The Woman Who Showed President Biden ChatGPT

https://www.wired.com/story/arati-prabhakar-ostp-biden-science-tech-adviser/

by belter • 2 years ago

26 35 2 years ago

I can't stand the "OMG there's a new thing, we need to regulate it" way of thinking. No doubt in my mind the woman in the article doesn't understand much more about so-called "AI" than Biden.

2OEH8eoCRo0• 2 years ago

Born in India and raised in Texas, Prabhakar has a PhD in applied physics from Caltech and previously ran two US agencies: the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency. She also spent 15 years in Silicon Valley as a venture capitalist, including as president of Interval Research, Paul Allen’s legendary tech incubator, and has served as vice president or chief technology officer at several companies.

PicassoCTs• 2 years ago

Its in the nature of the beast, the boomer generation, being in the retreat-defeat of retirement, wants things stable, conservative, collapsing inwards at a snails pace. Your point of view has no party running

moffkalast• 2 years ago

The thing is, we do need regulation but not the kind that's being proposed, which appears to be more like regulatory capture by OpenAI & friends to enshrine deep learning at scale as something only verified multinationals with NSA backdoors can do and put up even larger barriers for entry for anyone else.

What's needed is practically the exact opposite, a set of rules that prevents work automation to be owned by a select few who will then manipulate the resulting techno-feudalist world with impunity because they need no one else. Things are changing too quickly, the fastest they ever have in the history of man even. Some people are probably preparing to enter a college programme right now to learn something that will be fully automated before they even get their degree.

ajmurmann• 2 years ago

I think it's easier to take arguments more seriously when the statement doesn't generalize across an entire generation.

krapp3• 2 years ago

Everyone but psychopaths wants to live in a stable society, conservatism is apparently a trend among the young, and the boomer generation is all but dead at this point. But go off.

drdaeman• 2 years ago

In an instant it became very, very obvious that the United States needed to speed up its efforts to regulate the AI industry

And the article says it as if that's some God-given truth...

The sad part is that AI won't "break out" and kill all humans aka stop this insanity. Life isn't a fairy^W cyberpunk tale.

go_elmo• 2 years ago

Laws are made for things that exist. If new things appear, laws might need to be adapted - to be decided by the voters.

ttrashh• 2 years ago

You read her qualifications and history? You still decided to write this comment?

IncreasePosts2• 2 years ago

It seems like she has a background in EE and physics, but almost all of her work is policy oriented and not actually hands-on building things, at which point, "when all you have is a hammer" seems relevant. From the article:

[Interviewer:] It’s almost predestined that you’d be in this job. As soon as you got your physics degree at Caltech, you went to DC and got enmeshed in policy.

nvy4• 2 years ago

This current iteration of "AI", by which I mean LLMs, seems only good at enabling generative spam and disinformation.

I think regulations are exactly what's required.

robertlagrant2• 2 years ago

seems only good at enabling generative spam and disinformation

This doesn't seem to make sense. Although it uses the word "disinformation", so perhaps an LLM wrote it.

ch4s32• 2 years ago

seems only good at enabling generative spam and disinformation.

That seems overly pessimistic. They're pretty good at generating summaries of text, simple machine translation, generating alternative prose, turning unstructured text into table-like data, providing a text interface over a corpus of facts, and probably a bunch of things I'm not thinking of.

oceanplexian• 2 years ago

The government has the legal authority to kill, imprison, and tax citizens. It can destroy entire industries with the stroke of a pen. The military can wipe other nations off the face of the Earth.

And you want to wield that awesome power for some trivial problem like spam on the Internet? This is exactly the kind of overreach the founding fathers intended to prevent.

belter2• 2 years ago

Why is this flagged? I would like to hear the reasoning from at least one of the people flagging it...

unyttigfjelltol• 2 years ago

You seem to have stood up a lightning rod in a thunderstorm. Didn't flag it, but also it's paywalled so didn't upvote it either.

gwbas1c• 2 years ago

I find that any article that goes against the popular "tech" narrative of the day gets flagged.

I once read a great article on Hacker News where Bill Gates and Warren Buffet explained tangible problems with Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. It ended up being flagged, because the article went against the "Bitcoin is going to take over the world" narrative.

bryanlarsen• 2 years ago

Read the comments. Did you think this article generated fruitful discussion?

belter2• 2 years ago

I agree it did not generate a fruitful discussion...But that is not what flagging is for.

vld_chk• 2 years ago

Oh boy, years after years, after everything we went so far, there are people in the world who believes that Big Tech invests billions dollars into AI (including data centers and infra) with only socially good intent and we should not at all touch anything Big Tech do …

The Woman Who Showed President Biden ChatGPT

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