More than one danger from any given tech can be true at the same time. Coal plants can produce local smog as well as global warming.

There's certainly some AI risks that are the same as human risks, just as you say.

But even though LLMs have very human failures (IMO because the models anthropomorphise themselves as part of their training, thus leading to the outward behaviours of our emotions and thus emit token sequences such as "I'm sorry" or "how embarrassing!" when they (probably) didn't actually create any internal structure that can have emotions like sorrow and embarrassment), that doesn't generalise to all AI.

Any machine learning system that is given a poor quality fitness function to optimise, will optimise whatever that fitness function actually is, not what it was meant to be: "Literal minded genie" and "rules lawyering" may be well-worn tropes for good reason, likewise work-to-rule as a union tactic, but we've all seen how much more severe computers are at being literal-minded than humans.

I think people who care about superintelligent AI risk don't believe an AI that is subservient to humans is the solution to AI alignment, for exactly the same reasons as you. Stuff like Coherent Extrapolated Volition* (see the paper with this name) which focuses on what all mankind would want if they know more and they were smarter (or something like that) would be a way to go.

*But Yudkowsky ditched CEV years ago, for reasons I don't understand (but I admit I haven't put in the effort to understand).

What’s the “Ender’s Game Approach “? I’ve read the book but I’m not sure which part you’re referring to.

>An AI that's perfectly obedient to humans is still a huge risk when used as a force multiplier by a malevolent human.

"Obedient" is anthropomorphizing too much (as there is no volition), but even then, it only matters according to how much agency the bot is extended. So there is also risk from neglectful humans who opt to present BS as fact due to an expectation of receiving fact and a failure to critique the BS.

People don't know they are being manipulated. Marketing does that all of the time and nobody complain. They complain about "too much advert" but not about "too much manipulation".

Example: in my country we often hear "it costs too much to repair, just buy a replacement". That's often not true, but we do pay. Mobile phone subscription are routinely screwing you, many complain but keep buying. Or you hear "it's because of immigration" and many just accept it, etc.

People hate feeling manipulated, but they love propaganda that feeds their prejudices. People voluntarily turn on Fox News - even in public spaces - and get mad if you turn it off.

Sufficiently effective propaganda produces its own cults. People want a sense of purpose and belonging. Sometimes even at the expense of their own lives, or (more easily) someone else's lives.

Knowing one is manipulated, requires having some trusted alternate source to verify against.

If all your trusted sources are saying the same thing, then you are safe.

If all your untrusted sources are telling you your trusted sources are lying, then it only means your trusted sources are of good character.

Most people are wildly unaware of the type of social conditioning they are under.

  > People hate being manipulated.

- People are primarily social animals, if they see their peers accept affairs as normal, they conclude it is normal. We don't live in small villages anymore, so we rely on media to "see our peers". We are increasingly disconnected from social reality, but we still need others to form our group values. So modern media have a heavily concentrated power as "towntalk actors", replacing social processing of events and validation of perspectives.

- People are easily distracted, you don't have to feed them much.

- People have on average an enormous capacity to absorb compliments, even when they know it is flattery. It is known we let ourselves being manipulated if it feels good. Hence, the need for social feedback loops to keep you grounded in reality.

TLDR: Citizens in the modern age are very reliant on the few actors that provide a semblance of public discourse, see Fourth Estate. The incentives of those few actors are not aligned with the common man. The autonomous, rational, self-valued citizen is a myth. Undermine the man's groups process => the group destroys the man.

I don't find your mother's reaction bizarre. When people are told that some behavior they've been doing for years is bad for reasons X,Y,Z, it's typical to be defensive and skeptical. The fact that your mother really did follow up and check your reasons demonstrates that she takes your point of view seriously. If she didn't, she wouldn't have bothered to verify your assertions, and she wouldn't have told you you were right all along.

As far as trusting AI, I presume your mother was asking ChatGPT, not Llama 7B or something. The LLM backed up your reasoning rather than telling her that dog feces in bushes is harmless isn't just happenstance, it's because the big frontier commercial models really do know a lot.

That isn't to say the LLMs know everything, or that they're right all the time, but they tend to be more right than wrong. I wouldn't trust an LLM for medical advice over, say, a doctor, or for electrical advice over an electrician. But I'd absolutely trust ChatGPT or Claude for medical advice over an electrician, or for electrical advice over a medical doctor.

But to bring the point back to the article, we might currently be living in a brief period where these big corporate AIs can be reasonably trusted. Google's Gemeni is absolutely going to become ad driven, and OpenAI seems on the path to following the same direction. Xai's Grok is already practicing Elon-thought. Not only will the models show ads, but they'll be trained to tell their users what they want to hear because humans love confirmation bias. Future models may well tell your mother that dog feces can safely be thrown in bushes, if that's the answer that will make her likelier to come back and see some ads next time.

On the one hand, confirming a new piece of information with a second source is good practice (even if we should trust our family implicitly on such topics). On the other, I'm not even a dog person and I understand the etiquette here. So, really, this story sounds like someone outsourcing their common sense or common courtesy to a machine, which is scary to me.

However, maybe she was just making conversation & thought you might be impressed that she knows what AI is and how to use it.

Quite a tangent, but for the purpose of avoiding anaerobic decomposition (and byproducts, CH4, H2S etc) of the dog poo and associated compostable bag (if you’re in one of those neighbourhoods), I do the same as your mum. If possible, flick it off the path. Else use a bag. Nature is full of the faeces of plenty of other things which we don’t bother picking up.

I don't know how old your mom is, but my pet theory of authority is that people older than about 40 accept printed text as authoritative. As in, non-handwritten letters that look regular.

When we were kids, you had either direct speech, hand-written words, or printed words.

The first two could be done by anybody. Anything informal like your local message board would be handwritten, sometimes with crappy printing from a home printer. It used to cost a bit to print text that looked nice, and that text used to be associated with a book or newspaper, which were authoritative.

Now suddenly everything you read is shaped like a newspaper. There's even crappy news websites that have the physical appearance of a proper newspaper website, with misinformation on them.

Welcome to my world. People don't listen to reason or arguments, they only accept social proof / authority / money talks etc. And yes, AI is already an authority. Why do you think companies are spending so much money on it? For profit? No, for power, as then profit comes automatically.

Wow, that is interesting! We used to go to elders, oracles, and priests. We have totally outsourced our humanity.

Well, I prefer this to people who bag up the poop and then throw the bag in the bushes, which seems increasingly common. Another popular option seems to be hanging the bag on a nearby tree branch, as if there's someone who's responsible for coming by and collecting it later.

It's fairly clear from Twitter that it's possible to be a victim of your own system. But sycophancy has always been a problem for elites. It's very easy to surround yourselves with people who always say yes, and now you can have a machine do it too.

This is how you get things like the colossal Facebook writeoff of "metaverse".

Isn't Grok just built as "the AI Elon Musk wants to use"? Starting from the goals of being "maximally truth seeking" and having no "woke" alignment and fewer safety rails, to the various "tweaks" to the Grok Twitter bot that happen to be related to Musk's world view

Even Grok at one point looking up how Musk feels about a topic before answering fits that pattern. Not something that's healthy or that he would likely prefer when asked, but something that would produce answers that he personally likes when using it

"someone with 100k dollars" is not exactly "the masses". It is a larger set, but it's just more rich/powerful people. Which I would not describe as the "masses".

I know what you mean, but that descriptor seems off

LLMs can't lie: they aren't alive.

The text they produce contains lies, constantly, at almost every interaction.

> LLMs haven't been caught actively lying yet…

Any time they say "I'm sorry" - which is very, very common - they're lying.