WSJ Reports on 'Hard-line Activists Ramping Up for the War With AI' (msn.com) 70
The Wall Street Journal says "an intense 27-year-old activist who had been leading sit-ins at OpenAI to protest the dangers of AI" was just part of a larger movement.
"The Bay Area's AI boom is drawing young disillusioned men and women to join the fight against it. They are upending their lives and leaving behind careers for think tanks, nonprofits and street protest groups." Their cause is now riding a surge of anti-AI backlash. Many Americans are souring on the technology amid mass layoffs, data center sprawl, reports of chatbot-fueled attacks by unstable users and hacking tools that have panicked cybersecurity professionals. Seventy percent of U.S. adults believe AI will cost jobs, and 55% believe it will do more harm than good in their daily lives, according to a recent Quinnipiac University poll. But for activists on the front lines, the driving fear is often more dramatic: human extinction. They cling to dire predictions, like Geoffrey Hinton's. The Nobel laureate, dubbed the "godfather of AI" for his work on artificial neural networks, warns of a 10% to 20% chance AI will wipe out humans.
At its most extreme and troubling end, some believe they must stop an AI apocalypse by any means necessary. In April, an unknown assailant fired 13 shots at the home of an Indianapolis councilman, leaving a note: "no data centers." That same month, authorities arrested a 20-year-old Texas college student for an attack on OpenAI CEO Sam Altman's home in San Francisco, and charged him with attempted murder and arson. The student was carrying an anti-AI document with a section on "our impending extinction," according to a federal criminal complaint. He has pleaded not guilty and his lawyers have said his actions appear to have been driven by an "acute mental-health crisis, not a desire to harm."
"The Bay Area's AI boom is drawing young disillusioned men and women to join the fight against it. They are upending their lives and leaving behind careers for think tanks, nonprofits and street protest groups." Their cause is now riding a surge of anti-AI backlash. Many Americans are souring on the technology amid mass layoffs, data center sprawl, reports of chatbot-fueled attacks by unstable users and hacking tools that have panicked cybersecurity professionals. Seventy percent of U.S. adults believe AI will cost jobs, and 55% believe it will do more harm than good in their daily lives, according to a recent Quinnipiac University poll. But for activists on the front lines, the driving fear is often more dramatic: human extinction. They cling to dire predictions, like Geoffrey Hinton's. The Nobel laureate, dubbed the "godfather of AI" for his work on artificial neural networks, warns of a 10% to 20% chance AI will wipe out humans.
At its most extreme and troubling end, some believe they must stop an AI apocalypse by any means necessary. In April, an unknown assailant fired 13 shots at the home of an Indianapolis councilman, leaving a note: "no data centers." That same month, authorities arrested a 20-year-old Texas college student for an attack on OpenAI CEO Sam Altman's home in San Francisco, and charged him with attempted murder and arson. The student was carrying an anti-AI document with a section on "our impending extinction," according to a federal criminal complaint. He has pleaded not guilty and his lawyers have said his actions appear to have been driven by an "acute mental-health crisis, not a desire to harm."
Disingenuous (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Disingenuous (Score:5, Insightful)
The financial apocalypse will cause the human one.
It's a war on those who think that AI should control every aspect of our lives.
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Exactly... once they replace most workers with AI, an entry level position is going to require five Ph.Ds and twenty years experience in a 5 year old industry, and when they can't find anyone, they just give that position to the AI, and now there's no jobs for the dirty masses.
Soon, a starter job at McDonalds will require an AI programming degree to adjust the robot arms that do everything as needed.
Its attention and newsprint space (Score:2)
For decades, the long entrenched social and political advocacy groups largely did not have to compete for attention, news coverage, politician endorsements and gaining new adherents to the cause.
Now, they have to compete for relevancy in the attention span of the general public,NGOs and political arena.
The following are jumping up in priority versus where they were in the past and displacing entrenched reliable causes no matter how worthy.
1. Population decline, rise in childless women, birthrate collapse
2.
