Marha01

How will increased energy use from *carbon-neutral sources* cause climate change?

That future is not here yet, but my point still stands: once they are sufficiently developed (it's only a matter of time, perhaps 5 years, perhaps 20 years), your societal problem suddenly has a technological solution. QED.

For example: the current societal problem of not doing enough against climate change would disappear if we developed cheap fusion power and/or very cheap grid-scale batteries that would remove the intermittency issue from renewables. Such power sources would quickly replace fossil fuels simply due to better economics, no need to change society to care about climate change anymore.

People driving dangerously is not a technical problem.

Complete bullshit. This problem can be completely solved by a technical, not societal solution: actually working self-driving cars. Once they are available, all your imperfect societal solutions to the problem are not needed anymore.

Technological solutions to societal problems is one of the shortest paths to hell.

This is an unjustified blanket opinion. Sometimes, societal problems can be solved by technological progress. I think you simply lack imagination if you cannot think of any societal problem that would be solved by better technology.

It is not really inconsistent. Despite all the flaws of the current US government, USA is still a relatively free democracy. Russia is a full-blown fascist dictatorship. Russia is also a much more acute threat to me than Trump's USA, because I am from central European country formerly in Soviet Union's sphere of influence, that would be next on the chopping block if Ukraine falls.

I would really love to see examples of creatives using modern AI/LLMs to make quality art

Look up "The Chronicles of Bone". It's pretty good.

My great annoyance with all this blather about UBI and post-scarcity and new economic models is that it relies on taxing and redistributing the ~infinite profits of the largest tech companies on earth.

The arrival of true AGI and human-level robots will likely result in very strong deflation, since robotic factories will flood the market with goods produced for far cheaper than those in factories with human workers.

At that point, you don't need taxation. The government can just print the money for UBI. It would have to print the money anyway, to combat the massive deflation.

Why should AI make it worse? Can you point to any other important technology that historically made people in poor countries even poorer? Technological progress generally lifts people from poverty in the long run. There could be issues caused by disruption of established systems in the short term, though.

Food production is indeed a solved problem in most countries (we are almost post-scarcity when it comes to food), which is why obesity is a much bigger issue than hunger today. Hunger is present pretty much only in conflict zones. I fully expect such issues in conflict zones, even in AI post-scarcity world.

Housing is definitely not post-scarcity today, building a house is still very expensive, not to mention the limited availability of land zoned for housing.

There is also Humanizer:

https://github.com/blader/humanizer

AIs get replaced with newer models.

For less starving people? For less child abuse? For less climate change?

Yes. The only way to truly solve these issues is technological progress.

Many weapons designers thought they were making war “more humane” by creating weapons that killed faster and more decisively.

Do you think the world would be better off if we still killed ourselves with swords instead of drones? The result is the same. A death is a death. The real cause of wars is not "better weapons".

And this time around, it seems like only a minority that are billionaires will be able to move forward, and we all will be left behind.

I don't think this is true. Of course, rich people will always benefit the most from any technological advances. But there is no indication that the average Joe will be worse off in say, 20 years, compared to today. Medical advances alone coming down the pipeline will likely tip the scales towards future average Joe being better off compared to today. If I have to make a choice, for example: do I want to cut the deaths from diseases by half and fill the sky with Starlink satellites, or do nothing? I am picking the better medicice and Starlink-filled sky.

Colonizing space is progress.

Educational outcomes tank when computers are introduced to classrooms.

Correlation does not necessarily mean causation.

Teachers make mistakes, yes. But can you swap a teacher with another teacher without a student knowing? No, you can't. You can with a model and that is dangerous. And not only the company. If Ello wants to they can move students to a Chinese model and nobody would know the difference. Or the OAI model they've chosen can be dilluted or changed without Ello even knowing.

Sounds like this issue could be solved by an open-source teaching harness.

Good idea! Both versions sound great, in their own way.

I might have to revisit some of my old songs...

But the ground reality is that they don't lack tutors or educators.

As someone from a developing country: you are wrong. Lack of teachers (and especially GOOD teachers) is a big issue. Lack of infrastructure is also an issue, though.

Do you actually use these things?

I use them every day for SWE. I cannot remember any hallucination from the last 6 months. It pretty much stopped being an issue from the beginning of this year, if you use top paid models. Free models or lower-tier paid models can still hallucinate, though.

It's a classic example of the kinds of questions LLMs get wrong. There's plenty of others. Not sure your point here. We can easily find things a 4-9 year old will talk about that an LLM will get wrong, hallucinate, etc.

My point is that the hallucination rate of modern LLMs, while not zero, is so low that this is no longer an issue in practice.

There's a lot of work being done in 'could'. And it's entirely ignoring the dangers.

I agree that there are some risks. But for many children, the alternative is not human teacher, but no teacher at all. This considerably changes the risk-benefit calculus, IMHO.

I'm a mom who actually has kids and this thread is insane. 'Just get a tutor'...okay?? Are you paying for it? Because that's not an option for a lot of families. I get that it's more ideal, but the alternative is...nothing?

Well said. I think many posters in this thread come from a pretty privileged backgrounds..

If you could time-travel back to your 5y old self, would you prefer to be taught by AI tutor given the current state o/t art, or taught by whatever teachers you did have when you were 5? (with all the existing hallucination, breaking through guardrails etc problems of current AI in mind)

I had to choose between my elementary school teachers and something like Claude Fable 5 with a good teaching-focused harness, I would definitely choose Fable 5.

Which model are you using? I don't think any recent state-of-the-art model does this.

You don't even need to use AI at all to have valid critiques of it

You cannot rationally criticize something if you have no up-to-date knowledge about it.

We should be wary of all new technology until it’s proven to be a benefit to society.

Nope. Any nation that thinks like this will be outcompeted by more tech-positive nations in the long-term. It's on the luddites to demonstrate evidence of harm, if they want some use of technology banned.

Ask them how many r's are in strawberry.

2024 called and wants its talking points back.

Teachers don't make confident mistakes because the student asked the wrong way. Teachers can be held accountable. Teachers can learn. Teachers can love their students.

All of these can be true, and at the same it can be true that a child tutored by a good quality state-of-the-art LLM with a good teaching-focused harness could have better learning outcomes than a child without it. Even if we agreed that a good human teacher is better than a LLM, human teacher's time and attention is limited.

It is a pretty unlikely proposition that AI progress will be a net negative, especially over the long term. There is no great technology in the history of mankind that was a net negative. Even for the more controversial ones, like internal combustion engines or nuclear power, the pros still far outweight the cons. Why should AI be different?

Advanced AI could be very useful for science and engineering tasks. AI-accelerated fusion R&D will achieve success sooner than without AI.