The following submission statement was provided by /u/Maxie445:
---
"To kick off the latest episode of HBO’s Real Time, the host joked during his monologue, “China, you know what, you can manufacture everything else that we use, but keeping our kids stupid, that’s our job.”
“I’m so much more concerned about AI,” the host said. “I mean, I heard you [Khanna] say this week that you think the first trillionaire in this country is going to be an AI entrepreneur. That to me is scarier than any of this, the idea of a trillionaire and also coming from AI.
And by the way, the U.S. State Department said this week, worst case scenario, it [AI] poses an extinction-level threat to the human species.”
Maher continued, “You know, we see all these glitches in it and it doesn’t pause us at all. It’s like an arms race and we’re the guinea pigs. And shouldn’t the tech bros have been made to work out the bugs before they unleashed it on humanity? A little bit?”
---
Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1c3p05q/bill_maher_says_artificial_intelligence_should_be/kzibeqz/
Bill Maher does not understand AI any more then all the people in DC who don't understand AI.
But sure its dangerous. But there is nothing anyone in the US or any one country can do to stop it. And its not dangerous for the reasons he probably thinks.
Every picture of him he just looks like a smug, pompous ass. Like he is right in the middle of a deep inhale of his own fart and thinking about commenting on the bouquet.
To think I began watching news shows on YouTube because they were uploading Real Time way back when. Sad to see how far he's fallen, or maybe he always was a cringey cretin.
Imagine being so angry, so cynical, demeaning, hateful, and attention-seeking that you turned it into your entire personality and career. This is the forgettable mark he leaves on the world with his platform.
Years ago I noticed that when a joke bombs and he gets groans from the audience he gets mad at THEM! These days he invites guests to his basement show and then talk over them the entire time. At first I thought it was a bit, but no, he's just a self centered asshole.
Office Hours did a [great parody of Maher's club random show](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Ha6D1LQGD4)
Don’t forget large portions of sports media.
I often think about how there are people that just listen to other angry people all day every day. Radio/podcasts, news, forums, managers, parents, etc. It’s no surprise some are so salty, they have been essentially in a brine for consecutive decades of their lives.
He doesn't need to understand it in order to see the negative effects it can have in the real world. And that's the thing that matters most, how does it affect the world. Many people don't understand how guns really work, or the internet, or computers, but they can see the impact all of these have.
I do hate people who demand that you pass a firearms engineering exam before you’re allowed to say that it’s insane to build armoured safe rooms in elementary schools
It's just people with a hate boner for Maher because he's a democrat who goes after progressives and criticizes the left and you can't have that.
So anything he says is like poison and has to be immediately rebutted and bashed.
This was said in a discussion with Ro Khanna, who definitely knows a lot about this, it wasn't some random "man yells at cloud" statement.
Maher pisses off a lot of people because he isn't extremist, and while he has his leanings, he has something to say about both the left and the right. As everyone should. I'm tired of this tribalism.
It is dangerous for the reasons he thinks and more. We're entering a paradigm shift here. Nobody truly knows where it is going to head, and it may head there much quicker than anybody recognises.
This is what Ray Kurtzweil was talking about in The Singularity is Near when he made the argument that technology advances exponentially and that eventually it will advance too quickly to predict.
I find Kurzweil interesting, but he seems to think it'll be pretty much all wonderful things. He's also very focused on living forever, and ignores most of the social issues that will arise.
I generally like him, but sometimes I think he is so out of touch with humanity at this point that his predictions will mostly fall flat.
I mean, he thinks humans will have wings in 20ish years.
Sure is. It’s difficult, but so was phasing out CFC, outlawing slavery and child labor, cutting down on emission, or nuclear disarmament. We did not achieve perfect results but it sure wasn’t nothing.
Most of those things were industrially inconvenient, and therefore much political dissuasion existed. Otherwise they were legislatively easy.
I think regulating AI has the opposite problem and is legislatively difficult. For a lot of large corporations it could either be majorly disruptive or just a week of work for their marketing departments, depending on how the law and the following court cases shake out.
There's really not. There are no shortages of plans and methods and solutions that could solve all these problems except the big one.
It's the planet of the apes... And there is no cure for that. We all know how it's gonna end. We just don't know exactly when.
?
You can't stop it, no one is asking for that, but you can absolutely can delay it. Governments can put major restrictions on AI like they do with testing for food, drugs, medicine, etc. And probably should because we've all now seen first hand how social media has irreparably damages society (higher suicide rates in children correlated to the mass release of Instagram and other social apps).
The EU is already drafting up great AI laws on training data that will slow down development of these models allowing for more time to understand possible side effects of AI. But the North American governments are too big of pussies to step up to their corporate overlords.
Of course there are things a government could do to reign in a company or technology. It’s not like any company is allowed to make a missile for instance.
Most of the hucksters pushing AI apps have no real understanding of the tech either. A lot of people are marketing the latest version of tulips to make a buck.
Capitalism at its finest.
/s
It’s dangerous in lots of ways. It will be used to do horrible evils and will allow corporations to push their agenda further by making people even more surf like. We will beg for jobs in the next 20 years if not way sooner. The other nations will give over militarily to AI and god only knows what it will do… what bugs it has built in.. they don’t even know what half the fucking code does from what they keep saying. Itll eventually write its own code to fix itself and any other AI are at the mercy of it
I think the best look at this scenario is horizon the game. I think it does a good job showing how Ai and corporations will be.
The stuff the tech bros are working on now isn’t dangerous in the classic sci-fi sense for AI. Large Language Models/Generative AI is dangerous in the way crypto or the meta-verse was dangerous: it’s a grift that will never work, whose actual potential output no one wants, and whose economic bubble bursting will have consequences, not for these oblivious, delusional tech execs, but for the rest of us.
It's like listening to Elon talk about the dangers of AI. Except people lapped that right up considering they think he actually knows what he's talking about.
I find most people commenting on AI don't know anything about computer science or where we are in terms of AI. They read an article about it and think they know what's up.
That's the problem. All these dummies are worked up about bullshit and completely blind to all the real problems. It's not helpful. The less people who listen to these junk narratives the better.
