soiler

Reasonable, but not necessarily true.

1. We don't understand what the motivations of our own AI are, let alone "typical" alien AI

2. Expanding AI might be better at and/or more invested in hiding itself. It probably has no need for wasteful communications, for example.

How the hell did this person start their SWE career at the same time as me and come to feel they have an authoritative view on the state of the industry? Maybe it's because they're a recent grad and I'm an older career changer, but I still feel quite new to the industry.

I asked it to explain how to use a certain Vue feature the other day which wasn't working as I hoped. It explained incorrectly, and when I drilled down, it started using React syntax disguised with Vue keywords. I definitely could have tried harder to get it to figure out what was going on, but it kept repeating its mistakes even when I pointed them out explicitly.

Part of why I don't use ChatGPT very much for work is that I don't want to feed significant amounts of proprietary code into it. Could be the one thing that actually gets me in trouble at work, seems risky regardless. How is it you're comfortable with doing so? (Not asking in a judgmental way, just curious. I would like to have a LLM assistant that understood my whole codebase, because I'm stumped on a bug today.)

That's even worse. They might not have the knowledge to realize the regex an AI gives them is bunk, or to debug it when it fails.

I'd like to see some numbers on a tool like this. If a huge majority of people are seeing genuine improvements in their workflow with it, I won't be a luddite yelling at them. Rare, low-severity failures shouldn't hold us back.

But the potential cost of failure with (any) regex is very high, so I personally wouldn't want to trust any remotely mission-critical to a person who doesn't understand regex well enough to write it themself, and if they can write it on their own that's often faster than debugging AI-generated regex.

I read a few weeks ago here on HN about one large SAAS grinding to a halt because of a greedy selector in one line of regex. Not sure how people find old stories, it's lost to me now. But it was an excellent example of why regex is dangerous and requires a lot of care to write. I wouldn't trust an AI to write my regex unless I saw that people were finding it to be consistently better than they were are writing what they need.

I'm (genuinely) curious what kind of code you write. I haven't tried Copilot and I haven't used ChatGPT very much, but I feel I would be pretty surprised if either of them made significant improvements to my workflow.

Copilot I could see, since I already use Intellisense, autocomplete, and snippets to great effect. I'd be annoyed if I had to work without them. But in general, knowing what I want the code to do is >90% of the work of writing new code.

I feel there are a few possibilities for why I'm confused:

1. I'm not a very good software engineer, at least in certain respects. Maybe I should have a better understanding of architecture patterns or something I might have learned in a CS degree. Maybe I am hacking everything together and maybe I am already a slow coder.

2. I'm not [being] creative enough as a prompt engineer. I typically can't think of any way that ChatGPT could help me without ingesting my entire repo and figuring out the correct patterns. It could be, however, that there are ways to get the answers I need with better questions.

3. We do completely different kinds of work, and some kinds of coding are better suited for AI assistance than others.

android changed the lock screen clock from HH:MM to

HH

MM

it's a little stupid to be angry about but it's also pretty stupid to do in the first place.

> I think tech companies are (very) net positive for society

There are certainly huge positives, but do you really feel something like Facebook is a net positive? Facebook, which intentionally stoke(d/s) genocide? Genocides have existed before Facebook, yes, but so did communication and racist relatives.

> Personally, I'd say that at least Google's Android department is currently headless and has no idea what the users want.

The clock change, while minor, really put the nail in the coffin for me. I have very little optimism for Android. Luckily, it still allows me to use an app to revert the clock display to an readable clock display. I don't particularly want to switch to iOS and I am happy about GrapheneOS, but it's still going to suffer from bad decisions coming from Android.

Well there you go. You don't believe that an AI expressing dangerous ideas represents danger, and you don't believe that astronomical increases in AI abilities represent the advent of AGI. The latter opinion is... well, an opinion you're allowed to have. I don't think it makes sense, but I certainly can't prove otherwise. Literally every human on the planet - rather, all of humanity, only has speculation to go on here.

The former opinion is.. not a great take. First, ChatGPT isn't the only one out there. It's Bing's Sydney which is dehumanizing people and threatening them. Those are dangerous ideas. If a human or a certified AGI expressed those ideas, they would be problematic (see: every genocide in history). So for a non-AGI AI to express those ideas is worrying, even if it can't do act on them right now in a way that's directly harmful.

Would it be innocuous of me o say that because we disagreed on something, you are a bad person? To say that I'm prepared to combat and destroy you to protect my worldview? To say you are not human?

You might say, "Of course it's innocuous, you're just a person on the internet who doesn't mean it." Well, imagine I'm your neighbor, and you can tell I do mean it (or in the case of AI: it is not possible for you to know what I do and don't mean). Would you be concerned at all?

Sydney has said all of the above to people who were acting pretty normally. Sydney itself may not pose any danger to anyone. But the ideas expressed are dangerous ones. If they were expressed by a more powerful AI, they would be extremely worrying. It doesn't even have to know what it's saying if it knows that calling someone nonhuman is frequently followed by crushing their skull. If it knows that angry behavior is often associated with violent or even genocidal behavior.

People do this shit, and we know how they work pretty well. I am not saying that AI will do these things, I'm saying that there are more possibilities where it does do these things than ones where it somehow avoids them without our control.

I feel the exact opposite is true. To me it's lazy to say that AGI can't be a threat simply because current AI has not harmed us yet (which is not even true, but that's another thread).

I think you've misunderstood my arguments, so I'll step through them again:

1. The trajectory of how we got to current AI (from past AI) is terrifyingly steep. In the time since ChatGPT was released, many experts have shortened their predicted timelines for the arrival of AGI. In other words: AGI is coming soon.

2. Current AI is smart enough to demonstrate that alignment is not solved, not even close. Current AI says things to us that would be very scary coming from an AGI. In other words: Current AI is dangerous.

3. Alignment does not come automatically from increased capabilities. Maybe this is a huge leap, but I don't see any reason that making AI smarter will automatically give it values that are more aligned with out interests. In other words: Future AI will not be less dangerous than current AI without dramatic and unlikely effort.

None of these ideas contradict each other. Current AI is dangerous. AI is getting smarter faster than it is getting safer. Therefore, future AI will be extremely dangerous.

> Its reproducing human text, which is "blatantly misaligned". Go on any twitter thread on some reasonably controversial topic and you will find people telling others to kill themselves. Humans are writing this, so models who are trained to imitate human writing will write this as well.

Yes, I know. We should under no circumstances unleash a powerful, sentient AI that acts like average people on the internet.

> But current AI doesn't have comprehension or planning abilities.

Yes, I know. That's why I said I do not believe current AI has comprehension or planning abilities.

Did an AI write this comment?

I would not consider a scheduled physical/social/emotional activity to be a distraction. Is eating lunch a distraction? Is sleeping a distraction? If anything, I think Avicenna supports the value of reducing distraction.