We also tend to have decades of experience interacting with other humans and understanding what would be reasonable to want / moral / what would “make sense”.
This is a big part of why I’m bearish on things like fully autonomous self-driving cars until general AI is achieved. Driving is fundamentally a social activity that you participate in with other humans, at least until we built out nation-wide autonomous-only lanes that only allow (through a gate or barrier) autonomous vehicles with self-driving engaged in a way that normal vehicles can’t “sneak in”…I’m not holding my breath. Maybe I’ll see it in my lifetime (30s), maybe not.
Perhaps religious cult territory too. "The Algorithm" [1] is already being used to tell fortunes -- which if it just stays as a few people having fun with horoscopes I don't really care, it seems harmless. But I could also totally picture some cryptocoin charlatan getting revelations about The Spiritual Algorithm or something and starts selling AI for getting into heaven.
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[1] By "The Algorithm" I just mean the public colloquially reference to trending formulas used on TikTok etc, which I'm sure probably uses machine learning somewhere
I agree. I have the same reactions to these guys as I did to religious zealots when I was a teenager; and later to "transhumanism". Alarm, disbelief, hostility.
There is a new secular religion underneath this.
"Uploading consciousness", "Aren't we all just data systems?", "We've built a neural network with as many (meaningless) neurones as the brain!"
It's the same disgust and denial at being biological animals that all religions foster.
Thankfully here, I think, the religion has predictions. It predicts a self-driving car, a "fourth industrial revolution", and so on. When these fail to materialise, some sanity will return.
(Of course they have already failed, the question is when in the next 5-10yrs people will realise.)
> It's the same disgust and denial at being biological animals that all religions foster.
Huh, I didn't think of it that way! Good point!
I love history and a few weeks ago I read passage in a history book on a period in the early 19th century dominated by "American radicalism" (a liberal movement) and "transcendentalism" [1], when many hucksters and itinerant pastors profited off of the hype of industrialization. It immediately reminded me of the modern crypto / AI hype. In both cases, it actually is simply more smoke-and-mirrors to remove culpable human elements from a changing system --- by replacing it with "AI" and "crypto" (today), or the "invisible hand" and "radical self-reliance" (the 1820s-1830s US).
This is a big part of why I’m bearish on things like fully autonomous self-driving cars until general AI is achieved. Driving is fundamentally a social activity that you participate in with other humans, at least until we built out nation-wide autonomous-only lanes that only allow (through a gate or barrier) autonomous vehicles with self-driving engaged in a way that normal vehicles can’t “sneak in”…I’m not holding my breath. Maybe I’ll see it in my lifetime (30s), maybe not.