
On the other hand you have pure speculation.
Not only that, AI has been immensely liberating/empowering for many ordinary people (That's why these AI companies have millions of users).
says a lot about them if you really think about it. These are dinosaurs who refuse/unable to adapt, and is being pushed out and/or felt too useless to get out by themselves while finding the perfect excuse: I have principles; ai bad.
But they never did quit saying we are harming children, exploiting people with addiction, getting people addicted to social media, earning money from distributing scam/virus thru ads. These people are highest to the highest hypocrites.
I think people with objections to googles business model simply don’t join the company in the first place. We’re decades from Google+ and other various “oh maybe Google isn’t perfect” events, the advertising is a known entity.
There has been a shift, and people are reacting to it
If tons of people thought advertising was going to lead to the extinction of humanity, then probably more people would be extremely worried about advertising.
I understand that some people think AI is completely 100% safe, but you guys also have to be aware that a lot of people disagree with you, otherwise you're going to find their actions very confusing.
I agree, while reading the post I was thinking that the potential negative impacts the author listed might be subtle and detrimental along the same lines of social media.
Sure, there may be some bad actors who utilize it to hack computer systems.
But most of the negative impact will be the subtle influences on the mind which are hard to identify and quantify.
BLKNSLVR · · focus · HN ↗
codeduck · · focus · HN ↗
Lammy · · focus · HN ↗
King-Aaron · · focus · HN ↗
s900mhz · · focus · HN ↗
King-Aaron · · focus · HN ↗
7bit · · focus · HN ↗
ozgung · · focus · HN ↗
BLKNSLVR · · focus · HN ↗
That is a threat to the fundamental stability of society.
swiftcoder · · focus · HN ↗
I think it's worse than that. Or at least, the products that have been built because of advertising are worse than that. Instagram/TikTok/Facebook are all ultimately just surfaces to serve ads, but they've wormed their way into their users' consciousness in fairly insidious ways
scotty79 · · focus · HN ↗
All intellectual, psych and social scores are in free fall since introduction of ad-supported attention grabbing internet.
AI is theorethical threat. Advertising is a constant detriment to our brains, societies and culture.
If AI can mitigate a fraction of the damage that ads do it will have massive positive impact.
We live in times where everyone can pick their own flavor of apocalypse to be scared of. Ads are leading us into Idiocracy since ~2004 and made huge progress towards it.
Google and Meta's wealth came at the cost of civilization getting sucked dry of its attention and mental capacity.
smugglerFlynn · · focus · HN ↗
Even before big money was on the table, people didn’t blink an eye at starting to work for Google/Facebook, “solving fun tasks.”
roca · · focus · HN ↗
I respect the argument for not working for a company that does addictiveness work anywhere, even if you don't work on it yourself. But that's not where I drew the line.
Also FWIW I disagree the danger of AI is abstract. A lot is happening right now, in education for example.
BLKNSLVR · · focus · HN ↗
+1000
CrimsonRain · · focus · HN ↗
roca · · focus · HN ↗
smugglerFlynn · · focus · HN ↗
I actually work in education and can share the following first-hand: the things we now build, the ways we now educate, and all the opportunities for reaching out to students are beautiful. I foresee that _many_ people will cut corners now, but I believe that, in the end, we will get a new generation of education that is personal and humane.
I don't mean this as preaching some shiny future that I hope will magically arrive. I already see these things happening. And I also see all the ways people misuse the tools or take shortcuts.
Educators with good intentions, skills, and powerful tools will always beat ignorance and laziness relying on those same tools.
killerstorm · · focus · HN ↗
smugglerFlynn · · focus · HN ↗
I wrote about this here: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49685036">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49685036
Is there anything specific you, as an LLM equivalent of a nuclear physicist (if that’s a fair comparison), can highlight in terms of these imminent dangers?
killerstorm · · focus · HN ↗
hypfer · · focus · HN ↗
AI is concerning in some aspects, yes, but the loss of a shared reality has nothing to do with that, and is even more scary.
jimmaswell · · focus · HN ↗
etdznots · · focus · HN ↗
aenis · · focus · HN ↗
baobabKoodaa · · focus · HN ↗
jwilber · · focus · HN ↗
Or do it as a hobby. I love shooting guns, I certainly wouldn’t shoot people if that was the only way to make a career shooting guns.
thinkingemote · · focus · HN ↗
> I plan to study how AI agents debug code and whether debugging tools that can make them more effective at that.