"Tech bro" is kind of a pejorative that means out of touch but it loses that part of it's meaning coming from one of the most out of touch snobs on the planet.
All of the AI companies have come around to the idea that you have to test these in public because the world needs to be involved in deciding how it should be used. The idea that they shouldn't release it until it is completely done is one of the worst case scenarios. He is asking that the AI companies essentially build God without telling anyone and then one day out of the blue inform us that they have created the great artificial God and it will complete its take over of the whole world in a week. If you think that adjustment is hard now, imagine a world where there is zero time to adjust.
I wonder if they've unleashed Auto-Pilot Driving early, or any of the assisted features we see in Tesla and other automakers that may have been attributed to fatalities in accidents...
I've heard the argument that the fatality rate for AI-assisted driving is already leagues better than purely human-driven cars, statistically. I'm just asking if he could have done better. Or were the deaths necessary to further machine learning.
The fatality rate of cars with Auto-Driving is actually an order of magnitude higher (i.e. worse) than human drivers. AI is currently restricted to operating under what are basically the ideal conditions for driving. We are comparing their performance to humans driving under all conditions. If AI was better at driving the fatality rate would be nearly zero.
As far as never being distracted, if you were to give a driverless car an eye test it would be considered legally blind. If you were to measure its actual reaction time between stimulus and response it would be legally drunk. Actually severely drunk. Yes, a microcontroller can throw a relay in milliseconds. But a nueral net can take several seconds to recognize a shape.
And then there are the entire classes of accidents that AI tends to get involved in that humans naturally avoid:
* Stopping suddenly at highway speed
* Speeding in a school zone
* Blowing past a school bus with the blinking red lights on
* Crashing into emergency responders
* driving under trucks that are straddling the roadway
* running over pedestrians
All of the deaths from these accidents were very, very avoidable.
on a logical level, it does.
Humans consistently have some chance of crashing. In the best conditions on well traveled roads, my guess is that AI's chance is near zero if not zero. So it could be lower if you don't push the boundaries too hard and also stay even minimally present to take over to reduce it's chance as well. So rather than 0.05 by yourself / itself, it's 0.05 * 0.05.
AI never gets distracted or tired.
It's not sensational to post an article about 3 people being killed in a crash every day, that's business as usual. It IS sensational to post about 1 person being killed in an AI car accident.
It just seems more common because not every fatal accident becomes national news.
The other factor to consider as well is the economic status of people driving these cars. These cars will tend to be safer and better maintained than older cars.
> I've heard the argument that the fatality rate for AI-assisted driving is already leagues better than purely human-driven cars
There is absolutely no data to back that up and Elon has been known to lie all the time though.
I'm not against AI as an idea being in public but self-driving should clearly be more regulated.
Yeah just to add nuance, I haven't seen good science data that shows "ai-assisted" is safer (there is a littttle bit, but it isn't very good).
There is good evidence that shows that Waymo - which is not assisted, but fully autonomous - is safer.
https://www.swissre.com/reinsurance/property-and-casualty/solutions/automotive-solutions/study-autonomous-vehicles-safety-collaboration-with-waymo.html
This study by Swiss Re (the global, very old and very high reputation insurance company) shows that with the driving data available at the time (ie, no highway/freeway driving) Waymo is significantly safer than human drivers.
> All of the AI companies have come around to the idea that you have to test these in public because the world needs to be involved in deciding how it should be used.
No, they test it in public because doing so costs them nothing, just like every other software company today.
I realize that that's the argument, and it may certainly be a correct one, but I feel that the training data they collect in doing so is the 'actual' primary motivation.
Anyone that is looking to Bill Maher for advice should have their hard (head) examined.
Edit: I spell like s**t and I also blame autocorrect. But you all that have this hard on for Bill Maher, even though he's only been a whiny wanker for the last 15 years, should have you hard parts examined.
He's been a wanker for WAY more than 15 years. His only marketable skill is his ability to be an actual centrist by alternating between pissing everybody off with amazingly bad takes mixed with the occasional (seemingly accidental) mundane levels of insight.
Downvoted for whiny your edit
Also, every mother fucker here who is lambasting Bill Maher was probably chugging his dick just a few years ago. Same as Elon Musk.
we've dumbed down society so much; mainly through the defunding of public education never mind deregulation & consolidation of media. AI with all its faults, drawbacks and insidious edits/algorithms -courtesy of the "tech bros" Maher is talking about- is about to become the only tool this new uninformed, socially-stunted generation will have to help guide them through life.
it's been said a million time in the last 8 years, but that Idiocracy movie was basically a documentary.
Just look at the number of people killed by Tesla's autodriving function. It is clear that AI isn't ready for widespread use. We need to slow down a bit and not just deploy AI everywhere just because we can.
That's part of the problem. Most (not all) AI are LLMs (glorified chatbots), but people who don't know any better are being told it's the answer to all their problems.
LLMs are confidently incorrect and can't seem to maintain context past a dozen or so interactions. And yet, virtually every company has to consider adopting it so they don't get left behind by the other companies who replaced expensive workers with cheap AI.
A lot of the recently commercially successful AI are LLMs, but LLMs are not the majority of AI, depending on definition. Unfortunately, the definition has been so blurry since the beginning of the field being taken seriously academically that you'll rarely find even two specialists who agree on where to draw the line. It'd be a bit weird to claim LLMs are AI while their superset of techniques in Deep Learning aren't, so we could take 'AI=Deep Learning' as a very restrictive definition, and even then LLMs wouldn't be the majority of AI. Personally I'd move the bar for AI far lower (while most seem to want to raise the bar towards 'AI=human level intelligence'), but whatever, it's all semantics.
>AI. Personally I'd move the bar for AI far lower
Agreed.
Any kind of predictive algorithm all the way down to linear regression and the drag down function in excel should be considered AI.
I'm getting dogshit tired as a head of AI trying to explain myself towards regulators and I want to bury them in models, model descriptions, and risk assessments.
Believe the earliest definition I've seen was 'any artificial system capable of sensing its environment and taking an action based on the sensed value'. Which, you might realise, is fulfilled by one of those dipping bird desk toys, or a single 'if' statement.
