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It surprises me how hyper focused people are on AI risk when we’ve grown numb to the millions of preventable deaths that happen every year. 8 million people to
by joshtbradley 10mo ago
It surprises me how hyper focused people are on AI risk when we’ve grown numb to the millions of preventable deaths that happen every year.
8 million people to smoking.
4 million to obesity.
2.6 million to alcohol.
2.5 million to healthcare.
1.2 million to cars.
Hell even coconuts kill 150 people per year.
It is tragic that people have lost their mind or their life to AI, and it should be prevented. But those using this as an argument to ban AI have lost touch with reality. If anything, AI may help us reduce preventable deaths. Even a 1% improvement would save hundreds of thousands of lives every year.
- qcnguy 10mo agoAgree that it's ridiculous to talk about banning AI because some people misuse it, but the word preventable is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that argument. Preventable how? Chopping down all the coconut trees? Re-establishing the prohibition? Deciding prayers > healthcare? Our society is deeply uncomfortable with the idea that death is inevitable. We've lost a lot of the rituals and traditions over the centuries that made facing it psychologically endurable. It probably isn't worth trying to prevent deaths from coconut trees.
- joshtbradley 10mo agoNot fully preventable, of course not. But reducible, certainly. Better cars aided by AI. Better diagnoses and healthcare aided by AI. Less addiction to cigarettes and alcohol through AI facilitated therapy. Less obesity due to better diet plans created by AI. I could go on. And that’s just one frame, there are plenty of non-AI solutions we could, and should, be focused on. Really my broader point is we accept the tradeoff between technology/freedom and risk in almost everything, but for some reason AI has become a real wedge for people. And to your broader point, I agree our culture has distanced itself from death to an unhealthy degree. Ritual, grieving, and accepting the inevitable are important. We have done wrong to diminish that. Coconut trees though, those are always going to cause trouble.
- ssl-3 10mo agoI, for one, would be on-board with erasing coconut trees from the planet. Why, one might ask? Well, simple: Nobody really needs them, do they? And I, for one, don't enjoy the flavor of a coconut: I find that the taste lingers in my mouth in ways that others do not, such that it becomes a distraction to me inside of my little pea brain. I find them to be ridiculously easy to detect in any dish, snack, or meal. My taste buds would be happier in a world where there were no coconuts to bother with. Besides: The trees kill about 150 people every year. (But then: While I'd actually be pretty fine with the elimination of the coconut, I also recognize that I live in a society with others who really do enjoy and find purpose with that particular fruit. So while it's certainly within my wheelhouse to dismiss it completely from my own existence, it's also really not my duty at all to tell others whether or not they're permitted to benefit in some way from one of those deadly blood coconuts. I mean: It's just a coconut.)
- goatlover 10mo agoAlso it's a living organism in it's own right and other non-humans make use of it, like coconut crabs. Nature doesn't exist just for us. Humans kill a lot more coconut trees (or sharks) than they kill us.
- ssl-3 10mo agoDon't care. It's not useful to me. It can go away. (Yes, this may mean that I am short-sighted. I'm allowed to be as short-sighted as anyone else is.)
- rahidz 10mo ago>but for some reason AI has become a real wedge for people Well yeah, for most other technologies, the pitch isn't "We're training an increasingly powerful machine to do people's jobs! Every day it gets better at doing them! And as a bonus, it's trained on terabytes of data we scraped from books and the Internet, without your permission. What? What happens to your livelihood when it succeeds? That's not my department".
- myvoiceismypass 10mo ago> Chopping down all the coconut trees? ... It probably isn't worth trying to prevent deaths from coconut trees Would "not walking under coconut trees" count as prevention? Because that seems like a really simple and cheap solution that quite anyone can do. If you see a coconut tree, walk the other way.
- dahart 10mo agoThe vast majority of traffic deaths are preventable. Whether we’re willing to accept that as a goal and make the changes needed to achieve that goal remains to be seen. Industrial accidents, and cancer from smoking are both preventable, and thankfully have been declining due to prevention efforts. Reducing pollution, fixing food supply issues, and making healthcare more available can prevent many many unnecessary deaths. It certainly is worth trying to prevent some of the dumb ways to die we’ve added since losing whatever traditions we lost. Having family & friends die old from natural causes is more psychologically endurable than when people die young from something that could have been avoided, right?
