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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.
I'm reminded of how "Critical X Theory" has been pushed for a while now while it and its academic relatives openly eschew critical thinking as an incorrect way of analysis, but which many laymen confuse as being related. There's some sort of analogy here to organisms that have evolved (presumably without any conscious intent) to mimicking other organisms for the purpose of fooling other organisms in a way that improves their own survival, but I'm not sure exactly what that looks like.
I am reminded of Baudrillard’s levels of simulation: sensory reality, summarized description, attempted simulation, simulacrum based on the simulation but essentially different from all before. Also, “speak your truth” giving anecdotal experiences and their emotional weight the same respect as universal scientific truth.
The first time I read of this dynamic was in the Cerebus the Aardvark comic series. Dave Sim predicted all of this.
Second Dave Sim reference on this site today. Which book are you thinking of?
Eigenrobot referenced Cerebus on twitter the other day, something must be in the air.
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