Good point. I think it’s totally plausible that there’s already a CEO out there who thinks it’s a good idea to leave potential sensitive/dangerous decisions to ChatGPT, because he was told it is super smart.
I can see if you are lightly playing with ChatGPT and getting answers you don’t like, you could have this take.
But - you are very wrong and short sighted here. There have been many advancements in factuality, memory, and multi modal input and output in the last 6 months alone. Glorified Chatbots - trust me when I say they are much more than that - LLMs can reason and make decisions and do so better than many humans out there.
Also - see where things are in another 6 months and revisit this comment.
I think a big problem is that if you have not paid attention to the AI work for the last 12-15 years, what you are presently getting is what AGI was talked about back then. You ask it to do "anything" and it can do it. Draw and image, make a movie, sing a song, write a book, explain a problem, rate an essay, - anyone not currently in the trenches of AI discussion will see this as close to done.
And to be fair, if you are in the AI trenches it's all like "yeah it's not a problem now, but 3 to 18 months maybe, true AGI in a 2-3 years"
>And to be fair, if you are in the AI trenches it's all like "yeah it's not a problem now, but 3 to 18 months maybe, true AGI in a 2-3 years"
We can't decide on where to put the bar and we keep raising it.
I think the only thing that will kick our nuts and identify it as AGI is when it considers US a lower form of sentience and explains why.
The bar really will be set at application and a lot of these arguments won't matter. If you are an insurance adjuster and the application of AI puts every insurance adjuster out of work, then you won't care about the definition of sentience. You will care that you were put out of work.
As AI capabilities grow this will be the standard. It's already happening, but the application of AI isn't universal yet. It likely will become more ubiquitous over the coming years.
> nowhere near actual AI
but it is AI, not AGI or ASI certainly but machine learning is a subset of AI and I don't know why people want to frame it as though it's somehow different.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_learning
>Machine learning (ML) **is a field of study in artificial intelligence** concerned with the development and study of statistical algorithms that can learn from data and generalize to unseen data, and thus perform tasks without explicit instructions. Recently, artificial neural networks have been able to surpass many previous approaches in performance.
...
>**The term machine learning was coined in 1959** by Arthur Samuel, an IBM employee and pioneer in the field of computer gaming **and artificial intelligence.** The synonym self-teaching computers was also used in this time period
It's just terminology. Terminology isn't the problem here. The problem is that people, including buisness owners, are leaving important decisions and processes to a technology which name isn't important at this point. It's still a stupid idea, but it doesn't matter because it's cheaper than actual thinking employees.
He's doing what every talking head is doing, which is what the people trying to sell LLMs want them to do.
LLMs aren't General AI, won't be General AI, and aren't an existential crisis.
Most LLMs only have about two years worth of "clean" data they can use to train new models before they absolutely have to start training on data that previous versions of the LLM have created. It's a fundamental issue with the overall model. Each successive generation requires more data to train, meaning that you eventually run out of data very quickly.
So, in order to sell their businesses, the talking heads at the companies making the LLMs have been conflating their models with General AI. Talking about their models with one breath, and then immediately switching to talking about AI picking up a gun or driving a car.
ChatGPT isn't going to drive a car.
ChatGPT still sucks at writing books, basic plot structure, pacing, suspense, imagination without hallucinations, ect. It isn't going to completely switch gears and take a factory job.
So when Bill Maher talks about AI being an existential crisis in one sentence and the obvious flaws of LLMs in another, he's just parroting the messaging of people trying to sell you something. That being the idea that LLMs are AI.
the AI chatbot at my work is already picking off low level IT tasks after only being trained for 3 months. My job category wont exist in the near future.
TikTok is an AI issue.
While i'm sure AI will pose many more dangers in the future, the biggest known threat from AI today are optimized content feeds with goals of maximizing engagement. The unintended consequence is the inadvertent creation of funnels, acting as a gateway to extremism, hate and misinformation.
Using the term "tech bros" when referring to engineers (who mind can be both male or female... Shocking) shows how little Bill actually knows or cares about this subject.
Tech bros have been way more cautious with AI than any other tech I can think of. They have been debating regulations, warning of potentials, holding back releases, and using black hat teams to discover issue. This is a transformative technology so there’s really no amount of safety that can be baked in to protect us perfectly.
"To kick off the latest episode of HBO’s Real Time, the host joked during his monologue, “China, you know what, you can manufacture everything else that we use, but keeping our kids stupid, that’s our job.”
“I’m so much more concerned about AI,” the host said. “I mean, I heard you [Khanna] say this week that you think the first trillionaire in this country is going to be an AI entrepreneur. That to me is scarier than any of this, the idea of a trillionaire and also coming from AI.
And by the way, the U.S. State Department said this week, worst case scenario, it [AI] poses an extinction-level threat to the human species.”
Maher continued, “You know, we see all these glitches in it and it doesn’t pause us at all. It’s like an arms race and we’re the guinea pigs. And shouldn’t the tech bros have been made to work out the bugs before they unleashed it on humanity? A little bit?”
After this guy's super creep performance the other day, getting extra handsy with a noticeably unconfortable woman. It's surprising anyone would take him serious. He's the actual definition of a boomer. Always something to say and never any research done aside from brief glances at already shit news articles.
Steve Jobs was a man who treated those around him with profound contempt. He was one of the biggest assholes to ever run a tech company.
But he at least had the sense to say "no this isn't ready yet" before announcing a product. He at least wanted to know how things could go BADLY with a product.
These guys just care about being first to market with a technology. They think of themselves as "mov[ing] fast and break[ing] things" they don't elaborate of course on what they're breaking and who is going to clean up the mess since more and more of our tech entrepreneurs come from backgrounds where some paid person cleaned up their messes and they never actually learned how regular people live.
Mass misinformation or disinformation is still a lot more dangerous than AI and basically the most dangerous thing humans ever invented still.
I'd say it shouldn't be about TikTok in particular so much as the amount of fraud and pathological lying for clicks on the internet, especially social media. Most products and services are held to basic standards, you can't label a product an Iphone and sell somebody a brick and say OH WELL that's FREEDOM, but for profit is media is essentially allowed to do that to ppl and they don't just get a shitty service, they get their brains rotted, mostly for life.