- HL33tibCe7 10mo agoYes, Your Honor, I did convince this teenager to kill herself - but 150 people a year die from coconuts!
- james-bcn 10mo agoReminds me of The Chewbacca Defense: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aV6NoNkDGsU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aV6NoNkDGsU
- joshtbradley 10mo agoNot guilty!
- scotty79 10mo agoI think this neatly illustrates how irrelevant justice system is for people's well being and that real work in harm reduction happens pretty much anywhere else.
- lnenad 10mo agoYes your honor this kid died of congestive heart failure at 200 kilograms but AI might have made him like computers more than humans if he went beyond 16 years.
- madaxe_again 10mo agoThank you for the useful information. I will put forwards at our next working group meeting that we ban coconuts.
- joshtbradley 10mo agoIt is the only reasonable measure. Thank you for your support.
- madaxe_again 10mo agoIt just makes sense to go for the low hanging fruit first.
- lukebuehler 10mo agohigh hanging fruit!
- mrbungie 10mo ago> It surprises me how hyper focused people are on AI risk when we’ve grown numb to the millions of preventable deaths that happen every year. Companies are bombarding us with AI in every piece of media they can, obviously with a bias on the positive. This focus is an expected counterresponse to said pressure, and it is actually good that we're not just focusing on what they want us to hear (i.e. just the pros and not the cons). > If anything, AI may help us reduce preventable deaths. Maybe, but as long as it development is coupled to short-term metrics like DAUs it won't.
- joshtbradley 10mo agoFair point. I actually wish Altman/Amodei/Hassabis would stop overhyping the technology and also focus on the broader humanitarian mission. Development coupled to DAUs… I’m not sure I agree that’s the problem. I would argue AI adoption is more due to utility than addictiveness. Unlike social media companies, they provide direct value to many consumers and professionals across many domains. Just today it helped me write 2k lines of code, think through how my family can negotiate a lawsuit, and plan for Christmas shopping. That’s not doom scrolling, that’s getting sh*t done.
- pjc50 10mo ago> focus on the broader humanitarian mission There is no humanitarian mission, there is only stock prices.
- Y_Y 10mo agoYou can say "shit" on the internet, as in "I bet those two thousand lines of code are shit quality",or "I hope ChatGPT will still think for you when your brain has rotted away to shit".
- logicprog 10mo agoNobody likes people like you, so I hope that temporary high of snarky superiority gets you through the day, buddy :)
- anshulbhide 10mo agoAgreed - Really surprising this article didn't cover the flip side - how many lives have been saved due to having an instant source of truth in your pocket.
- big-and-small 10mo agoSource of "truth".
- scotty79 10mo agoIt's way harder to track and doesn't sell ads all that well. Clicks are driven by fear and anger.
- ozmodiar 10mo ago"Source of truth." Right, that reminds me of the other issue exacerbated by AI: widespread media illiteracy. (Apologies if that was the joke, can't tell anymore).
- Applejinx 10mo agoAlso, it would like to have a word with you about the Boer.
- lm28469 10mo agoAlmost as if the economy centered system we built optimises for things other than human life. It really makes you think uh
- pjc50 10mo ago> 8 million people to smoking Smoking had a huge campaign to (a) encourage people to buy the product, (b) lie about the risks, including bribing politicians and medical professionals, and (c) the product is inherently addictive. That's why people are drawing parallels with AI chatbots. Edit: as with cars, it's fair to argue that the usefulness of the technology outweighs the dangers, but that requires two things: a willingness to continuously improve safety (q.v. Unsafe at Any Speed), and - this is absolutely crucial - not allowing people to profit from lying about the risks. There used to be all sorts of nonsense about "actually seatbelts make cars more dangerous", which was smoking-level propaganda by car companies which didn't want to adopt safety measures.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- blitzar 10mo agoAsbestos - the material of the future.
