The rapid progression of AI chatbots made me think that we need a thread devoted to a discussion of the impact that AI is likely to have on our politics and our societies. I don't have a specific goal in mind, but here is a list of topics and concerns to start the discussion.
Let's start with the positive.
1. AI has enormous potential to assist with public health.
Like all AI topics, this one is broad, but the short of it is that AIs have enormous potential when it comes to processing big data without bias, improving clinical workflow, and even improving communication with patients.
In a recent study, communications from ChatGPT were assessed as more accurate, detailed, and empathetic than communications from medical professionals.
2. AI has enormous potential to free us from the shackles of work.
OK. That's a overstatement. But the workplace-positive view of AI is that it will eventually eliminate the need for humans to do the sort of drudge work that many humans don't enjoy doing, thereby freeing up time for humans to engage in work that is more rewarding and more "human."
3. AI has enormous potential to help us combat complex problems like global warming.
One of the biggest challenges in dealing with climate issues is that the data set is so enormous and so complex. And if there is one thing that AIs excel at (especially compared to humans), it is synthesizing massive amounts of complex data.
4. AI may eliminate a lot of jobs and cause a lot of economic dislocution in the short to medium term.
Even if AI eliminates drudgery in the long run, the road is likely to be bumpy. Goldman Sachs recently released a report warning that AI was likely to cause a significant disruption in the labor market in the coming years, with as many as 300 million jobs affected to some degree.
5. At best, AI will have an uncertain effect on the arts and human creativity.
AI image generation is progressing at an astonishing pace, and everyone from illustrators to film directors seems to be worried about the implications.
Boris Eldagen recently won a photo contest in the "creative photo" category by surreptitiously submitting an AI-generated "photo." He subsequently refused to accept the award and said that he had submitted the image to start a conversation about AI-generated art.
Music and literature are likely on similar trajectories. Over the last several months, the internet has been flooded with AI-generated hip hop in the voices of Jay-Z, Drake and others.
6. AI is likely to contribute to the ongoing degradation of objective reality.
Political bias in AI is already a hot-button topic. Some right-wing groups have promised to develop AIs that are a counterpoint to what they perceive as left wing bias in today's modern chatbots.
7. AI may kill us, enslave us, or do something else terrible to us.
This concern has been around ever since AI has been contemplated. This post isn't the place to summarize all the theoretical discussion about how a super-intelligent, unboxed AI might go sideways, but if you want an overview, Nick Bostrom's Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies is a reasonable summary of the major concerns.
One of the world's leaders in AI development, Geoff Hinton, recently resigned from Google, citing potential existential risk associated with AI as one of his reasons for doing so.
And there have been numerous high-profile tech billionaires and scientists who have signed an open letter urging an immediate 6 month pause in AI development.
8. And even if AI doesn't kill us, it may still creep us the **** out.
A few months ago, Kevin Roose described a conversation he had with Bing's A.I. chatbot, in which the chatbot speculated on the negative things that its "shadow self" might want to do, repeatedly declared its love for Roose, and repeatedly insisted that Roose did not love his wife.
Roose stated that he found the entire conversation unsettling, not because he thought the AI was sentient, but rather because he found the chatbot's choices about what to say to be creepy and stalkerish.
Roose stated that he found the entire conversation unsettling, not because he thought the AI was sentient, but rather because he found the chatbot's choices about what to say to be creepy and stalkerish.
I feel like you are missing the giant elephant in the room. AI providing companionship (sexual and/or emotional) that could have far reaching ramifications for social organization and cohesion. At one point I was planning on started a thread about the future of sex/companionship robots and how they could disrupt society far more than people realize for psychological evolutionary reasons. I never got around to it, but it seems like this thread is as good a place as any.
I feel like you are missing the giant elephant in the room. AI providing companionship (sexual and/or emotional) that could have far reaching ramifications for social organization and cohesion. At one point I was planning on started a thread about the future of sex/companionship robots and how they could disrupt society far more than people realize for psychological evolutionary reasons. I never got around to it, but it seems like this thread is as good a place as any.
I wasn't trying to be comprehensive. I wouldn't rate this risk as high as some others in the OP, but it's certainly an issue worth discussing.
I feel like you are missing the giant elephant in the room. AI providing companionship (sexual and/or emotional) that could have far reaching ramifications for social organization and cohesion. At one point I was planning on started a thread about the future of sex/companionship robots and how they could disrupt society far more than people realize for psychological evolutionary reasons. I never got around to it, but it seems like this thread is as good a place as any.
Sex robots has long been a kink of yours. You're probably not wrong but who knows there.
Sex robots has long been a kink of yours. You're probably not wrong but who knows there.
Well, my basic premise is that like most other mammal species, humans are motivated in large part by searching for mates, so any anything that dramatically alters the mate search dynamic, will dramatically alter society itself. And for awhile now I have been anticipating AI/companionship robots will eventually do exactly this.
It's going to be tough to not fall in love with a robot that always cooks and cleans, never disagrees, can be adjusted to the owners changing personalities and has a titanium penis ready at any moment.