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6. Life quality choices made by persons opting out of what decades ago were professions / jobs which allowed for economic advance but do not do so today
This one is for the blue-collar trades which used to allow for supporting a family and now being abandonded by the population.
Those blue collar jobs don't pay enough for a middle class family and, importantly, have a "I cannot brag about my significant other's job" online and to friends.factor.
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If AI is truly eliminating jobs, and keeping them eliminated, there is only one possible reason why: AI is delivering value.
If this is not true, nobody has anything to worry about: everyone who invests in it will go broke and things will get back to normal. This does not seem likely at this point, however.
Technology that delivers value is a good thing. It has always been resisted (sometimes violently) by the displaced workers. But this isn't because the technology was bad, its because those workers were
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> Protesting "AI" and spinning wild narratives about how it will doom the world is just silly.
Is a good plan for AI to use democratic control and "first do no harm" ?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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AI provides 'value' by being cheaper than having meatsacks doing the same task.
Once who "is well positioned to really capitalize on AI" is where the real answer lies... a handful of people are the only ones who capitalize on it. The rest of us can't find a menial labor job to feed our starving kids (oh... there's food shelves and SNAP... just wait until 9/10 of people are using those two resources).
Bet those recent college who didn't _all_ get degrees in an AI field and are hundreds of thousands in debt an
Re:Disingenuous (Score:5, Interesting)
If such a financial apocalypse materializes, I would put the blame more on the way our economic system is organized and regulated (or not) than any particular technology like LLMs.
Right now, the whole AI thing looks more like a bubble in the technology sector than anything which could rightfully be called a financial apocalypse. AI companies are burning through cash, and other companies aren't willing to pay enough for tokens to make AI companies profitable.
Re: Disingenuous (Score:2)
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The vast majority of activists just want, indeed need, something to fight, and this is just the latest bogeyman.
Responsibility not terror (Score:5, Insightful)
The real problem is that the companies are going to try and refuse the responsibility for the AI actions.
As in:
Yes my AI was empowered to set prices, but we did not want it to set a price less than a $1000 and it set a price of 10 cents. No we do not want to give up all other transactions the AI approved.
Yes the AI hired only christian white woman and illegally asked if they had children, but we did not mean to break the law. That was the LLM, not our fault.
Yes the AI illegally rejected every rental applicant that was single but we did not mean to violate the Fair Housing Law. We never told it to do that, it is just the algorithm.
You can't sue us if we did not intend to break the law.
No. They can definitely sue you for unintenionally breaking the law.
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In the end you are just restating Wilholt's law
It's getting the people who haven't yet been visibly targeted by this to understand that only a tiny tiny set is really in the in-group and that they, unless they are actual billionaires of the right group, aren't in it which is the difficulty.
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If a person makes an offer and accept the money, that is a non-verbal contract for services. Certain states have laws that prevent businesses from cancelling orders without just cause.
In those cases, it may very well be illegal for a company to cancel an order because an AI that was authorized to set prices did not follow the company's intentions.
smh (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm just throwing out ideas here, but maybe the current crop of AI execs shouldn't have gone around issuing dire warnings while claiming they had no choice but to continue developing the very technology they were warning about. That has pretty predictable consequences.
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You have to understand where they are coming from. A good number of AI-nuts and Silicon Valley in general are fans of effective altruism. There's not really good def (you can google for the term) but they are hiding behind "give us all your money and we'll decide best where it should go....we're smart, you owe us!".
The Singularity nutjobs are fellow travelers, i.e., AI will become so goddamn smart it will stop hallucinating and solve all our problems for us. All AI is capable of doing is hallucinating. It c
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Re: Who is funding these groups (Score:5, Funny)
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I could use some extra income, do you have a signup url?
Organiztions do what they are paid to do (Score:1)
The Wall Street Journal used to be a very good newspaper with a moderately conservative viewpoint and an extreme (some would say nutty) Radical Right editorial page. Now it just exists to provide a veneer of respectability to whatever scheme the hard Radical Right has cooked up to demonize a new Other (or resurrect the demonization of a previous Other) and hoover more money out of the pockets of the median Citizen.
