On the Threats of AI

Question

I'm fascinated and excited about the latest advancements in AI. As a software engineer, used to see computers do exactly what we program them to do, when I see AI able to reply in a human like way, with these emergent behavior from a statistical model it feels like magic. But although excited, I can see many ways how AI can be a threat to humanity. And I'm not only referring to SuperAGI wiping out humanity with determination as it's primary goal, or even indifference as a side effect while pursuing a completely unrelated goal. Or even more immediately used by bad actors to spread misinformation, deep fakes that could have dramatic political outcomes, or for really elaborate scams. Or even a threat for many different roles in the job market.All of those things are a possibility and many people has discussed them.What I have not seen discussed is, we see how seemingly good AI can be to diagnose medical patients, as a lawyer, as a programmer or software engineer, and so on. This is now, imagine in 10 years.What happens when AI is so good at all those things that new generations of humans don't have an incentive to learn and study and become experts in any of those fields because what's the point if AI is so good!As the old generation of experts in different fields retires, there will be no more human experts on those fields anymore, how will research and advancement continue? We should have delegated all knowledge to AI and humans would be ignorant of most advanced things, isn't that a terrifying though? I think that would lead to the collapse of our civilization.What do you think?

abhi9u · Accepted Answer

This is what I argue in my post on AI's impact on programming jobs -- my take is that if AI ends up automating low end tasks, then it opens up opportunities for us to spend our time on more creative and challenging problems. The current generation of models know all the data structures and algorithms but do they have the ability to extrapolate their knowledge to come up with novel solutions to unseen problems -- which is what we are good at. Similarly, there are tons of interesting problems which are unsolved in other domains and we could use AI's help to tackle those. Naval Ravikant talks about something similar on Joe Rogan Podcast -- where he says everybody can be rich. His argument was that if every human on the planet could become an engineer, or doctor, or scientist, we would solve all of our basic problems in few years and then humanity would be free to explore creative things. So if AI gets us there, we could be writers, actors, scientists.https://codeconfessions.substack.com/p/will-ai-replace-progr...

swah · Answer

I find it exciting to live in a time that things are changing fast, to be honest.

ineedausername · Answer

> What do you think?Universal basic incoom.