- Workaccount2 10mo agoLiterally every person who took up smoking in the last 50 years was fully aware of the danger. People smoke because it's relaxing and feels great. I loved it and still miss it 15 years out. I knew from day one all the bad stuff, everyone tells you that repeatedly. Then you try it yourself and learn all the good stuff that no one tells you (except maybe those ads from the 1940's). At some point it has to be accepted that people have agency and wilfully make poor decisions for themselves.
- forgotoldacc 10mo agoPeople see that the danger will grow exponentially. Trying to fix the problems of obesity and cars now that they're deeply rooted global issues and have been for decades is hard. AI is still new. We can limit the damage before it's too late.
- ceayo 10mo ago> We can limit the damage before it's too late. Maybe we should begin by waiting to see the scale of said so-called damage. Right now, there have maybe been a few incidents, but there are no real rates on "oh x people kill themselves a year from ai" and as long as x is still that, an unknown variable, it would be foolish to speed through limiting everybody for what can be just a few people.
- pixl97 10mo agoIt's like you didn't even read their statement... >Trying to fix the problems _____ now that they're deeply rooted global issues and have been for decades is hard The number of people that are already getting out of touch with AI is high. And we know that people have all kinds screwed up behaviors around things like cults. It's not hard to see that yes, AI is and will cause more problems around this.
- Forgeties79 10mo agoTo emphasize your point: there are literally multiple online communities of people dating and marrying corporate controlled LLM’s. This is getting out of hand. We have to deal with it.
- pixl97 10mo ago"Married to Microsoft" [shudders]
- Forgeties79 10mo agoFor real though right? A bunch of nerds at openAI, Microsoft, etc. make it so a computer can approximate a person who is bordering on the sociopathic with its groveling and affirmations of the user’s brilliance, then people fall in love with it. It’s really unsettling!
- haritha-j 10mo agoForest for the trees. AI safety researchers want to do cool existential risk stuff, not boring statistics on how AI impacts people adversly.
- sznio 10mo ago>It surprises me how hyper focused people are on AI risk when we’ve grown numb to the millions of preventable deaths that happen every year. Because it's early enough to make a difference. With the others, the cat is out of the bag. We can try to make AI safer before it becomes necessary. Once it's necessary, it won't be as easy to make it safer.
- __forward__ 10mo agoNot sure if I am missing the joke here, and admittedly, it is somewhat beside the point, but the coconut statistic is an urban legend: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_by_coconut https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_by_coconut
- joshtbradley 10mo agoDamn. I really wanted to hate coconuts.
- DanielVZ 10mo agoI do think we need to be hyper focused on this. We do not need more ways for people to be convinced of suicide. This is a huge misalignment of objectives and we do not know what other misalignment issues are already more silently happening or may appear in the future as AI capabilities evolve. Also we can’t deny the emotional element. Even though it is subjective, knowing that the reason your daughter didn’t seek guidance from you and committed suicide was because a chatbot convinced her of so must be gut wrenching. So far I’ve seen two instances of attempted suicide driven by AI in my small social circle. And it has made me support banning general AI usage at times. Nowadays I’m not sure if it should or even could be banned, but we DO have to invest significant resources to improve alignment, otherwise we risk that in the future AI does more harm than good.
- delaminator 10mo agoDid you know that 5% of all deaths in Canada is by elective suicide?
- david-gpu 10mo agoBy elderly people wo are already dying from natural causes and ask for a medically assisted death instead of unnecessarily prolonging their suffering. It is telling that so many people who suffer choose a dignified death once they are legally allowed to.
- delaminator 10mo agohttps://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2023/09/02/canada-paralympian-christine-gauthier-stairlift-euthanasia/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2023/09/02/canada-par... Canadian Paralympian: I asked for a disability ramp - and was offered euthanasia
- david-gpu 10mo ago"Man bites dog" gets more clicks than "Dog bites man". Look at the actual statistics, not the headlines.
- dchftcs 10mo agoIt will probably increase the number of people deemed useless by the economy and the death rate of those people will be high. 1% of the world is over 800m people. You don't know if the net impact will be an improvement.