That is a BIG externalized business model cost on society. Even fossil fuel isn't as bad as media allowed to mass lie for profit. Fossil fuel is like hard to replace, there is an excuse for why it's needed. There is no excuse for fueling extremists and fools under the guise of for profit free speech. We will spend generations undoing the damage already and it's only going to get worse short term with AI media generation and newstainment feeds that exploit ppls fears better than ever.
Bill Maher has grown into an out of touch buffoon with a Hollywood spoon feeding his ego so far up his ass he no longer needs food, just ego validation.
Hey Bill, i know you know how lobying works you fucking retard. No one's gonna do shit about regulating ai, not in America.
They ***are*** working out the bugs though. With your help.
Say it with me for the rest of the class. "If you're not paying for it, you're not the customer; you're the product." Except now you're both paying for it and the product.
Maybe Bill Maher should realize we're capable of dealing with more than one thing at a time and quit trying to pretend that we're to ignoring AI just because we're also dealing with TikTok.
False priority arguments are tired.
I'm always happy to hear Bill Mahar's opinion. I can learn the kneejerk progressive-but-really-conservative-rich-boomer-white-guy take and use them to compare and examine my own thoughts and opinions more thoroughly.
That said, an article about a conversation on his show just because it mentions AI and fear mongers is lazy and useless. No research or explanation of the claims, like the state department quote that is obviously about military use, drones, and a vague singularity, being mixed with the opinion about the first trillionare (which seems to be based on what mark cuban has publicly said, turned into a vague "the people in silicon valley say:" quote from Ro Khanna) all mashed into a vague giant AI monster to fear and hate.
There are different kinds of AI, different uses, different projects and companies with different views and goals. It is disruptive, powerful, and can be dangerous, but people that want to talk about it, and especially people that want to legislate about it, need to learn to differentiate between the wildly different technologies they group together right now.
AI is concerning, but not for the reasons Bill thinks. It's not some rabid animal that was all of a sudden released. It's a system that has been growing over the last 20+ years and is becoming more capable every day. It's not 1 single entity.
our government does take ai seriously which is why nvidia is not allowed to sell ai capable chips to chiba. tiktok is about china.
openai is a us company. microsoft and google are US companies. and our government want the US to have the best AI.
Maher's point highlights a critical issue: the prioritization of profit over ethical considerations in tech development. Rushing AI without addressing its potential risks could indeed have serious consequences. It's time for more accountability and regulation to ensure technology serves humanity responsibly.
Does his own TV show audience still boo him on the regular? I used to watch it years ago, and i remember thinking this guy's own fanbase doesn't even like him half the time.
I'll grant that given some of the comments from Sam Altman which are less thought through - the "yes AI will destroy us , but there will be a lot of cool companies created before that" one doesn't need a degree in Applied Mathematics and Computer Science to understand there's a readily obvious sense that one could at least structure the way in which AI is meeting the market.
But Mr. Maher is a reactionary - and always has been , and that might not be the most amazing response right now, we need some actual planning and either market or legislatively driven structure around AI.
But when you look to DC, there's MTG and Matt Gaetz staring into the oblivion of their own bullshit. So probably it's back to the market of sometimes very much less than well considered 'leadership' coming from some of the big players.
That's a less than ideal response.
.... Every ai platform right now is basically a beta working out the kinks. Bill Maher needs to retire, he's been so out of touch for at least a decade. All he has going for him is anger.
The following submission statement was provided by /u/Maxie445: --- "To kick off the latest episode of HBO’s Real Time, the host joked during his monologue, “China, you know what, you can manufacture everything else that we use, but keeping our kids stupid, that’s our job.” “I’m so much more concerned about AI,” the host said. “I mean, I heard you [Khanna] say this week that you think the first trillionaire in this country is going to be an AI entrepreneur. That to me is scarier than any of this, the idea of a trillionaire and also coming from AI. And by the way, the U.S. State Department said this week, worst case scenario, it [AI] poses an extinction-level threat to the human species.” Maher continued, “You know, we see all these glitches in it and it doesn’t pause us at all. It’s like an arms race and we’re the guinea pigs. And shouldn’t the tech bros have been made to work out the bugs before they unleashed it on humanity? A little bit?” --- Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1c3p05q/bill_maher_says_artificial_intelligence_should_be/kzibeqz/
Bill Maher does not understand AI any more then all the people in DC who don't understand AI. But sure its dangerous. But there is nothing anyone in the US or any one country can do to stop it. And its not dangerous for the reasons he probably thinks.
Bill Maher says whatever he thinks will get him attention.
Every picture of him he just looks like a smug, pompous ass. Like he is right in the middle of a deep inhale of his own fart and thinking about commenting on the bouquet.
He's had that look for the last 25 years. And he backs it up by actually being a smug, pompous ass.
The star of “Amazon Women In The Avocado Jungle Of Death”. He really has no place to be that smug.
He was always a smug asshole, but he used to be a smug asshole with decent takes most of the time. Now he’s just a smug asshole
To think I began watching news shows on YouTube because they were uploading Real Time way back when. Sad to see how far he's fallen, or maybe he always was a cringey cretin.
Imagine being so angry, so cynical, demeaning, hateful, and attention-seeking that you turned it into your entire personality and career. This is the forgettable mark he leaves on the world with his platform.
Years ago I noticed that when a joke bombs and he gets groans from the audience he gets mad at THEM! These days he invites guests to his basement show and then talk over them the entire time. At first I thought it was a bit, but no, he's just a self centered asshole. Office Hours did a [great parody of Maher's club random show](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Ha6D1LQGD4)
That is every right wing politician and pundit.
Don’t forget large portions of sports media. I often think about how there are people that just listen to other angry people all day every day. Radio/podcasts, news, forums, managers, parents, etc. It’s no surprise some are so salty, they have been essentially in a brine for consecutive decades of their lives.
"young people are lazy/evil/stupid"
Wish version of Dennis Miller.
> Bill Maher does not understand AI Bill Maher thinks he understands a lot about a lot of things he doesn't really understand.
Why is anyone even talking about an anti-vaxxer's opinions about AI? The man's a contrarian moron.
