Jaron Lanier: How humanity can defeat AI

I'm not worried that hammers will start hitting us on the head. I'm worried about people using the hammers to hit us on the head, and it has nothing to do with how intelligent the hammers are.

I drove to work today and passed a bus stop full of kids waiting to catch the bus to school. Everyone of them was staring at their phones. I find this extremely sad and with more technology this will only get worse. I accept progression but this doesn't seem like progression of the human only the machine. The world is being run by geeks who have little understanding what makes the rest of the population happy.

I think AI became inteligent around the same time Microsoft spent alot of marketing dollars telling us it is.

I always find the point about the Turing test "what if the human judge gets dumber" so prescient. Whenever I see discussion of why code, why write, why learn X because AI can just do it, I'm always drawn to that idea. AI undermining people's belief in themselves seems so damaging to me.

Jaron has just helped confirm my fear in AI .. It boils down to faith in humanity he says …. It’s out of our hands …. I’m saving up for a ticket to Mars !

Here’s the pertinent question for all AI engineers: can it be weaponized? If the answer is yes, then it will be. This is the problem with folks who defend AGI, nation states and terrorists will weaponize these tools and that’s where the danger lies.

His book "you are not a gadget" is as relevant today as when it was written over 10 years ago. Its really good

His 737-Max analogy doesn't give me hope for the future of humanity and AI. It's the old line "It's not the technology that is evil but how humans use the technology that is evil" Every new tech has been abused and I don't expect anything different with AI.

"As long as the AI mash up music apps don't hide the original source musicians, as long as we don't erase ourselves..." No musician is erasing themself, its the creators of the AI that don't care to deal with IP and licensing issues that come with their tech the same as mid journey isn't paying out illustrators, painters and photographers when stealing pixels worth of their stuff. A single image created by AI would have to source and site at least thousands of artists and their pieces. No one is going to deal with this problem from inside tech unless they are forced to by law. The same will be for music. It is nothing like remixing or sampling. The jump from human sampling to this AI scrambling is like claiming nuclear fusion is comparable to banging two rocks together. AI completely obliterates the original form and reconstitutes it - no one is getting recognized or credited without it being built directly into the tech.

What we believe about AI says a lot about what we think of ourselves.

He calls his job unusual but still he gets paid by Microsoft at the end of the day.

"Are people more important than machines?" That question has already been answered by Bill Gate's community: Seattle is a shithole of HOMELESSNESS due to skyrocketing rents and the non-availability to anyone now not working in TECH. So... no need to ask the question. It's been answered. Speaking of 'pragmatic'. You can intellectualize your way out of the stupid paper bag... mais a La fin, la verité est dans les rues.

I want to live a totally non-digital life. How can I do it without losing my citizenship?

The civilian sector is usually blind to the dangers in the military sector. At some point in the future autonomous weapons will be used in warfare against humans and it will be very difficult to contain them in the end.

Lanier is oftentimes incredibly naive, but this time I appreciate the fact that he brings the human element back into the AI discussion. I see a lot more danger in how humans will decide to use AI than in the possibility that AI will decide to dispense with humanity altogether just because it's an inferior form of intelligence.

I trust any man who displays a serpent horn on the wall.

The reason “you keep in doing it” is greed and money.

You don't have to give an AI zombie a consciousness to make it dangerous.

this is a really great interview, Jaron is so insightful,.but here I actually think the interviewer was asking all the right questions. loved watching this

Sci-Fi is not the reason people are taking it too seriously and pushing the doom narrative , Sci-Fi is rather one of the main reasons why they don't take it seriously. Since we are used to meet these narratives in a fictional futuristic package, it seems inconceivable that they can actually be true now. You never see anyone laughing when talking about the holocaust or the massacre in Ruanda, but when they talk about the AI killing everyone, laughter seems to be a very usual response.