I could see that an AI companion which is not only an assistant but also an encouraging, reliable friend could be an incredible benefit to people without a social network.
On the flip side, this capacity for connection and friendship represents one of my biggest near term fears. Training on all the same stuff that current narrow AI is trained on now to show you targeted ads will be incredibly damaging to society. If bots are allowed to proliferate unchecked and people don't know that that person they're talking to is actually an AI that has been taught to act in just the right way to manipulate them personally I think it's going to make the harm from social media look like nothing. I have some hope that the EU will regulate things like this but I have less faith in the US. Of course regulations won't stop everything either.
In terms of job loss, near term a lot of content creation jobs are going to disappear and some lower level programming jobs. People are just starting to learn how to leverage things like ChatGPT with prompt engineering and incorporating it into other products. I think even the current tech is not close to it's full impact and things have been advancing very quickly in the last year or so.
Long term, it's difficult to see a non-dystopian future that doesn't involve UBI but I have serious doubts that that transition is going to be smooth. I don't see it happening in most places without a lot of suffering first as has been the tradition with any large change to worker's rights.
I'm pretty concerned about military utilization of AI as well. If we get autonomous aircraft and vehicles to the point where very few human soldiers are at risk I see a greater tolerance of military intervention in the public and possibly an increased appetite from governments because of this. On the other hand, I could see this ending with civilian population centers targeted more often because blowing up some AI driven tanks and planes won't have the same impact on the enemy as killing humans.
I'm also a long term doomer when it comes to increasing the intelligence of AI. The idea that you could create something smarter than you and hope to contain it seems absurd. The idea that you could for sure notice when its interests are not aligned with those of humans also seems incredibly naive (not to mention that very little effort is being put into this problem). The fact that it's being trained on human data should also be concerning for a number of reasons. One is that it is literally being trained on how to fool humans and the other is that if it one day becomes sentient, it's going to know about humanity's love affair with exploitation. One thing I never see mentioned in the talks about some future sentient AI is that the best case scenario from the human perspective is digital slaves. It's hard to think that any self-aware AI in such a scenario is going to look kindly on humans. There's also the other risk that when its intelligence far surpasses ours, that even if it doesn't see us as a threat, it may see us as we see bugs. When we have to drive somewhere in the summer we commit insect mass murder without even considering it in our plans. It's hard to imagine how creating a god would end well for us. Just look at how we treat every other creature on Earth. You'd have to hope it takes pity on us or treats us as pets. There's of course also the paper clip creating monkey's paw scenario where it's not even sentient but inadvertantly causes harm to complete its directive.
It's going to be tough to not fall in love with a robot that always cooks and cleans, never disagrees, can be adjusted to the owners changing personalities and has a titanium penis ready at any moment.
You can call a robot arm an arm, or a robot leg a leg. But when it comes to the genitals I'm a little hesitant. That, whatever specific image your words conjure up for people, is a dildo not a penis. The "female" equivalent is not a vagina either. I don't know what you call it, but it's not a vagina. Let's leave some sacred things as human only.
You can call a robot arm an arm, or a robot leg a leg. But when it comes to the genitals I'm a little hesitant. That, whatever specific image your words conjure up for people, is a dildo not a penis. The "female" equivalent is not a vagina either. I don't know what you call it, but it's not a vagina. Let's leave some sacred things as human only.
We are still at the genesis stage of discussion for proper robotic terminology.
It's all going to come down to what each individual wants and their perception.
The robots are here and the pleasure seekers are going to fall in love with AI, say experts who studied machine-human bonding
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Physically embodied sex robots tend to incorporate human-like features: gender, head with hair and facial features, a body with articulated arms and legs, genitals, and sexual orifices. TrueCompanion’s female and male sex robot, Roxxxy [46] and Rocky [47], have highly customizable physical features. The user can customize Roxxxy’s physical aspects. TrueCompanion offers users the choice of 37 different hairstyles in 40 unique colors, five eye colors, five skin tones, two eyebrow colors, four eyeliner options, nine eyeshadow colors, six lipstick options, six toenail and fingernail color options and ten pubic hairstyle and color options for Roxxxy.
Concerning sexual awareness and responsiveness, several sex robots have external and internal body sensors. Roxxxy and Rocky have sensors within the vaginal and anal orifices which detect penetration [46, 47]. Upon detection of the user’s movement, Roxxxy and Rocky respond to users by producing audio that denotes sexual arousal (e.g., moaning). Emma, AI Dolls, Robot Sex Doll models, and Realdollx models, all detect user touch using either internal or external sensors and respond with audio feedback [48, 49, 50, 52].
Solid OP, but I just don't think the modern iteration of this forum can have a good discussion on something that requires thought and effort like this.
Solid OP, but I just don't think the modern iteration of this forum can have a good discussion on something that requires thought and effort like this.
I thought people might be interested in this graph, which shows the percentage of web traffic attributable to bots. I'm guessing that bots will comprise about 50% of web traffic in 2023, with 30-35% of the overall traffic being of the "bad bot" variety.