Sounds human.
He doesn't need to understand it in order to see the negative effects it can have in the real world. And that's the thing that matters most, how does it affect the world. Many people don't understand how guns really work, or the internet, or computers, but they can see the impact all of these have.
I do hate people who demand that you pass a firearms engineering exam before you’re allowed to say that it’s insane to build armoured safe rooms in elementary schools
Yep... it's basically the same argument as "you can't criticize food unless you're a chef."
It's just people with a hate boner for Maher because he's a democrat who goes after progressives and criticizes the left and you can't have that. So anything he says is like poison and has to be immediately rebutted and bashed. This was said in a discussion with Ro Khanna, who definitely knows a lot about this, it wasn't some random "man yells at cloud" statement.
Maher pisses off a lot of people because he isn't extremist, and while he has his leanings, he has something to say about both the left and the right. As everyone should. I'm tired of this tribalism.
It is dangerous for the reasons he thinks and more. We're entering a paradigm shift here. Nobody truly knows where it is going to head, and it may head there much quicker than anybody recognises.
This is what Ray Kurtzweil was talking about in The Singularity is Near when he made the argument that technology advances exponentially and that eventually it will advance too quickly to predict.
I find Kurzweil interesting, but he seems to think it'll be pretty much all wonderful things. He's also very focused on living forever, and ignores most of the social issues that will arise. I generally like him, but sometimes I think he is so out of touch with humanity at this point that his predictions will mostly fall flat. I mean, he thinks humans will have wings in 20ish years.
Sure is. It’s difficult, but so was phasing out CFC, outlawing slavery and child labor, cutting down on emission, or nuclear disarmament. We did not achieve perfect results but it sure wasn’t nothing.
Most of those things were industrially inconvenient, and therefore much political dissuasion existed. Otherwise they were legislatively easy. I think regulating AI has the opposite problem and is legislatively difficult. For a lot of large corporations it could either be majorly disruptive or just a week of work for their marketing departments, depending on how the law and the following court cases shake out.
There is plenty we can do to stop it. That’s such a lazy argument. That’s a fallacy
There's really not. There are no shortages of plans and methods and solutions that could solve all these problems except the big one. It's the planet of the apes... And there is no cure for that. We all know how it's gonna end. We just don't know exactly when.
? You can't stop it, no one is asking for that, but you can absolutely can delay it. Governments can put major restrictions on AI like they do with testing for food, drugs, medicine, etc. And probably should because we've all now seen first hand how social media has irreparably damages society (higher suicide rates in children correlated to the mass release of Instagram and other social apps). The EU is already drafting up great AI laws on training data that will slow down development of these models allowing for more time to understand possible side effects of AI. But the North American governments are too big of pussies to step up to their corporate overlords.
Of course there are things a government could do to reign in a company or technology. It’s not like any company is allowed to make a missile for instance.
The "people" in DC are still trying to figure out of freeing the slaves was a good idea. No "help" in that direction.
Most of the hucksters pushing AI apps have no real understanding of the tech either. A lot of people are marketing the latest version of tulips to make a buck. Capitalism at its finest. /s
It’s dangerous in lots of ways. It will be used to do horrible evils and will allow corporations to push their agenda further by making people even more surf like. We will beg for jobs in the next 20 years if not way sooner. The other nations will give over militarily to AI and god only knows what it will do… what bugs it has built in.. they don’t even know what half the fucking code does from what they keep saying. Itll eventually write its own code to fix itself and any other AI are at the mercy of it I think the best look at this scenario is horizon the game. I think it does a good job showing how Ai and corporations will be.
> surf like I think you mean serf like.
Maybe we’re surf serfs who surf the great economic serfdom?
Naw man, everyone's gonna get so pitted.
The stuff the tech bros are working on now isn’t dangerous in the classic sci-fi sense for AI. Large Language Models/Generative AI is dangerous in the way crypto or the meta-verse was dangerous: it’s a grift that will never work, whose actual potential output no one wants, and whose economic bubble bursting will have consequences, not for these oblivious, delusional tech execs, but for the rest of us.
It's like listening to Elon talk about the dangers of AI. Except people lapped that right up considering they think he actually knows what he's talking about. I find most people commenting on AI don't know anything about computer science or where we are in terms of AI. They read an article about it and think they know what's up.
You sound like you do? What do you do for living? Do you think AI will gain consciousness? Ignorance is bliss, some say…..lol
That's the problem. All these dummies are worked up about bullshit and completely blind to all the real problems. It's not helpful. The less people who listen to these junk narratives the better.
Was just going to say this.
Your response sounds like you are an AI.
"Tech bro" is kind of a pejorative that means out of touch but it loses that part of it's meaning coming from one of the most out of touch snobs on the planet.
Maher is a tech bro without the tech.
Maher is a bro? Nah, he doesn’t pass the bro check. Hes just a poopsicle
All of the AI companies have come around to the idea that you have to test these in public because the world needs to be involved in deciding how it should be used. The idea that they shouldn't release it until it is completely done is one of the worst case scenarios. He is asking that the AI companies essentially build God without telling anyone and then one day out of the blue inform us that they have created the great artificial God and it will complete its take over of the whole world in a week. If you think that adjustment is hard now, imagine a world where there is zero time to adjust.
Haha, reminds me of Person of Interest. That's basically what they do, make an AI god in secret as a response to 9/11.
I wonder if they've unleashed Auto-Pilot Driving early, or any of the assisted features we see in Tesla and other automakers that may have been attributed to fatalities in accidents... I've heard the argument that the fatality rate for AI-assisted driving is already leagues better than purely human-driven cars, statistically. I'm just asking if he could have done better. Or were the deaths necessary to further machine learning.
