Doesn't law enforcement have access to cell towers and the phones that connect to them along with their GPS coordinates? Obviously paranoid schizophrenics are probably not tracked but it is in theory possible and that's probably what he's fixated on without actually being able to articulate why.
Poster needs some talk therapy but I doubt he's important enough to be tracked so someone needs to acknowledge his fears and dissuade him of his paranoia.
The current model is already destructive and most of the market is managed by artificial agents. Schwab will give you a roboadvisor to manage your retirement account so AI is already managing large chunks of the financial markets. Letting AI manage not just the financial aspects but things like farmland is an obvious extension of the same principle and since AIs can notice more patterns it's going to become basically a necessity because global warming is going to make large parts of existing farmlands unmanageable. Floods and droughts are becoming more common and humans are very bad at figuring out the weather so there will be an AI agent monitoring weather patterns and allocating seeds to various plots of land to maximize yields.
Bill Gates has bought up a bunch of farmland and I am certain he will use AI to manage them because manual allocation will be too inefficient[1].
The fact is that no neural network can solve sudoku puzzles. I think it's hilarious that AI proponents/detractors keep worrying about existential risk when not a single one of these systems can solve logic puzzles.
The comparison is in terms of energy use since at the end of the day that is the fundamental currency of all techno-industrial activity. The point is that the global machinery that is currently guiding civilizational progress is fundamentally anti-life. It constantly grows and subsumes whatever energy resources are accessible without any regard for negative externalities like pollution and environmental degradation. This is why I don't take AI alarmism seriously because the problem is not the AI, the problem is the organization of techno-industrial civilization and its focus on exponential growth.
It's only going to keep getting worse and the AI alarmism is not doing anything to address the actual root causes of the crisis. If anything, AI development might actually make things more sustainable by better allocating and managing natural resources so retarding AI progress is actually making things worse in the long run.
I get what you're saying but people don't really care. The typical/average person does not know anything about derivatives, backpropagation, or probabilities so to them it all seems like magic and they anthropomorphize what they're seeing as something intelligent.
Some folks that know how this stuff works and do a good job of explaining the limitations are Melanie Mitchel and Francois Chollet. Both have extensive experience in the field and have also written books on AI.
You can spend your time trying to explain to every random person that computers can't think but they're not gonna understand what you're saying because to them it seems like a large enough Markov chain is actually thinking.
Math seems correct but US military also includes conglomerates and companies like Palantir and Anduril (main reason it is described as an industrial complex is because there is no clear distinction between corporations and how their activities are tied up with military spending and energy use).
Seeking profit and constant population growth are already extremely dumb goals on their own. You can continue worrying about AGI if you want but nothing I've said is either cynical or anti-human. It is simply a description of the global techno-industrial economic system and its total blindness to all the negative externalities of cancerous growth. Continued progress and development of AI capabilities does not change the dynamics of the machine that is destroying the biosphere and it never will because it is an extension of profit seeking exploitative corporate practices carried over to the digital sphere. To address the root causes of misalignment will require getting rid of profit motives and accounting for all the metabolic byproducts of human economic activity and consumption. Unless the AI alarmists have a solution to those things they're just creating another distraction and diverting attention away from the actual problems[1].
Every cancer eventually kills the host so either people figure out how to be less cancerous or we die out from drowning in the byproducts of our metabolic processes just like yeast drown in alcohol.
The AI doomers can continue worrying about technological progress if they want, the actual problems are unrelated to how much money and effort OpenAI is spending on alignment because their corporate structure requires that they continue advancing AI capabilities in order to exploit the digital commons as efficiently as possible.
> According to the 2005 CIA World Factbook, if it were a country, the DoD would rank 34th in the world in average daily oil use, coming in just behind Iraq and just ahead of Sweden.
Sure, the phrasing could be debated but the fact that it even ranks close to actual nation states is already problematic. The US military is basically an entire nation state of its own. This is nothing new if you're old enough to have observed the kind of damage it has done but it demonstrates my point about profit and alignment. Profits are very often misaligned with human values because war is extremely profitable.
There are no enemies. The biosphere is a singular organism and right now people are doing their best to basically destroy all of it. The only way to prevent further damage is to reduce the human population but that's another non-starter so as long as the human population is increasing it will compel the people in charge to continue pushing for more technological "innovation" because technology is the best way to control 8B+ people[1].
Very few people are actually alarmed about the right issues (in no particular order): population size, industrial pollution, military-industrial complex, for-profit multi-national corporations, digital surveillance, factory farming, global warming, &etc. This is why the alarmism from the AI crowd seems disingenuous because AI progress is simply an extension of for-profit corporatism and exploitation applied to digital resources and to properly address the risk from AI would require addressing the actual root causes of why technological progress is misaligned with human values.
They're aligned with the military-industrial complex. The US military is one of the biggest consumers of fossil fuels[1] and it's the same with other nations and their energy use. So profitable is not the same as aligned with human values.