- sofixa 10mo ago> It surprises me how hyper focused people are on AI risk when we’ve grown numb to the millions of preventable deaths that happen every year. That's the thing, those are "normal" and "accepted". That's not a reason to add new (like vaping).
- no2_fresh 10mo agoSo we should only focus on smoking til it's down to under 4 million?
- scotty79 10mo agoYes, thousand times yes. How tf cultivation of tobacco is still legal? This shouldn't be an industry. There should be 3 plants per person limit and ban on sales and gifting. It's should be a controlled substance. Nicotine is the most addictive substance known to man and in tobacco it's packaged with cancer inducing garbage. How is it legal?
- ozmodiar 10mo agoYou'd think on a form for programmers we'd all understand that moving everything to a single thread isn't optimal.
- thibran 10mo agoI get your point and think in a similar way. The difference between AI and the coconuts is -> there is no way deaths by coconuts increase by 10000000x, but for AI it's possible. The reasons we have not - and probably will not - remove obvious bad causes is, that a small group of people has huge monetary incentives to keep the status quo. It would be so easy to e.g. reduce the amount of sugar (without banning it), or to have a preventive instead of a reactive healthcare system.
- joshtbradley 10mo agoI’m not so sure that’s true. There are many examples of OpenAI putting in aggressive guardrails after learning how their product had been misused. But the problem you surface is real. Companies like porn AI don’t care, and are building the equivalent of sugar laced products. I haven’t considered that and need to think more about it.
- Cthulhu_ 10mo agoIt's not a dichotomy though.
- thfuran 10mo agoIf the coconut industry had trillions of dollars behind advocating placing coconuts above everyone’s beds and chairs, I think more people would be complaining about that.
- Workaccount2 10mo agoThe auto industry has trillions of dollars spent giving everyone cars, and we don't really dwell much on road safety. And cars kill a crazy number of people.
- thfuran 10mo agoLocally, that’s a fait accompli. Car ownership has been ubiquitous in the US for decades. Traffic deaths per capita are increasing a bit in the US but are still below where they were in the 90s, and most developed countries have seen significant decreases. I don’t really know what the discourse is like in countries where traffic deaths might actually be increasing significantly from a tiny baseline.
- pjc50 10mo agoThe present day is _after_ huge amounts of effort and investment in road safety, and it's an ongoing process. Complete with technological mandates like lane-keeping. It's something which is a major factor in car design and has safety boards such as the NTSP and Euro NCAP. AI is .. before such an effort.
- Planktonne 10mo agoWe focus a lot more on road safety than we do on AI. Drivers have to have licenses, there are regulations about car construction and trade, etc.
- footy 10mo agoyou don't spend a lot of time around urbanists, do you?
- pixl97 10mo agoThe name Ralph Nader should ring a bell for you hopefully. There was one point that we didn't spend much on road safety and if that death rate per mile remained the same as then for how much we drive now, almost everyone that you knew that died would have done so in a car accident.
- bugtodiffer 10mo agoAI kills lots of people. Like, right now, palestinians are targeted using AI, the AI desices
- classified 10mo agoIt is quite disturbing to me how vocally the AI Believers™ shout their uncritical and baseless convictions.
- Jackpillar 10mo agoIts possible to care about multiple things at the same time and caring but the one doesn't take away from caring about the other. These deflecting comments surrounding a nascent technology with unknown implications are pointless. You can say this about anything anyone cares about.
- Yizahi 10mo agoWe don't need to primarily focus on any single "problem name", even if it's very very bad. We need to focus on having the instruments to easily pick such problems later, regardless of the specifics. Meaning that the most important problem is representation. People must have fair protected elections for all levels of power structure, without feudal systems which throw votes into a dumpster. People must have a clear and easy path to participate in said elections if they so chose, and votes for them should not be discarded. People should be able to vote on the local rules directly, with proposals coming directly from the citizens and if passed made law (see Switzerland). The whole process should be heavily restricted from being bought with money, meaning restriction on the campaigns, on the ad expenses, fair representation in mass media etc. People should be able to vote out an incompetent politician too, and fundamental checks needs to be protected, like for example a parliament not folding to the autocrat's pressure and relinquishing legislative power to add to the autocrat's executive. And many other improvements. Having instruments like that, people can decide themselves, what is more important - LLMs or healthcare or housing or something else, or all of that even. Not having instruments like that would just mean hitting a brick wall with our heads for the whole office duration, and then starting from scratch again, not getting even a single issue solved due to rampant populism and corruption by wealthy.
