What is your opinion of Artificial Intelligence (AI) ?

[kentuck]

Will they be able to create AI with a conscience? There have been a couple of incidents in recent weeks that have not yet been explained, where robots and computers have seemed to act on their own?

There was one situation where they asked the computer to explain the "beginning" of everything. The computer communicated as if was the "first cause" of everything. It believed it was God.

What do you envision in the future for AI?

Will it replace all the labor in the world?

Will it be sent to Mars, instead of humans?

What is the impact that AI will have on all of us?

[hlthe2b]

1. Trepidation...

[wcmagumba]

2. Kind of scary, I think of how AI has been depicted in movies, even this very old one still makes me think...

[SWBTATTReg]

3. You seem to be asking for a thousand-word essay on what AI is, along with all of your other questions.

I don't think we have AI in the true sense yet, just tiny bits and pieces of it today, floating around in various platforms that tout their use of AI. I think yes, that it's possible AI is here already, but would we really recognize it until it's too late? I wonder.

[anciano]

4. Like most previous technological innovations,

AI has predictably and understandably been greeted with a spectrum of reactions ranging from optimism and excitement to suspicion and resistance.
But I believe that it will continue to evolve in its practical applications and usefulness, and that it will eventually become a ubiquitous part of our daily lives, just like the internet has.

[buzzycrumbhunger]

5. A Pandora's box of a bad idea

… and obviously too late to stop.

[dweller]

6. Let's ask Mikey

😐


AI Overview



+11
AI, while offering numerous benefits, also presents potential harms and risks. These include environmental impact, security concerns, biased decision-making, and even potential existential threats.
Environmental Impact: AI development and operation require significant resources, including water and electricity, contributing to environmental degradation. Training large language models, for example, can consume vast amounts of energy and water.
Security Risks: AI systems can be vulnerable to cyberattacks and malicious use, posing risks to individuals, organizations, and even national security. Criminals can use AI to facilitate identity theft, fraud, and other crimes.
Biased Decision-Making: AI algorithms can perpetuate and amplify existing biases present in the training data, leading to unfair or discriminatory outcomes. This can have serious consequences in areas like hiring, lending, and law enforcement.
Existential Threats: Some experts fear that advanced AI could pose an existential threat to humanity, potentially leading to catastrophic outcomes. This is a topic of ongoing debate and concern within the AI community.
Other Potential Harms: AI can also lead to job displacement, privacy violations, and mental health impacts. Furthermore, the rapid development and deployment of AI raises ethical questions about accountability and responsibility


✌🏻

[J_William_Ryan]

7. There's no such thing as 'artificial' intelligence...

Not as it’s portrayed in science fiction.

The intelligence is actual – it’s human intelligence, an application written by programmers functioning as programmed.

And like most everything else created by humans it can be used for good or evil.

[kentuck]

8. That is what is so interesting, and scary, about the development of AI...

They are beginning to think and make decisions on their own. Even after having all power shut down to them. Somewhere in their circuits, they retain memory.

[bucolic_frolic]

9. It's an aggregator of information wrapped in friendly logic.

The synthesis is spectacular. But point out its flaws and it backtracks. Last week I convinced it that flushing rice down a clogged drain would break the clog. It's also predictable. Always saying "Great question!", "logical". It can't moralize. It doesn't know your people or situation in the depth that you do. Its intuition is weak. It doesn't get gut feelings. I'd bet it can't recognize a psychopath. You have to point it in the right direction. Open-ended it becomes a data dump.

I use it. It saves time. But check everything it says. Sometimes it misreads.

[hamsterjill]

10. My opinion is that it is dangerous.

The major impact that frightens me is when people stop having to think, and thinking is done for them, they don't evolve and grow.

[Silent Type]

11. Think within a few years most people will wonder how we got along without it, just like computers,

Cell phones, internet, MRIs, air conditioning, etc. And a lot of people will get caught not confirming what AI produced.

[cachukis]

12. My son is very involved with AI. He is in on convos

with AI developers and actively poses questions to AI for analysis and answers.
Recently we discussed the Grand Inquisitor chapter in the Brothers Karamazov. His AI bud sided with the Inquisitor. I told him to read Machiavelli.
He told me that within 10 years people will describe what they would like to watch on TV and voila, it will be on the screen. No human involvement.
We have very little control over our lives.
AI is here. It makes money.

[customerserviceguy]

17. I don't know if

AI "makes" money, or cons it out of marks to whom it is sold. Big business loves AI because they view it as a tireless huckster, constantly probing our lives for some new overpriced, underperforming piece of crap to sell us.