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You should look up what happened to newspapers like the (London) Times when Rupert Murdoch bought them up. His entire shtick is buying up journalism and converting it into what the lawyers politely describe as "entertainment". He, or rather News Corp has been doing clickbait from before people even started clicking.
Re: Organiztions do what they are paid to do (Score:1)
Nothing happened to The Times. It's the best selling broadsheet in the UK and is far from being a right wing tabloid. Perhaps try reading it sometime instead of spouting some 3rd hand BS you saw on reddit.
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LLMs = human extinction? (Score:2)
Anyone who looks at the current state of LLM technology and fears human extinction either doesn't understand LLM tech or is wildly extrapolating.
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Well, LLMs have been wildly mis-marketed, contributing to people not understanding them.
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Or they are assuming stupid humans will use tech not suited for the purpose of thinking like a human to replace thinking humans. How much do we "assume" by our own nature and life long learned lessons that is missing from LLMs is being ignored by the forcing everyone to adopt people? Humans have a learned set of "institutional knowledge" that is learned in an incremental way along with wired instincts for group survival that LLMs don't have. So what happens when you put this type of tech in charge of things
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Hopefully people will eventually realize when LLMs aren't good at a particular job and change course.
Re: LLMs = human extinction? (Score:2)
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I hope they face consequences for such flawed decision making. Poor software quality is not penalized anywhere near severely enough nor quickly enough for my liking.
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there is a disconcertingly large supply of people who are just chomping at the bit to replace people regardless of whether the bots are up to the job or not.
I'll quibble with this a bit. They are chomping at the bit to replace people with something they think will yield equivalent or better results than people at lower cost. That may or may not materialize in any particular situation. Remember the recent article about Ford rehiring engineers [msn.com] after replacing them with AI didn't pan out?
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The current crop of bots (physical ones), certainly... wait until the AGI comes along and starts designing the robots and tasks the factories with building them.
The AIs (which aren't bots) taking the jobs are good enough for now... just like eventually the room full of monkeys will type Shakespeare... once they get to AGI, it'll all be just one central computer running everything.
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I think it is a IQ bell curve meme.
Low IQ: LLMs may kill us all
Average: LLMs are just programs that produce text
High IQ: (People with) LLMs may kill us all
I don't believe in Anthropics fear mongering about the treacherous AI or what their current bad vision is. But I believe that some people are quite interested in wiring weapon systems to AI.
This won't yield Skynet, but it may yield some literally inhuman wars, where some stupid computer makes kill decisions and the human operator is detached enough to not
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I think it's down to dumb luck that we, as a species, survived the cold war. And we're not doing nearly enough on the climate change front. We are plenty capable of ending things ourselves without help from AI, lol.
"the most extreme and troubling end" (Score:4, Informative)
This is an industry that puts out a 'tehehe, we're an existential threat!' press release every time they need another VC round; and whose c-levels openly discuss how they will annihilate all human jobs and maybe someone should think about what we should do about that; and who routinely trample local interests to get their infrastructure builds rammed through; and what's the 'war with AI'? One idiot who tossed a molotov and a disgruntled constituent? That's it?
The same oddity is true for 'AI' companies and nation states, also very puzzlingly. To go by the rhetoric of 'AI' being an existential struggle for the future of industry and whether the AGI omnimind will speak english or mandarin you'd think that we'd see at least a bit of skullduggery. Prominent 'AI' hires occasionally dying under mysterious circumstances; sabotage of expensive GPU farms, maybe a Rosenberg-style show trial or two. But no. There's some lightweight hacking and ToS-violating 'distillation'; and a few export shenanigans; but aside from that it's basically the same as any other SaaS nonsense but with bigger numbers. Weirdly unserious.
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I don't think those things would work. The knowledge of how to create state of the art AI is widely distributed. Tens of thousands of people have the knowledge and skills to do it, and many more could acquire it if needed. The data centers are a commodity. Currently the demand exceeds the supply, making it an expensive commodity, but it's still just a question of money.