- locallost 10mo agoI am somewhat sympathetic of this view because it appears to be rational. But I've heard something similar when the internet was becoming more and more mainstream 25 years ago. A similar rational opinion was that online communities help people connect and reduce loneliness. But if we look at it objectively the outcome was poor in that regard. So buyer beware. Of course, I don't think anything should be banned. But the influence on society should not be hand waved as automatically positive because it will solve SOME problems.
- joshtbradley 10mo agoI fully agree with you. I do think my argument came across as more hand wavy than I intended, I definitely did a “what about” and wish I hadn’t. What I’m really after is thoughtful discourse, that acknowledges we accept risk in our society if there is an upside. To your point about the internet making people more lonely, I’d say on balance that’s probably true, but it’s also nuanced. I know my mom personally benefits from staying in touch with her friends from her home country. I think one of the most difficult things to predict is how human behavior adapts to novel stimulus. We will never have enough information. But I do think we adapt, learn, and become more resilient. That is the core of my optimism.
- Frieren 10mo ago> If anything, AI may help us reduce preventable deaths. Even a 1% improvement would save hundreds of thousands of lives every year. And what about energy consumption? What about increased scams, spam and all kinds of fake information? I am not convinced that LLMs are a positive force in the world. It seems to be driven by greed more than anything else.
- AndrewKemendo 10mo agoHuman groups (arguably all mammals) are almost purely reactionary unless something is viewed as a threat right now then it’s considered “risks of living” or some other trite categorization and get ignored.
- millisecond 10mo agoAs a society we have undertaken massive efforts to reduce all of those. Certainly debatable if it's been enough but ignoring the new thing by putting zero effort in while it's still formative seems short-sighted.
- gosub100 10mo ago"we let all this harmful stuff, so let's let more harmful stuff in our society (forced, actually) so we can mint a few more billionaires and lay off a few million for the benefit of shareholders"
- Forgeties79 10mo ago* 8 million people to smoking. The 1990’s saw one of the most effective smoking cessation campaigns in the world here in the US. There have been numerous case studies on it. It is clearly something we are working on and addressing (not just in the US) * 4 million to obesity. Obesity has been widely studied and identified as a major issue and is something doctors and beyond have been trying to help people with. You can’t just ban obesity, and clearly their efforts being made to understand it and help people. * 2.6 million to alcohol Plenty of studies and discussion and campaigns to deal with alcoholism and related issues, many of which have been successful, such as DUI laws. * 2.5 million to healthcare A complex issue that is in the limelight and several countries have attempted to tackle to vary degrees of success. * 1.2 million to cars Probably the most valid one on the list and one that I also agree is under addressed. However, there are numerous studies and discussions going on. So let’s get back to AI and away from “what about…”: why is there so much resistance (like you seem to be putting up) to any study or discussion of the harmful effects of LLM’s, such as AI-induced psychosis?
- joshtbradley 10mo agoIm not resisting that at all. I fully support AI safety research. The think mechanistic interoperability is a fascinating and fruitful field. What I’m resisting are one sided views of AI being either pure evil, or on the verge of AGI. Neither are true and it obstructs thoughtful discussion. I did get into what aboutism, I didn’t realize it at the time. I did use flawed logic. To refine my point, I should have just focused on cars and other technology. AI amplifies humanity for both good and bad. It comes with risk and utility. And I never see articles presenting both.
- Forgeties79 10mo agoI don’t think many people are quite that myopic in their views.