> I want to use AI agents to bring some of my hobby project ideas to life.
> I’m keen to reap the benefits of AI
and addresses the anti-AI view:
> AI detractors think that AI won’t really work. I think it will. (ed. for brev)
The main reason then is the concern of the velocity of the rollout and the increased pervasiveness of AI. Too fast, too much.
roca · · focus · HN ↗
Personally if I could Thanos-snap AI out of existence I would, but as long as it exists, it seems better on balance to make good use of it where possible than just try to ignore it.
"Focusing more on AI stuff" ... not really? Of course I was using AI a lot in my work at Google, as well as contributing to AI acceleration. Now I won't be contributing to acceleration and I can be as cautious as I want to be about using it.
[deleted] · · focus · HN ↗
[deleted]
wseqyrku · · focus · HN ↗
jader201 · · focus · HN ↗
I also don’t believe addiction and other psychological exploits are used for the sole purpose of ad revenue. There are other more direct forms of monetization involved, such as microtransactions and subscriptions.
If you really want to blame something, it really all comes down to one word:
Greed.
altairprime · · focus · HN ↗
BLKNSLVR · · focus · HN ↗
Advertising has become 'active', very recently in the overall lifespan of advertising. For most of it's lifespan it was passive, it blared out at you from the TV or radio or bus stop. Now, however, it's reaching out and taking pieces of you back for analysis and reconstruction, and on-selling to any other entity interested in doing the same.
The reason is greed, yes.
We can't regulate human greed, but we can regulate the manifestation of its symptoms.
We can also choose not to work towards expanding the capacity of said symptoms.
visarga · · focus · HN ↗
Not if we need to eat and raise our kids. Then we need careers, which depend on what everyone else is doing, so we can't stop, our own future depends on how competitive we remain in the new context. I see an idealist streak here, some kind of naive platonism that ignores everything runs at a cost and nothing executes for free like platonic heaven. We can't take decisions that contradict our own needs.
iamnothere · · focus · HN ↗
Continuing to work for evil people is a choice. Don’t brush it off.
Itoldmyselfso · · focus · HN ↗
BLKNSLVR · · focus · HN ↗
tjah1087 · · focus · HN ↗
Instagram? Tiktok? Facebook?
Social media feeds off addiction to generate ad revenue.
And how much damage has social media done to political and social institutions and to collective mental health?
Ads on other web properties are not weaponised in the same way.
socalgal2 · · focus · HN ↗
rcMgD2BwE72F · · focus · HN ↗
Eating too much fruits has never been healthy, but gorging oneself on raw sugar is worse. Perfect is the enemy of the good.
socalgal2 · · focus · HN ↗
stonogo · · focus · HN ↗
CrimsonRain · · focus · HN ↗
On the other hand you have pure speculation.
Not only that, AI has been immensely liberating/empowering for many ordinary people (That's why these AI companies have millions of users).
rcMgD2BwE72F · · focus · HN ↗
If you really want to blame something, it really all comes down to one word: substance use disorder.
4b11b4 · · focus · HN ↗
I suppose yeah... It's just greed and corruption.
The incentive structures are wrong/poor/malignant
nickthegreek · · focus · HN ↗
CrimsonRain · · focus · HN ↗
But they never did quit saying we are harming children, exploiting people with addiction, getting people addicted to social media, earning money from distributing scam/virus thru ads. These people are highest to the highest hypocrites.
rtpg · · focus · HN ↗
I think people with objections to googles business model simply don’t join the company in the first place. We’re decades from Google+ and other various “oh maybe Google isn’t perfect” events, the advertising is a known entity.
There has been a shift, and people are reacting to it
streptomycin · · focus · HN ↗
I understand that some people think AI is completely 100% safe, but you guys also have to be aware that a lot of people disagree with you, otherwise you're going to find their actions very confusing.
informal007 · · focus · HN ↗
4b11b4 · · focus · HN ↗
Sure, there may be some bad actors who utilize it to hack computer systems.
But most of the negative impact will be the subtle influences on the mind which are hard to identify and quantify.