2. AI has enormous potential to free us from the shackles of work.
OK. That's a overstatement. But the workplace-positive view of AI is that it will eventually eliminate the need for humans to do the sort of drudge work that many humans don't enjoy doing, thereby freeing up time for humans to engage in work that is more rewarding and more "human."
4. AI may eliminate a lot of jobs and cause a lot of economic dislocution in the short to medium term.
This is definitely my biggest concern with AI for the immediate future.
There will have to be a massive shift in public and political opinion regarding benefits or else the number people that sit below the poverty line or just end up homeless will skyrocket
Solid OP, but I just don't think the modern iteration of this forum can have a good discussion on something that requires thought and effort like this.
I agree that this topic requires really smart people and that most of us don't have the mental capacity necessary.
i followed the lawyerAI bot situation a bit, where the company wanted to have the AI defend a traffic court case. ultimately the BAR association said they would go after the license of the attorney on record so the idea was scrapped.
in the legal world that's the one part of the job i dont think AI will necessarily be able to take from humans. i think they can largely do better than humans in the transactional work, but i'll be surprised if they take out the litigators, particularly on the criminal front. they certainly would be great research aids, especially if they can kill the monopolies of overpriced legal research engines like westlaw and lexusnexis.
i followed the lawyerAI bot situation a bit, where the company wanted to have the AI defend a traffic court case. ultimately the BAR association said they would go after the license of the attorney on record so the idea was scrapped.
in the legal world that's the one part of the job i dont think AI will necessarily be able to take from humans. i think they can largely do better than humans in the transactional work, but i'll be surprised if they take out the litigators, particularly on the criminal front. they certainly would be great research aids, especially if they can kill the monopolies of overpriced legal research engines like westlaw and lexusnexis.
There is too much bespoke work and nuance in complex transactional work for me to imagine AIs completely displacing lawyers. But for more routine stuff like real estate closings, it may be possible.
The large research engines like Westlaw rely less and less on Boolean searches and function more and more like research assistants with each passing year. That is likely to continue. As for AI displacing Westlaw entirely, I don't know. Back in the old days, I'm pretty sure that Westlaw and Lexis had a stranglehold on access to the content, which made it almost impossible to compete, but I think that has changed in recent years.
When it comes to litigation, the most obvious application for AI is to weed through millions of pages of electronic discovery. For more than a decade now, document management systems have been touting the ability of their systems to be trained to locate both responsive and "hot" documents. Theoretically, this technology could be used to reduce the cost of both producing documents and reviewing documents produced by your adversary, but in practice, it is used more extensively for the latter than the former.
This is definitely my biggest concern with AI for the immediate future.
There will have to be a massive shift in public and political opinion regarding benefits or else the number people that sit below the poverty line or just end up homeless will skyrocket
It's complicated because in a ideal AI scenario, AI would replace human work for that particular job and the increase in revenue and tax dollars coukd go to help pay UBI. But we have no idea how to calculate the savings, the allocation or how it would be fairly distributed amongst a whole host of other issues 5hat are coming to mind as I type this.
Yeah I got like 5 word in to a post that I realized was gonna take 15 min and make me go find multiple links before I figured whats the point....it's an interesting topic and the OP was really good. But casting pearls before swine given what this place has recently become. Not too long ago we had decent math/science discussions though.
in the legal world that's the one part of the job i dont think AI will necessarily be able to take from humans. i think they can largely do better than humans in the transactional work, but i'll be surprised if they take out the litigators, particularly on the criminal front. they certainly would be great research aids, especially if they can kill the monopolies of overpriced legal research engines like westlaw and lexusnexis.
I'd imagine it's going to be quite a while before AI takes starts to take away an economic altering amount of higher paying jobs, or at least higher paying than the assumed replacement that UBI would look to compensate. I would think there would be too much pushback on that front and that pushback seems likely to succeed.
It would start with the more lower paying jobs that AI can actually do that aren't in demand and can be compensated easier. Everything above that should be a disaster. I'm curious how demand for immigration is affected by a successful AI in the workplace.
Immigrants aren't really clustered in the sorts of jobs that are most vulnerable in the short term to replacement by AI.
Yeah, but I think that kind of excludes the pressure that businesses will have in order too adjust and accommodate to AI - and even interpreting how AI is going to work in businesses outside of answering questions.
You've got 5 million in fast food, millions at Walmart, Amazon, postal services and such and all of those are low margin winners that are going to do everything they can to get AI to benefit them somehow.
Thread might be better suited outside of Politics - anyhoo ...
Wendy’s to test AI chatbot that takes your drive-thru order
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The next time someone asks for fries with their shake, they might be talking to a robot. At least, that’s what the US fast-food chain Wendy’s has planned.
Next month, Wendy’s will be testing an artificial-intelligence-powered chatbot with the capability to speak with customers and take their orders.
The pilot program, dubbed “FreshAI”, is powered by Google Cloud’s AI software. It will launch in the Columbus, Ohio, area.
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In a press release, Wendy’s said it was designed to revolutionize the fast-food restaurant industry.
Such drastic changes in the fast-food industry are likely to add to fears that jobs once exclusively performed by humans will be taken over by robots.
