Technology

It's getting old telling people this, but... the AI that we have right now? Isn't even really AI. It's certainly not anything like in the movies. It's just pattern-recognition algorithms. It doesn't know or understand anything and it has no context. It can't tell the difference between a truth and a lie, and it doesn't know what a finger is. It just paints amalgamations of things it's already seen, or throws together things that seem common to it— with no filter nor sense of "that can't be correct".

I'm not saying there's nothing to be afraid of concerning today's "AI", but it's not comparable to movie/book AI.

Edit: The replies annoy me. It's just the same thing all over again— everything I said seems to have went right over most peoples' heads. If you don't know what today's "AI" is, then please stop assuming about what it is. Your imagination is way more interesting than what we actually have right now. This is why we should have never called what we have now "AI" in the first place— same reason we should never have called things "black holes". You take a misnomer and your imagination goes wild, and none of it is factual.

I dunno, James. Pretty sure Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury had more clear warnings years prior to Terminator.

What a pompous statement. Stories of AI causing trouble like this predate him by decades. He's never told an original story, they're all heavily based on old sci-fi stories. And exactly how were people supposed to "listen"? "Jimmy said we shouldn't work on AI, we all need to agree as a species to never do that. Thank you for saving us all Prophet Cameron!"

And we were warned about Perceptron in the 1950s. Fact of the matter is, this shit is still just a parlor trick and doesn't count as "intelligence" in any classical sense whatsoever. Guessing the next word in a sentence because hundreds of millions of examples tell it to isn't really that amazing. Call me when any of these systems actually comprehend the prompts they're given.

IIRC the original idea for the Terminator was for it to have the appearance of a regular guy on the street, the horror arising from the fact that anyone around you could actually be an emotionless killer.

They ended up getting a 6 foot Austrian behemoth that could barely speak english. One of the greatest films ever made.

So is the new trend going to be people who mentioned AI in the past to start acting like they were Nostradamus when warnings of evil AIs gone rogue has been a trope for a long long time?

Here's the thing. The Terminator movies were a warning against government/army AI. Actually slightly before that I guess wargames was too. But, honestly I'm not worried about military AI taking over.

I think if the military setup an AI, they would have multiple ways to kill it off in seconds. I mean, they would be in a more dangerous position to have an AI "gone wild". But not because of the movies, but because of how they work, they would have a lot of systems in place to mitigate disaster. Is it possible to go wrong? Yes. Likely? No.

I'm far more worried about the geeky kid that now has access to open source AI that can be retasked. Someone that doesn't understand the consequences of their actions fully, or at least can't properly quantify the risks they're taking. But, is smart enough to make use of these tools to their own end.

Some of you might still be teenagers, but those that aren't, remember back. Wouldn't you potentially think it'd be cool to create an auto gpt or some form of adversarial AI with an open ended success criteria that are either implicitly dangerous and/or illegal, or are broad enough to mean the AI will see the easiest path to success is to do dangerous and/or illegal things to reach its goal. You know, for fun. Just to see if it would work.

I'm not convinced the AI is quite there yet to be dangerous, or maybe it is. I've honestly not kept close tabs on this. But, when it does reach that level of maturity, a lot of the tools are still open source, they can be modified, any protections removed "for the lols" or "just to see what it can do" and someone without the level of control a government/military entity has could easily lose control of their own AI. That's what scares me, not a Joshua or Skynet.

This is really turning out like the 'satanic panic' of the 80's all over again.

I warned everyone about James Cameron in 1983 and no one listened

James Cameron WOULD make this about James Cameron.

ITT: People describing the core component of human consciousness, pattern recognition, as not a big deal because it's code and not a brain.

I'm not afraid of Ai, I'm afraid of greedy capitalist mfs who owns the AI.

He seems like the average reddit user raises nose