Thanks, Frank, I hadn't seen that article -- even though I tend to read the NYT reasonably thoroughly. (Ezra Klein usually does interviews rather than articles -- although he occasionally does articles as well.)
The piece felt a bit overwrought to me. *"As my colleague Ross Douthat wrote, this is an act of summoning. The coders casting these spells have no idea what will stumble through the portal."* I find that a bit much. Deep Mind has done wonderful work, from AlphaGo to AlphaFold. But I don't see any of it as existentially threatening. Computing itself has changed the world in many often unanticipated ways. We have adjusted over the past 3/4 century. We will have to adjust increasingly fast and with increasing insight and flexibility. We have created existential threats to ourselves before -- from nuclear bombs to climate change and environmental degradation. We have not tamed these existential threats. Perhaps an increasingly powerful AI will help us deal with them. It's certainly the case that "We do not understand [AI] systems, and it’s not clear we even can." And “If you were to print out everything the networks do between input and output, it would amount to billions of arithmetic operations. An ‘explanation’ that would be impossible to understand." Quite true. But that can be said about every large computer system--in fact about any sufficiently large complex system. Our lives depend on systems we do not thoroughly understand. This is not new. It has always been such. Our lives have always depended on the complex systems we inhabit. What's different now is that some of these systems are increasingly fragile, and in ways we don't see. Some (much?) of that fragility is due to our own activity. Increasing interest rates broke some banks. We should have been able to anticipate that. But greed overpowered caution and we looked the other way. We don't know what we are likely to break next. -- Russ Abbott Professor Emeritus, Computer Science California State University, Los Angeles On Mon, Mar 13, 2023 at 4:45 PM Frank Wimberly <wimber...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Many of you may have seen this article... > > > https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/12/opinion/chatbots-artificial-intelligence-future-weirdness.html?algo=combo_als_clicks_decay_96_50_ranks&block=5&campaign_id=142&emc=edit_fory_20230313&fellback=false&imp_id=761500277&instance_id=87626&nl=for-you&nlid=60903300&pool=pool%2F5e7731fa-5316-4a02-a8e4-6b70e6919705&rank=1®i_id=60903300&req_id=527980444&segment_id=127691&surface=for-you-email-rotating-opinion&user_id=03a68c161f5d16347943cf2195691293&variant=0_best_algo > > --- > Frank C. Wimberly > 140 Calle Ojo Feliz, > Santa Fe, NM 87505 > > 505 670-9918 > Santa Fe, NM > -. --- - / ...- .- .-.. .. -.. / -- --- .-. ... . / -.-. --- -.. . > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv > Fridays 9a-12p Friday St. Johns Cafe / Thursdays 9a-12p Zoom > https://bit.ly/virtualfriam > to (un)subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com > FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ > archives: 5/2017 thru present > https://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/ > 1/2003 thru 6/2021 http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/ >
-. --- - / ...- .- .-.. .. -.. / -- --- .-. ... . / -.-. --- -.. . FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Fridays 9a-12p Friday St. Johns Cafe / Thursdays 9a-12p Zoom https://bit.ly/virtualfriam to (un)subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ archives: 5/2017 thru present https://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/ 1/2003 thru 6/2021 http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/
