HN Reader

I am surprised by the direct quotes where Hinton says "by any measure AI is intelligent" because I think these words will come back to haunt him, much as prognostications from Chomsky dogged his heels.

By narrow measures of outcome, AI synthesises answers which meet needs in questioners. I think intelligence includes aspects of behaviour (such a word) of a system which go beyond simply providing answers. I don't think AI can do this, yet if ever.

Not sure if I'm allowed to quote from the protected article, but the full talk point was:

> “What’s actually going to happen is rich people are going to use AI to replace workers,” he says. “It’s going to create massive unemployment and a huge rise in profits. It will make a few people much richer and most people poorer. That’s not AI’s fault, that is the capitalist system.”

It's kind curious how that would happen.

In the old days, if you want to maintain a monopoly, you can try drain out the talent pool so no one else can hire the best people to do the work that you're doing, and you can also try patent wall to delay your competitors from launching their product.

But if a worker can be replaced by an AI, it could also mean that the competitiveness of the work is significantly reduced, to the point that theoretically everybody can do it. The only way (i guess) to remain the monopoly is then tightening control on the AI while optimize the process to kill off all potential competitors etc. It's all Red Ocean policies (https://www.wallstreetprep.com/knowledge/red-ocean-strategy/).

"Massive unemployment" maybe, but I don't think "huge rise in profits" is guaranteed.

When Hinton was asked, what's the solution, he simply said, "socialism". I am a socialist too. But if you believe his thesis (that AI will concentrate power in the hands of few), I think there is hope. Let me outline a positive vision of AI.

I assume it will be technologically possible to run "medium LLM" (for the lac of a better name) on your phone. A medium LLM is something that knows a limited vocabulary (say slightly larger than simple English), and perhaps doesn't remember the capital of France; but it can reason well with the limited vocabulary. So it can answer what's the capital of France by reading Wikipedia, and likewise, it can work with complicated words using their definitions in terms of simpler words.

Now, everybody would run an AI like that on their phone. It would help people solve real world problems of navigating the world and talking to others. Most importantly, it would help people unite by surpassing the Dunbar number. If you (with help of your phone AI) can keep track of 15 million contacts rather than 150, it is life changing and increases trust-building by orders of magnitude. And soon, machines will be able to do that for us.

Socialists have always emphasized education and communication, for everyone, because these are the true constituents of sovereignty and emancipation. We have, I believe, technological means (widely available universal computation and telecommunication) to provide a kind of mind extension for the mind that will surpass our neocortex and will allow everyone to engage with much larger number of people. Lot more human cooperation will result.

I think activists should look into building and embracing such app - a decentralized communication frontend agent, which would let you build trust with large number of people, without much effort, and help you by coordinating with them (really, learning from them their skills and their struggles). We don't need social media giants to do this for us in a centralized way.

So I posit this techno-anarchism as an antidote against techno-feudalism.

A surprising number of people are in favor of (or pay lip service to) some kind of VAT on robots and "AI":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robot_tax

Make it 50% of the sales price like with cigarettes, since "AI" makes people dumber.

Considering that the general trend has been that a few people get rich and everyone else gets poorer, this is a nothing statement.

Hinton never notices that information isn't psychological, his generation failed at resolving the conduit metaphor, ie making the arbitrary in any ways specific (unless it's about diagnostic targets). Of course Hinton is a doomer, he's bullish on his own tech's explosive growth, which, as semantic dilution and/or delusion, is really just a huge bust, generally. Hinton will be seen as another version of Tucker, not Tesla.

Hinton said on X “I left so that I could talk about the dangers of AI without considering how this impacts Google,"

Now he is claiming he left to watch Netflix?

Hinton is definitely making a full turn towards luddite.

"I guess it’s nice that he’s become more optimistic here. He usually just talks about how it’ll probably kill us all." (From Reddit)

Just because you fail to get rich with AI

does not mean you cannot get rich by some other means

It's certainly possible. It helps remove leverage from people trying to make a living. If your labour isn't needed, then what?

An alternative view could be, this is just the same as every other technological innovation.

Hinton is too speculative and inconsistent for me. A reporter outside the AI field even called him out for saying with confidence that only blue collar work will survive AI by pointing out a few years back he said with the same confidence that only creative work will survive.

I can't but compare his takes with Stuart Russell takes, which are so well grounded, coherent and easily presented. I often revisit Stuart Russell discussion with Steven Pinker on AI for the clarity he brings to the topic.

Maybe. At the end of the OP, Hinton qualifies his guesses with:

> "We don’t know what is going to happen, we have no idea, and people who tell you what is going to happen are just being silly," he adds. "We are at a point in history where something amazing is happening, and it may be amazingly good, and it may be amazingly bad. We can make guesses, but things aren’t going to stay like they are."

I agree with Hinton: We only know that things will change, not how they will change. We can only make guesses.

Anyone claiming to know with certainty is full of baloney.

I think this is true for most capital equipment, at least until governments step in to take the edge off.

Whether AI has a more powerful effect than it's predecessors remains to be seen. It could.

Can we get a second opinion from someone that actually specializes in LLMs?

This is the same clown who said years ago that we should stop training radiologists because AI would automate their jobs away. And now demand for radiologists is higher than ever. Don't waste time with his predictions.

Isn't that the result of every innovation ever, except for complete revolution?

yeah man this is just capitalism. everybody should read piketty.

Thank you for your contributions Geoffrey. Enjoy your retirement. You do not need to be a "thought leader".

Businesses fall into 2 categories:

B2C (sell to people)

B2B (sell to B2C companies)

If the “C” is broke, it seems like there won’t by any rich people. In other words, if the masses are poor and jobless, who is sending money to the rich?

This is true of everything anyone invents who happens to be unlucky enough to live under capitalism.

Rich, greedy people ruin everything.

Obvs