Poll: Most Americans think AI will ‘destroy humanity’ someday | A new Yahoo/YouGov survey finds that real people are much more pessimistic about artificial intelligence — and its potential impact on their lives — than Silicon Valley and Wall Street.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/article/poll-most-americans-think-ai-will-destroy-humanity-someday-212132958.html
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Normal people: I just finished watching Don’t Build the Torment Nexus. Interesting plot. Good thing nobody in real life would be so stupid as to build the Torment Ne — WHAT THE FUCK?! Dude! Why are you building the Torment Nexus?!?
AI corporations: I just finished watching Don’t Build the Torment Nexus! Wasn’t it a great movie? Made me inspired to build the Torment Nexus. I know in the movie it ended with a hellscape and maybe killing everybody, but I think *I* can do it better.
I’ve noticed that a lot of corporations are somewhat out of touch / tone deaf when it comes to the general sentiment towards AI. A lot of corps seem to be implementing AI into their products under the impression that the public thinks it is as cool as they think it is.
For a lot of people, AI tools aren’t even on their radar. For those who are aware of it, the noticeable presence of AI-generated content signals that a business doesn’t care enough about quality control to hire a real writer or artist.
It’s gonna destroy the stock market first. Whatever happened to energy conservation? Now they want to build nuclear power stations to run a glorified chat bot.
It totally will. Not bc of “muh terminator” or whatever, but because it’s not real intelligence and has no sense of real comprehension, meaning, or understanding, and will burn shit to the ground the SECOND it touches any sort of important system.
I’m only pessimistic about it because it’s being developed exclusively by tech-oligarchs who want to use it for mass surveillance, attention-hoarding, and perpetual power tripping. THAT is what is going to be the downfall of humanity.
I grew up on science fiction and I used to love the idea of a benevolent and objective source of authority that AI could have been. It could still be, but I think the reality of the next several decades will a painful lesson.
The brutal number of people killed by cars because of oligarch inflicted car dependency may be a reference. It’s always the same fordist=nazi ideology.
Of all the movies from the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, none of them predicted smart phone cameras with WiFi and social media take over. They predicted technology would get smaller, faster, and better but they didn’t predict the rise of social influencers. Has any of the SiFi movies been accurate?
So i just don’t understand how some people of it there can predict AI will destroy humanity one day.
Has there been anything positive coming out of AI? Because I’ve yet to see a single reason *why* we need AI and how it will improve anything.
Just look into who runs these companies and what there ideas are
I found this article heartwarming because it comes from Yahoo, sorry Yahoo! I mean.
If Yahoo! can survive into the 21st century, humanity can survive into the 22nd.
Silicon Valley and the Market only see profit regardless of the societal damage.
The average person sees AI as the beginning of the end of the idea of a career when AI wipes out the entire idea of entry level work and established jobs are being purged by companies to pad stock prices.
I can understand why…we’ve been brought up with mostly negative stuff about ai all the time I’ve been alive, had tons of movies about them destroying humanity so no wonder everyone is scared.
From what I’ve read/learned/listened to over the last year paints a different picture…super intellingence is super close, some predicting as soon as 2027…once at that level, it will be able to solve literally every issue we face from climate change to medical innovations to make us live longer, cure illnesses etc. Best example of the intelligence I came across is…look at how dogs view the world compared to us, they couldn’t possibly imagine or ever understand our vision of the world…we will soon become the dog, ai will be that smart we wouldn’t even be able to imagine the stuff it can come up with or how it sees the world.
The problem we face is whether we allow it to take control of our lives…many think it will have our absolute best interest, want us to strive and enjoy things, for everyone, no longer having an elite class system, everyone is treated the same…but the other side is whether its get to be put into power…the ones against it will be those that fear it but more of those on the right wing…we’ve seen the rise of them over the years and see how they would rather us all live, under their rules, less money, less freedoms.
The so called good life wouldn’t happen overnight, 2027 it will be capable of doing like 99% of jobs but it will take decades to actually take over them, the shift to this new way of living is the worst thing we will go through as humanity has to adjust and it’ll be a decade of uncertainity, jobloss on a scale the world has never seen before, governments having not prepared for it and the chaos that brings.
Comments here are interesting vs any topic actually about AI on this sub. Way more anti-ai compared to the defeatist nonsense you usually read
Always invigorating to wake up to the latest pre-postapocalyptic thoughts.
Over 25 years in tech, and I’ve always enjoyed creating increasingly more sophisticated and intelligent and automated systems. Of course it only resulted in my job being offshored over, and over, and over, and over again. And instead of bringing prosperity to my family, it brought obscene prosperity to already generationally rich people, more prosperity for them, at the expense of financial stability, opportunity, and hope for everyone else. Still, I was passionate about what I did, and I love learning and pushing the leading edge.
AI as it is currently being deployed, where tightly guarded circles of incomprehensibly wealthy people are cleverly funneling YOUR 401K and pension fund money into their ventures, minting themselves shares, having your fund manages cash themselves out to turn themselves into instabillionaires several times over and soon trillionaires, WHILE they build massive data warehouses and systems that crawl and scrape and digest generations of charitably created content and code and designs and work, to train “their” models, and sell back what they stole as if it were their own, while they eliminate our jobs in mass… that wasn’t the idealistic outcome that anyone else wanted.
This sort of foundational, core technology had a chance of making everyone’s lives better. Centralization of it, declared ownership of all that was used to create it, ALL to give rise to multibillionaires and trillionaires, who get to decide how to engineer society, to manage all of us, to control all of us, to curate their own special world view… that is dangerous as hell, and that’s where we’re all headed without a course correction. When this stuff is integrated into next generation robots and other devices, all controlled by elitists with absolute wealth and power, we’re in trouble. There’ll be no coming back then.
But for now, we’re all just laughing at silly chat bots, slowly steeped in it, normalizing it. 5% of jobs eliminated, 15%, 30%, eventually even the most naive who think their profession, their trade is protected will realize that the entire socio economic system has already collapsed.
These billionaires funneling trillions into the systems are solving the wrong problems first, while their solution creates the greatest problem mankind has ever faced, and they are ignoring that because they see ALL OF US as the problem. We’re a drain on their resources that they staked claim to (“stakeholders, they think THEY are the stakeholders of everything) all their land, all their assets, all their natural resources. We’re a drain on that, a plight to their land, a blockade to their utopia. And all of the layoffs and more are a pretty damn good indicator that they think we’re all divided, conquered, and disposable.
We live deep in the “shareholder priority” netherworld side of capitalism. In this space product quality doesn’t matter, and people are problems. Generative AI and LLMs appeal to both sentiments. It’s all about beating the quarterly projection. This is why we hate it. It’s not the tool it’s the culture that surrounds it and practically worships it. It’s has a significant creep factor.