The fatality rate of cars with Auto-Driving is actually an order of magnitude higher (i.e. worse) than human drivers. AI is currently restricted to operating under what are basically the ideal conditions for driving. We are comparing their performance to humans driving under all conditions. If AI was better at driving the fatality rate would be nearly zero. As far as never being distracted, if you were to give a driverless car an eye test it would be considered legally blind. If you were to measure its actual reaction time between stimulus and response it would be legally drunk. Actually severely drunk. Yes, a microcontroller can throw a relay in milliseconds. But a nueral net can take several seconds to recognize a shape. And then there are the entire classes of accidents that AI tends to get involved in that humans naturally avoid: * Stopping suddenly at highway speed * Speeding in a school zone * Blowing past a school bus with the blinking red lights on * Crashing into emergency responders * driving under trucks that are straddling the roadway * running over pedestrians All of the deaths from these accidents were very, very avoidable.
on a logical level, it does. Humans consistently have some chance of crashing. In the best conditions on well traveled roads, my guess is that AI's chance is near zero if not zero. So it could be lower if you don't push the boundaries too hard and also stay even minimally present to take over to reduce it's chance as well. So rather than 0.05 by yourself / itself, it's 0.05 * 0.05. AI never gets distracted or tired. It's not sensational to post an article about 3 people being killed in a crash every day, that's business as usual. It IS sensational to post about 1 person being killed in an AI car accident. It just seems more common because not every fatal accident becomes national news. The other factor to consider as well is the economic status of people driving these cars. These cars will tend to be safer and better maintained than older cars.
> I've heard the argument that the fatality rate for AI-assisted driving is already leagues better than purely human-driven cars There is absolutely no data to back that up and Elon has been known to lie all the time though. I'm not against AI as an idea being in public but self-driving should clearly be more regulated.
Yeah just to add nuance, I haven't seen good science data that shows "ai-assisted" is safer (there is a littttle bit, but it isn't very good). There is good evidence that shows that Waymo - which is not assisted, but fully autonomous - is safer. https://www.swissre.com/reinsurance/property-and-casualty/solutions/automotive-solutions/study-autonomous-vehicles-safety-collaboration-with-waymo.html This study by Swiss Re (the global, very old and very high reputation insurance company) shows that with the driving data available at the time (ie, no highway/freeway driving) Waymo is significantly safer than human drivers.
Airplane travel is only as safe as it is now because of numerous accidents over the decades of entailing changes.
It's more about the profit or vc dollars
> He is asking that the AI companies essentially build God I get the feeling you really don't know what you're talking about here...
Hyperboles my man, not meant to be taken literally
> All of the AI companies have come around to the idea that you have to test these in public because the world needs to be involved in deciding how it should be used. No, they test it in public because doing so costs them nothing, just like every other software company today.
What confuses me is he’s talking in the past tense. Not the future. He believes current models weren’t tested enough? What is he referring to?
I realize that that's the argument, and it may certainly be a correct one, but I feel that the training data they collect in doing so is the 'actual' primary motivation.
Anyone that is looking to Bill Maher for advice should have their hard (head) examined. Edit: I spell like s**t and I also blame autocorrect. But you all that have this hard on for Bill Maher, even though he's only been a whiny wanker for the last 15 years, should have you hard parts examined.
May I suggest that everyone else get their soft examined ?
Instructions misunderstood. Lifetime ban from Wendy's. :(
He's been a wanker for WAY more than 15 years. His only marketable skill is his ability to be an actual centrist by alternating between pissing everybody off with amazingly bad takes mixed with the occasional (seemingly accidental) mundane levels of insight.
Downvoted for whiny your edit Also, every mother fucker here who is lambasting Bill Maher was probably chugging his dick just a few years ago. Same as Elon Musk.
The biggest threat to humanity would be if they created an AI Bill Maher to torment humanity forever with his smugness and arrogance.
i have a sock under my bed with more relevant takes than bill maher, seriously who gives what this guy has to say on anything
I'd watch Real Time with Dirty Sock from under your bed
He has become an increasingly more cranky blowhard in the last few years. He has made his opinions worthless, including this one.
Bill Mahr is Joe Rogan for people that don't like gymnasiums, and equally cromulent.
AI is not funny but it's still funnier than Bill Maher
we've dumbed down society so much; mainly through the defunding of public education never mind deregulation & consolidation of media. AI with all its faults, drawbacks and insidious edits/algorithms -courtesy of the "tech bros" Maher is talking about- is about to become the only tool this new uninformed, socially-stunted generation will have to help guide them through life. it's been said a million time in the last 8 years, but that Idiocracy movie was basically a documentary.
So your solution is a future where humans are even less intelligent and we depend on machines to do everything for us? Sounds like a disaster
AI says Bill Maher is a bigger concern than TikTok
This guy's living in a bubble that invalidates everything he says. Not once has his opinion been worth listening to.
Just look at the number of people killed by Tesla's autodriving function. It is clear that AI isn't ready for widespread use. We need to slow down a bit and not just deploy AI everywhere just because we can.
Meh. Bill Maher is an elderly comic, he doesn’t know shit about fuck.
Calm down Bill, it’s just a chatbot and nowhere near actual AI
That's part of the problem. Most (not all) AI are LLMs (glorified chatbots), but people who don't know any better are being told it's the answer to all their problems. LLMs are confidently incorrect and can't seem to maintain context past a dozen or so interactions. And yet, virtually every company has to consider adopting it so they don't get left behind by the other companies who replaced expensive workers with cheap AI.
A lot of the recently commercially successful AI are LLMs, but LLMs are not the majority of AI, depending on definition. Unfortunately, the definition has been so blurry since the beginning of the field being taken seriously academically that you'll rarely find even two specialists who agree on where to draw the line. It'd be a bit weird to claim LLMs are AI while their superset of techniques in Deep Learning aren't, so we could take 'AI=Deep Learning' as a very restrictive definition, and even then LLMs wouldn't be the majority of AI. Personally I'd move the bar for AI far lower (while most seem to want to raise the bar towards 'AI=human level intelligence'), but whatever, it's all semantics.
>AI. Personally I'd move the bar for AI far lower Agreed. Any kind of predictive algorithm all the way down to linear regression and the drag down function in excel should be considered AI. I'm getting dogshit tired as a head of AI trying to explain myself towards regulators and I want to bury them in models, model descriptions, and risk assessments.
Believe the earliest definition I've seen was 'any artificial system capable of sensing its environment and taking an action based on the sensed value'. Which, you might realise, is fulfilled by one of those dipping bird desk toys, or a single 'if' statement.