If you started killing people and sabotaging data centers, you'd risk going to prison for life and invite retaliation. And what would y
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If 'AI' is half so interesting as its proponents claim one would expect being a machine learning researcher worth offering a fat signing bonus to be about as dangerous as being an Iranian nuclear physicist or a Russian oligarch who has fallen off Putin's friends list. If Zuck thinks that you
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If Zuck thinks that you are worth $100 million it seems like someone who takes the idea that 'AI' is the next frontier in state power would consider it worth the trouble to hire some local criminal to kill you
When Zuckerberg blows $100 million on one employee, China is probably cheering him on. When your competitor is doing such a good job of shooting themself in the foot, why would you stop them?
China wants American companies to spend a ton of money creating the best models in the world. Then Chinese companies can use distillation to create almost as good models at a fraction of the cost and undercut them on price.
We are run by 2 liars and a moron (Score:1)
The purpose of the economy is to produce things for humans to consume.
The economy has 2 inputs, Capital and Labour, and two outputs more capital and consumption.
We produce more than we ever have in history.
*Billionaires and Trillionaires do not consume much more food than the rest of us. They consume more luxury items than regular people but not 1000x more. Most of the earnings of the very rich go to producing more capital.
*The over 55 make up 27% of the Canadia
Re: We are run by 2 liars and a moron (Score:2)
Some corrections. (Score:2)
The purpose of the economy is to move resources and turn them into goods and services.
Production has three inputs, Land, Labor, and Capital.
Billionaires (we have no Trillionaires), don't let their capital sit around in a giant Scrooge-McDuckian vault, they invest it. Invested capital fuels production, as per the preceeding line.
Sit inside are worthless nonsense (Score:2, Offtopic)
The current tactic for the corporations and the Epstein class is to just prevent just enough people from voting to get whatever the hell they want.
Because of winner take off first past the post voting all they have to do is get 51% of the vote and they can have anyone they want running the show and it doesn't matter what you think or what you want.
About 30% of any
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Poor logic (Score:3)
They are upending their lives and leaving behind careers for think tanks, nonprofits and street protest groups.
That should read "for think tanks, nonprofits or street protest groups". The Venn diagram of people smart enough to work for think tanks and those who engage in street protests is the empty set.
Re: Poor logic (Score:2)
Electricity (Score:3)
While humans are being asked to conserve energy, the data centers are free to buy as much as can be provided.
The bigger risk? (Score:2)
The Nobel laureate, dubbed the "godfather of AI" for his work on artificial neural networks, warns of a 10% to 20% chance AI will wipe out humans.
The AI apocalypse may be a real threat, and the ten-to-twenty-percent likelihood mentioned above may be valid. But my bigger concern is that all the energy devoted to AI will push global warming farther and faster than we expect it to, and that our species will start to go extinct because we can't feed ourselves and can't survive the heat.
Re: The bigger risk? (Score:2)
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Here are some concrete details; No AI (Score:2)
The guy who threw the molotov coctail is named Daniel Moreno-GamaA [justice.gov]. Unfortunately he doesn't seem to have a gofundme page or something similar ot pay for legal bills. We should be supporting people like this and the people who do support this will only grow.
Many people paying his legal bills would send a message.
If you are the nonviolent type you can pledge money to Stop AI [stopai.info] as well as Pause AI [pauseai.info]. Redit, Facebook etc also have groups around these things if it your thing.
Support these groups if you don't like
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Right. WSJ... (Score:2)
Let's start with WSJ, owned by Rupert Murdoch. It's a "publishing subsidiary of News Corp." Which was founded in Australia in 1915 for the explicit purpose of publishing anti-union propaganda to the miners.
Now let's look at the story, pushing/implying "they're into violence!!!". Let's *NOT* mention the numerous cases, even in red states, where county councils have rejected new datacenter construction, and the several cases where, when the council approved it in spite of voter disapproval, the ENTIRE COUNCIL
In a panic they try to pull the plug (Score:2)
AI fights back