Technology

86413 readers

4048 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related news or articles.
Be excellent to each other!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.

Approved Bots

founded 3 years ago

MODERATORS

L3s@lemmy.world

enu@lemmy.world

technopagan@lemmy.world

L4s@lemmy.world

L3s@hackingne.ws

391

Most Americans don’t trust AI — or the people in charge of it (www.theverge.com)

submitted 2 months ago by KarlHeinzSchwuke@feddit.org to c/technology@lemmy.world

18 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] MangoCats@feddit.it 0 points 1 month ago (1 children)

but these are new risks of arbitrary severity, from trivial to devastating, that did not exist at all before

I disagree. The risks of arbitrary severity are already there, we have just slowly evolved into handling them how we handle them now, learned (sometimes) from the mistakes either how to handle them better or just accept the consequences as "how things are."

So, I do agree that rapid switching to letting AI handle things will mis-handle the old risks in new and unanticipated ways. Maybe if AI helps us actually build a space elevator or functional fusion Tokamaks or other things like that then that will be creating significant new risks with their own new issues.

we have to do that hard work and be real with ourselves, rather than hand-wave them away because of the potentially thrilling prospects.

AI is just the latest shiny in a long list of shinies that enthusiastic entreprenuers have hand-waved all the hard work around the real challenges away about. I think self driving cars are a pretty good example of how this "disaster waiting to happen" will really roll out - things like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYkv6jvTpCc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Elaine_Herzberg etc. Is it regrettable that Elaine died? Yes - right along with the other 6000+ pedestrians killed by human drivers that year in the US alone.

[+] badgermurphy@lemmy.world 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

[deleted]

[–] MangoCats@feddit.it 1 points 1 month ago

everyone throws their hands up and shouts “NOT IT!” when its time for responsibility and culpability to get handed out.

Oh, like the financial crisis of 2008-9 - bail us out, we're too big to fail - it's not our fault that we rushed into the unregulated territory and ignored all the risk... The taxpayers are the ultimate insurance underwriters.

as the responsible parties are made responsible for their failures and negligence

As such, regardless of technological involvement or not, you must be just about as sad as I am about the current trends regarding responsibility, accountability, enforcement of legal precedents, stability of our systems, etc. In that respect, I'll say the state of AI is more a symptom than a cause.

wait for their insurers to force them to take responsibility, since someone has to hold the bag when there’s lawsuits.

There was a scene in Star Wars (the original: A New Hope) where "the senate will no longer be a problem, the emperor has disbanded the body..." I'm waiting for them to start talking about doing that with the courts, they talk about every other outrageous thing imaginable.

[–] MangoCats@feddit.it 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

we must largely agree

I think we do, except, AI is just another (big, powerful, broad reaching implications) tech, like the internet, or computers, or nuclear fission, or spaceflight (artificial satellites), or powered flight, or the steam engine, or steel making, or circumnavigation capable sailing ships, or gunpowder...

None of those things switched on all at once in an instant, and AI has been creeping up on us for 60+ years. The past 2 or 3 have been a rather dramatic acceleration, fulfilling much of the promise and expectation of the past 50 years, but it's still not as great as people imagine it could be - a lot like everything else on the list above. Most people "on the cusp" of those technologies had very different visions for what they would bring to the world compared with what actually happened.

Can we "shoot ourselves in the foot" with this one? Yes, but you could do the same with a rock in a bamboo pole with a little gunpowder, too.