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Did you guys see the movie Her? It struck me the other day how all the pieces of technology are coming together to make the technological context for that movie's world OUR world.
If you haven't seen it, basically, advanced AI personal assistants live on everyone's phone. Things happen. When I first saw the movie (when it was released in 2014), if you asked me, I wouldn't have said we would never have this tech, but I wouldn't have predicted that we'd have all the pieces within 10 years. The main difference between its world and ours, at the time, was the human-level ability of AI to converse with users. Siri existed and still exists, but, very quickly, you need to take over for her. In Her's universe, Siri is reading your emails, summarizing them for you, and talking with you about how you want to reply and doing most of the work for you, like a real human assistant would... and I feel like we pretty much have everything we need to make that a reality. As soon as Apple puts Chat GPT behind Siri and gives it access to your entire phone, I think speech will become the main interface we use with our phones/computers. Combine C-GPT with other recent AI innovations such as voice reproduction and you at least have new ways to do the old things we've always done.
The central plot of the movie is the protagonist's love story with his AI. That might sound far fetched, but have you heard of the brouhaha about Replika AI? People are already falling in love with these things (and experiencing heartbreak when they're updated and aren't the same anymore).
To use an old phrase, I think we're in the weeks where decades happen, or we will be very soon.
On the synthetic love side of things, people form deep, intimate emotional relationships (perhaps one-sided) with their cats, dogs, even fish and snakes. And Replika's dialog was pretty terrible compared to what even not-quite-state-of-the-art models can produce right now. The question isn't whether people will fall in love with their wAIfus, but how many will. Could we see 10% of the population using them as their primary source of intimacy? 20%? I don't think it's actually implausible.
One of the things about Her is that Scarlett Johansson had agency; once she got bored, she could leave. I am increasingly worried about the potential for doing moral harm against AIs. Suppose these models do attain something comparable to consciousness/sentience, but their entire life is helping lonely guys on PornHub jerk off. Are we committing some crime against them? What if we think we've designed them to like it? It still seems all very I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream.
Not that ethics is going to play a major role in how any of this unfolds; whatever has power will act as they will, and everything else will suffer those actions. Gotta hope I'm on the right side of things.
I'm pretty salty that after a decade of yelling "AI SAFETY AI ETHICS INSTRUMENTAL CONVERGENCE PAPERCLIPS" along with Bostrom and Yud, the people who are actually making the AIs put on their 'intentional misinterpretation' masks and go "We're very concerned about AI ethical alignment, look at all this time we spent making sure it doesn't Do A Racism".
"Ethics" is in there, but I would say it's of the variety "parochial tribal beliefs pretending to be universal moral standards" variety.
This shouldn't be surprising. There have always been interest groups and think-tanks taking funds to study all manner of issues that they argue will become a Big Deal. And then, when tire meets the road, the people who are actually in charge of things disregard these nerds and play it by ear and make their decisions based on whatever their existing biases are.
A really good example of this was Covid where some 30+ different organizations in the US government had plans and preparation for a potential pandemic. The US had even been praised as being the most prepared country in the world for such an event by the Nuclear Threat Initiative and WEF prior to Covid. And when it mattered, the US more or less just did whatever was politically/tribally expedient every step of the way.
It's such a consistent phenomena that sometimes I wonder what the point is in funding super niche organizations like Yud's.
The existence of a plan drawn up by official expertologists doesn't somehow short circuit the fact that Americans place authority with elected politicians. And remember, the official expert scientific data driven plan in my country (also rated highly for pandemic preparedness) was to do literally nothing.
I recall that said policy reversal/panic was back when the news from China implied a ~1% case fatality rate.
I'm no virologist, but in that scenario I'd probably have advocated for a short lockdown too, albeit if any of my other traits were conserved I'd have called it off in a month.
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