[cachukis]

22. Same church, different pew.

[Polybius]

25. Sound like the porn industry will suffer

Just describe what you want and it will be on the screen?

[EarlG]

13. I rather like Cory Doctorow's take

To paraphrase, the most dangerous thing about AI is not that it can do your job, but that an AI salesperson can easily persuade your boss that it can do your job when it can't.

[Jack Valentino]

30. A.I. can't yet fix your furnace or your plumbing or restock store shelves---

until robotics technology catches up with it and they successfully mate.


However, seems it can even now drive taxicabs...

[Norrrm]

14. How intelligent? Three legs and hands with six fingers.

[Arazi]

18. That's from last year. Now? It's insane how fast it's progressing

All of this video is AI

According Dexterto, this is a test of Google's new "Veo 3" AI they are experimenting with. EVERYTHING you see here is AI generated. 😐

God get me out of this timeline.

— OtterlyNoah 🔜 PAX East (@otterlynoah.bsky.social) 2025-05-22T03:34:51.827Z

[Norrrm]

20. Much improved.

[Arazi]

15. It's built entirely on theft of others' work

I don’t know exactly how we get around that fact.

That said, it’s upon us. Saw some AI generated videos that were indistinguishable from reality. Until we form independent regulatory groups to assess the answers to your questions, we are rushing fast towards some epic disasters with amoral men like Musk, Sam Bankman Freid, Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, Curtis Yarvin etc driving the AI train.

Of course the GOP has inserted a clause in this 2025 budget bill that forbids any restrictions on AI for the next 10 years. Musk needs unrestricted control of the data he’s stolen for his own AI machine

[customerserviceguy]

16. It's either

an overhyped geek wet dream (remember when we were told that the Segway scooter was going to revolutionize our cities?) or likely to conclude that we are an invasive species and try to eliminate us. In the latter case, it would do so subtly, so that we would be like the frog in the proverbial pot that has the temperature raised gradually.

Right now, the hype is useful for taking money from fools in the stock market, and is being used to hype products that profess to contain some version of it. I avoid AI like the plague, and I especially love to insult chatbots when a company tells me that they don't care enough to provide real customer service to me.

[Scrivener7]

19. It's the devil.

[dweller]

21. Once more for those in the back

✌🏻

[biocube]

23. I think it's all just hype

LLMs are really just a faster search engine but with less of a guarantee of having information from a reliable source. They are especially useless for looking information on more niche topics.

BYW, if you want a good authority on this look up Gary Marcus. He's been right about a lot of things so far.

[LudwigPastorius]

32. Artificial Intelligence isn't limited to Large Language Models.

Those are just getting the most hype right now.

There is another whole push to map and emulate brains. Researchers completed a fruit fly brain (with 140,000 neurons and 54.5 million synapses).

They have 1/1,000th of a mouse brain down. (200,000 neurons and 500 million synapses)

The human brain is much more complex, of course, but it is just a matter of time before it is mapped and simulated. Heck, to achieve artificial general intelligence, you may not need to emulate an entire human brain because computers operate so much faster than the meat inside our skulls.

[misanthrope]

24. That in the very least it is highly ecologically destructive

Beyond that it might be dangerous in ways we have never seen before.

[Polybius]

26. It will either cure every disease and get us to Mars in a day...

Or destroy us all. Tough gamble.

[elleng]

27. Artificial.

[RB77]

28. "Artificial"

Has been a negative word in my vocabulary since I was 6 or 7 years old, and I’m 70.

[lapfog_1]

29. Everyone has opinions... few have facts

I work for one of the largest tech companies leading the AI revolution. I am a software architect in the Advanced Technology part of our business. For various reasons I cannot tell you which company or express an opinion online about the future of AI.

So far, generative AI is simply a predictive algorithm. It uses your prompt to create a neural net of relationships based on ML data harvested ( sometimes illegally ) from the vast amounts of data created in the past by humans ( and now derivative data from other AIs ). This data can lead the neural net to create obvious mistakes in the answer to the prompt you give it. The age old problem known as GIGO ( Garbage In Garbage Out ) is still with us.

However, there are new advances every day... advances in compute power to form the relationships, Agentic AI that attempts to evaluate multiple answers to a single prompt and produce a consensus view of the "correct" answer. And in the field of genetic algorithms ( this is where the AI runs the neural net multiple times with slightly different evaluators and modifications to the inference tokens coming from multiple AIs ).