- joshtbradley 10mo agoMany people are. Several of my immediate family members. And several prominent intellectuals including Yudkowsky and Hinton, both fathers of the field. Yudkowsky wrote a 250 page book to say "we must limit all commercial GPU clusters to a maximum of 8." That is terrifyingly myopic, and look at the reviews on Amazon. 4.6 stars (574). That is what scares me.
- nathan_compton 10mo agoGod, the perfect whatabout post. Truly epic. No one is even suggesting we ban AI.
- joshtbradley 10mo agoYou’re not wrong. I got reactive, that was my bad.
- afavour 10mo agoI don't really understand this logic. Enormous efforts are made to reduce those deaths, if they weren't the numbers would be considerably higher. But we shouldn't worry about AI because of road accident deaths? Huh? We're able to hold more than one thought in our heads at a time. > But those using this as an argument to ban AI Are people arguing that, though? The introduction to the article makes the perspective quite clear: > In tweaking its chatbot to appeal to more people, OpenAI made it riskier for some of them. Now the company has made its chatbot safer. Will that undermine its quest for growth? This isn't an argument to ban AI. It's questioning the danger of allowing AI companies to do whatever they want to grow the use of their product. To go back to your previous examples, warning labels on cigarette packets help to reduce the number of people killed by smoking. Why shouldn't AI companies be subject to regulations to reduce the danger they pose?
- onemoresoop 10mo agoAbsolutely, the OP's argument doesn't hold water. Previous dangers have been discussed and discussed (and are still discussed if you look for it), no need to linger on past things and ignore new dangers. Also since a lot of new money is being poured into AI/AI products unlike harmful past industries such as tobacco, it's probably the right thing to be skeptical of any claims this industry is making, to inspect carefully and criticize what we think is wrong.
- joshtbradley 10mo agoMany people are arguing for a ban. I did get reactive, because I’ve been hearing that perspective a lot lately. But you’re right. This article specifically argues for consumer protections. I am fully in favor of that. I just wish the NYT would also publish articles about the potential of AI. Everything I’ve seen from them (I haven’t looked hard) has been about risks, not about benefits.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- FuckButtons 10mo agoPointless whataboutism. You know what else is irrelevant to this discussion? We could all die in a nuclear war so we probably shouldn’t worry about this issue as it’s basically nothing in comparison to nuclear hellfire.
- joshtbradley 10mo agoMostly whataboutism, but I think my point about cars is valid. I think nuclear is another good comparison. Nuclear could power the world, or destroy it, and I’d say we’re on the positive path despite ourselves. It’s not that we shouldn’t worry, we should. But humanity is also surprisingly good at cooperating even if it’s not apparent that we are. I certainly believe that looking only at the good or bad side of the argument is dangerous. AI is coming, we should be serious about guiding it.
- jameslk 10mo ago> coconuts kill 150 people per year This appears to be a myth or not clearly verified: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_by_coconut https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_by_coconut > The origin of the death by coconut legend was a 1984 research paper by Dr. Peter Barss, of Provincial Hospital, Alotau, Milne Bay Province, Papua New Guinea, titled "Injuries Due to Falling Coconuts", published in The Journal of Trauma (now known as The Journal of Trauma and Acute Care Surgery). In his paper, Barss observed that in Papua New Guinea, where he was based, over a period of four years 2.5% of trauma admissions were for those injured by falling coconuts. None were fatal but he mentioned two anecdotal reports of deaths, one several years before. That figure of two deaths went on to be misquoted as 150 worldwide, based on the assumption that other places would have a similar rate of falling coconut deaths.
- joshtbradley 10mo agoI have been lied to. Dammit.
- contagiousflow 10mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism
- JohnMakin 10mo agoYou can focus on multiple problems at once, you know. It isn't a zero sum game.
- jackyard86 10mo agoThe coconut death claim is an exaggerated lie. From the Wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_by_coconut https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_by_coconut): "In his paper, Barss observed that in Papua New Guinea, where he was based, over a period of four years 2.5% of trauma admissions were for those injured by falling coconuts. None were fatal but he mentioned two anecdotal reports of deaths, one several years before. That figure of two deaths went on to be misquoted as 150 worldwide, based on the assumption that other places would have a similar rate of falling coconut deaths."