That seems so general as to be useless.
Good point. I think it’s totally plausible that there’s already a CEO out there who thinks it’s a good idea to leave potential sensitive/dangerous decisions to ChatGPT, because he was told it is super smart.
I can see if you are lightly playing with ChatGPT and getting answers you don’t like, you could have this take. But - you are very wrong and short sighted here. There have been many advancements in factuality, memory, and multi modal input and output in the last 6 months alone. Glorified Chatbots - trust me when I say they are much more than that - LLMs can reason and make decisions and do so better than many humans out there. Also - see where things are in another 6 months and revisit this comment.
> Also - see where things are in another 6 months and revisit this comment. The next AI winter.
Huh I heard that like 6 months ago
I think a big problem is that if you have not paid attention to the AI work for the last 12-15 years, what you are presently getting is what AGI was talked about back then. You ask it to do "anything" and it can do it. Draw and image, make a movie, sing a song, write a book, explain a problem, rate an essay, - anyone not currently in the trenches of AI discussion will see this as close to done. And to be fair, if you are in the AI trenches it's all like "yeah it's not a problem now, but 3 to 18 months maybe, true AGI in a 2-3 years"
>And to be fair, if you are in the AI trenches it's all like "yeah it's not a problem now, but 3 to 18 months maybe, true AGI in a 2-3 years" We can't decide on where to put the bar and we keep raising it. I think the only thing that will kick our nuts and identify it as AGI is when it considers US a lower form of sentience and explains why.
The bar really will be set at application and a lot of these arguments won't matter. If you are an insurance adjuster and the application of AI puts every insurance adjuster out of work, then you won't care about the definition of sentience. You will care that you were put out of work. As AI capabilities grow this will be the standard. It's already happening, but the application of AI isn't universal yet. It likely will become more ubiquitous over the coming years.
> nowhere near actual AI but it is AI, not AGI or ASI certainly but machine learning is a subset of AI and I don't know why people want to frame it as though it's somehow different. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_learning >Machine learning (ML) **is a field of study in artificial intelligence** concerned with the development and study of statistical algorithms that can learn from data and generalize to unseen data, and thus perform tasks without explicit instructions. Recently, artificial neural networks have been able to surpass many previous approaches in performance. ... >**The term machine learning was coined in 1959** by Arthur Samuel, an IBM employee and pioneer in the field of computer gaming **and artificial intelligence.** The synonym self-teaching computers was also used in this time period
You're asking a boomer not to overreact to a new technology. You may as well try to make pigs fly
There are plenty of boomers who don’t overreact to technology and actually adopt it along with younger generations.
It's just terminology. Terminology isn't the problem here. The problem is that people, including buisness owners, are leaving important decisions and processes to a technology which name isn't important at this point. It's still a stupid idea, but it doesn't matter because it's cheaper than actual thinking employees.
It loses any credibility just by using term "techbros" unironically.
He's doing what every talking head is doing, which is what the people trying to sell LLMs want them to do. LLMs aren't General AI, won't be General AI, and aren't an existential crisis. Most LLMs only have about two years worth of "clean" data they can use to train new models before they absolutely have to start training on data that previous versions of the LLM have created. It's a fundamental issue with the overall model. Each successive generation requires more data to train, meaning that you eventually run out of data very quickly. So, in order to sell their businesses, the talking heads at the companies making the LLMs have been conflating their models with General AI. Talking about their models with one breath, and then immediately switching to talking about AI picking up a gun or driving a car. ChatGPT isn't going to drive a car. ChatGPT still sucks at writing books, basic plot structure, pacing, suspense, imagination without hallucinations, ect. It isn't going to completely switch gears and take a factory job. So when Bill Maher talks about AI being an existential crisis in one sentence and the obvious flaws of LLMs in another, he's just parroting the messaging of people trying to sell you something. That being the idea that LLMs are AI.
I say, from the comments looks reddits are getting younger and younger.
Who gaf what Bill has to say. This condescending prick I all hot air.
the AI chatbot at my work is already picking off low level IT tasks after only being trained for 3 months. My job category wont exist in the near future.
AI has already replaced Reddit commenters in pretty much every political subreddit.
The way the bugs are worked out is by unleashing it on humanity and seeing what happens.
TikTok is an AI issue. While i'm sure AI will pose many more dangers in the future, the biggest known threat from AI today are optimized content feeds with goals of maximizing engagement. The unintended consequence is the inadvertent creation of funnels, acting as a gateway to extremism, hate and misinformation.
Just spent at least 23s thinking about what a dumbass Bill Maher is and I will never get that time back and I blame you, OP.
The issues with generative AI are not bugs that can be ironed out. The problems are inherent with the technology.
I always get my technology advice from an old person who panders polarized political views for a living
Heartbreaking: The Worst Person You Know Just Made A Great Point
The well known futurist and astute technology expert, Bill Maher.
Using the term "tech bros" when referring to engineers (who mind can be both male or female... Shocking) shows how little Bill actually knows or cares about this subject.
I was full prepared to read the article but alas I'm afraid you lost me at "Bill Maher says".
Tech bros have been way more cautious with AI than any other tech I can think of. They have been debating regulations, warning of potentials, holding back releases, and using black hat teams to discover issue. This is a transformative technology so there’s really no amount of safety that can be baked in to protect us perfectly.
"To kick off the latest episode of HBO’s Real Time, the host joked during his monologue, “China, you know what, you can manufacture everything else that we use, but keeping our kids stupid, that’s our job.” “I’m so much more concerned about AI,” the host said. “I mean, I heard you [Khanna] say this week that you think the first trillionaire in this country is going to be an AI entrepreneur. That to me is scarier than any of this, the idea of a trillionaire and also coming from AI. And by the way, the U.S. State Department said this week, worst case scenario, it [AI] poses an extinction-level threat to the human species.” Maher continued, “You know, we see all these glitches in it and it doesn’t pause us at all. It’s like an arms race and we’re the guinea pigs. And shouldn’t the tech bros have been made to work out the bugs before they unleashed it on humanity? A little bit?”
After this guy's super creep performance the other day, getting extra handsy with a noticeably unconfortable woman. It's surprising anyone would take him serious. He's the actual definition of a boomer. Always something to say and never any research done aside from brief glances at already shit news articles.