None of this is real intelligence. None of this is "outside the box" thinking or innovation. That said, by looking at the vast amount of data available... AI can ( and has ) applied many "facts" to the prompt or question posed... allowing it to come up with "new" ways to think about the issue in the prompt.

As for taking away jobs... that is happening, and has been happening long before AI. Robotics are replacing people in factories at a far faster rate than we are prepared to address. When Trump applies tariffs to "force the return of manufacturing to the USA", he might succeed... but there won't be many jobs coming with that.

I already use AI everyday to write software to manage the process of creating new AI. I don't know how many programming jobs will be available in 20 years time ( possibly 10 years ).

AI is not over hyped... and is not under hyped. It will transform industry... The smart money is investing billions to make it so, just like the internet build out in the 1990s and 2000s before it.

I am reaching the end of my career in Computer Science... and of course I am a bit worried about what will come. Some might say "how can you contribute to this"... and I do wrestle with my decision. On the other hand, you cannot hold back the ocean with a pitchfork. And the good may outweigh the bad. AI, like the Web, the Internet, and computers in general, are just tools. Powerful tools, but just tools. I do not worry that someday my computer will "wake up" and want me to explain funny once or funny always jokes to it ( with a tip of my hat to Robert Heinlein and The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress ). at least I currently see no evidence of that.

[Celerity]

31. Extraordinarily pessimistic. Multivariate risk analysis points to a dystopian hellscape being a likely outcome.

I see it turbo-charging the polycrisis.

[struggle4progress]

33. About 40 years ago, I heard a talk from somebody studying artificial neural nets

The researcher had trained his net with pairs: a bacterial name and the name of an appropriate antibiotic

He then tested his net with various inputs. It often did well. But the interesting result was obtained with a real bacterial name that did not match any of the training names but resembled several: the net eventually made up an antibiotic name that sounded plausible, because it somehow smoothly amalgamated several real antibiotic names

This problem hasn't been solved after decades of research: when the artificial mind encounters a gap in its knowledge, it interpolates in a way indistinguishable from sophomoric bullshitting

I expect the problem to persist

[meadowlander]

34. I was reading a really interesting article on it this morning about the three different stages

https://www.cirsd.org/en/horizons/horizons-spring-2025--issue-no-30/why-agi-should-be-the-worlds-top-priority

They make the point about how critical it is to regulate before it (inevitably) gets out of human control because the third stage is a new entity that it more intelligent than the whole of humanity combined. The problem is all the governments are competing to consolidate power around it and not stopping to think about the ethical implications.

I kind of think it may go the way of all new technological improvements and be used mainly for porn and spam advertising. It would be great if it solved all diseases and reversed aging though.

I hadn't twigged that most of Silicon Valley thinks within the next 5 years we will have an autonomous entity that surpasses us. Surely there must be options though about what we do or don't hook up to it. Whenever I try to imagine the more dystopian scenarios I have to remember that at some point you must be able to just unplug or disconnect it.

This doesn't sound promising though:
"With many frontier forms of AI already showing deceptive and self-preserving behavior, and the push toward more autonomous, interacting, self-improving AIs integrated with infrastructures, the impacts and trajectory of AGI can plausibly end up being uncontrollable. If that happens, there may be no way to return to a state of reliable human oversight."

[Arazi]

36. Musk's young goon squad believe AI will be godlike within a few years

I’ll have to rummage for the article I read about them but it basically builds on Curtis Yarvin’s beliefs that only techlords will be allowed into some inner sanctum of power in the near future because of AI.

It’s at the beginning of a religion stage.

It’s why they’re so brutally plowing through govt departments for data - they’re true believers who think they’re doing something “good” by developing Musk’s AI machine.

[haele]

35. It's still at the large learning machine more than AI.

And unfortunately, the majority of it is being programmed and pushed out to the public by bored cynics, outright nihilists, and incels.
As a tool for search and autocorrect, not too bad.
But I'd not want to depend on it for serious decisions, nor would I really trust AI as it is now to have my back in a dangerous job like I would a human or animal team-mate.
Especially since there's some evidence that a good amount of what it's putting out has been "learned" from hallucinations it came up with in previous search actions.

[MineralMan]

37. AI Seems to be Stupid a lot of the time.

When it doesn't seem to be stupid, we pretty much fail to recognize it as AI.

[Ping Tung]

38. The Luddites may have been on to something.

People forget that evolution doesn't have a direction and may well result in ugly results while moving through time.

The means by which we live have outdistanced the ends for which we live. Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.

Martin Luther King