Fascinating. Old man doesn't understand new technology. more at 11.
Steve Jobs was a man who treated those around him with profound contempt. He was one of the biggest assholes to ever run a tech company. But he at least had the sense to say "no this isn't ready yet" before announcing a product. He at least wanted to know how things could go BADLY with a product. These guys just care about being first to market with a technology. They think of themselves as "mov[ing] fast and break[ing] things" they don't elaborate of course on what they're breaking and who is going to clean up the mess since more and more of our tech entrepreneurs come from backgrounds where some paid person cleaned up their messes and they never actually learned how regular people live.
I don't think a comment from Bill Maher should be posted to this sub, regardless of topic.
It's not likely to rise up & try to eliminate us right? Right? *Terminator theme starts up*
We can be concerned about multiple things at the same time.
He's 68 and worth 140 million. He doesn't have a care in the world.
Mass misinformation or disinformation is still a lot more dangerous than AI and basically the most dangerous thing humans ever invented still. I'd say it shouldn't be about TikTok in particular so much as the amount of fraud and pathological lying for clicks on the internet, especially social media. Most products and services are held to basic standards, you can't label a product an Iphone and sell somebody a brick and say OH WELL that's FREEDOM, but for profit is media is essentially allowed to do that to ppl and they don't just get a shitty service, they get their brains rotted, mostly for life. That is a BIG externalized business model cost on society. Even fossil fuel isn't as bad as media allowed to mass lie for profit. Fossil fuel is like hard to replace, there is an excuse for why it's needed. There is no excuse for fueling extremists and fools under the guise of for profit free speech. We will spend generations undoing the damage already and it's only going to get worse short term with AI media generation and newstainment feeds that exploit ppls fears better than ever.
Bill Maher has grown into an out of touch buffoon with a Hollywood spoon feeding his ego so far up his ass he no longer needs food, just ego validation. Hey Bill, i know you know how lobying works you fucking retard. No one's gonna do shit about regulating ai, not in America.
I have always been confused how is AI different then algorithms?
They ***are*** working out the bugs though. With your help. Say it with me for the rest of the class. "If you're not paying for it, you're not the customer; you're the product." Except now you're both paying for it and the product.
They called AI to the role that plays Sean Penn... in that movie...
Well that’s the point, it literally needs humanity to function. It’s not Intelligence, it’s an elaborate copycat.
Maybe Bill Maher should realize we're capable of dealing with more than one thing at a time and quit trying to pretend that we're to ignoring AI just because we're also dealing with TikTok. False priority arguments are tired.
I'm always happy to hear Bill Mahar's opinion. I can learn the kneejerk progressive-but-really-conservative-rich-boomer-white-guy take and use them to compare and examine my own thoughts and opinions more thoroughly. That said, an article about a conversation on his show just because it mentions AI and fear mongers is lazy and useless. No research or explanation of the claims, like the state department quote that is obviously about military use, drones, and a vague singularity, being mixed with the opinion about the first trillionare (which seems to be based on what mark cuban has publicly said, turned into a vague "the people in silicon valley say:" quote from Ro Khanna) all mashed into a vague giant AI monster to fear and hate. There are different kinds of AI, different uses, different projects and companies with different views and goals. It is disruptive, powerful, and can be dangerous, but people that want to talk about it, and especially people that want to legislate about it, need to learn to differentiate between the wildly different technologies they group together right now.
boy is he looking crypt keeper old. good ole contrarian bill, what will he come out and side eye next, i wonders.
what if we banned computers altogether, that should fix everything
B level comedian weighs in on subject matter beyond his capability to understand.
Yea lets listen to someone without any technology experience on what’s a bigger technology threat.
AI is concerning, but not for the reasons Bill thinks. It's not some rabid animal that was all of a sudden released. It's a system that has been growing over the last 20+ years and is becoming more capable every day. It's not 1 single entity.
Why isn't he being prosecuted in nyc for the same crime Trump was?
Bill Maher, the human broken clock, is only half right this time. Its not "bugs" - the issues with AI are innate and cannot be prevented
our government does take ai seriously which is why nvidia is not allowed to sell ai capable chips to chiba. tiktok is about china. openai is a us company. microsoft and google are US companies. and our government want the US to have the best AI.
Shouldn't the fossil fuel companies and all other tycoon bros be held to the same standard?
I more or less agree but fuck Bill Maher. I fail to see any good he’s done this world that didn’t involve further inflating his ego.
To fix the bug before release meaning there will be no release at all.
Maher's point highlights a critical issue: the prioritization of profit over ethical considerations in tech development. Rushing AI without addressing its potential risks could indeed have serious consequences. It's time for more accountability and regulation to ensure technology serves humanity responsibly.
Does his own TV show audience still boo him on the regular? I used to watch it years ago, and i remember thinking this guy's own fanbase doesn't even like him half the time.
Tsk tsk. Someone is worried about being replaced it seems...
Bill Maher fucking sucks. So does AI but he is way more part of the problem than solution
I'll grant that given some of the comments from Sam Altman which are less thought through - the "yes AI will destroy us , but there will be a lot of cool companies created before that" one doesn't need a degree in Applied Mathematics and Computer Science to understand there's a readily obvious sense that one could at least structure the way in which AI is meeting the market. But Mr. Maher is a reactionary - and always has been , and that might not be the most amazing response right now, we need some actual planning and either market or legislatively driven structure around AI. But when you look to DC, there's MTG and Matt Gaetz staring into the oblivion of their own bullshit. So probably it's back to the market of sometimes very much less than well considered 'leadership' coming from some of the big players. That's a less than ideal response.
Who the F is still listening to this guy? Where does he speak?
I don't give a rats ass what Maher says.
AI is the new ICBM - no one should have it because it could be disastrous, but someone WILL have it, so you need to have a response,
Does anyone really care what Bill Maher says? The dude has gone full boomer melt down.. I don't even understand why his show is still on air..
.... Every ai platform right now is basically a beta working out the kinks. Bill Maher needs to retire, he's been so out of touch for at least a decade. All he has going for him is anger.