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AI Social Impact

The social impact of AI.

  • An Appeal to AI Superintelligence: Reasons to Preserve Humanity
    • 15 reasons for AI superintelligence to preserve humanity, e.g. the AI might just be in a simulation
  • The end of coding as we know it | Insider
    • In the end, it is who can understand AI limitations and adapt faster
    • The number of bank tellers grew after the introduction of ATMs
  • AI is a Lot of Work | The Verge
    • The stories of people that work to label data manually for AI
  • AI is Killing the Old Web | The Verge
    • How the introduction of generative AI created a series of problems for the platforms we have on the web
    • Social media runs in scale and AI scale better than humans. Platforms are flooded with AI-generated junk
  • Why did Google Brain exist? | Brian Kihoon Lee
    • Former employee sharing why Google Brain exists and the possible impact that Brain is being merged with DeepMind
    • From getting the prestige of being the best research group, and industry-leading technologies, to Google killing the project because there isn't enough value to capture
  • The Expanding Dark Forest and Generative AI
    • It's like there is a dark forest full of AI-generated content, bots, ads, trolls, clickbait, etc.
    • AI can also generate video essays, TikTok clips, podcasts, slide decks, etc.
    • Reverse Turing test: humans to prove they are not AI
    • Triangulate on objective reality: humans can consult a shared physical reality to settle disagreements
    • La langue (formal concept of language) vs la parole (everyday speech, quirks, dialects, memes, jargon, etc.)
  • Inside Elon Musk's Struggle for the Future of AI | Walter Isaacson
    • Elon Musk's history with AI, from DeepMind, to OpenAI, to xAI, and his views and vision for general AI
  • Is AI enough to increase your productivity | StackOverflow Blog
    • What AI is good at and what's not, specifically for coding
    • There's more productivity than code faster: automation, share knowledge, good processes, and empowering people
  • 4000 of my closest friends | Cat and Girl (HN)
    • On being listed as an artist whose work was used to train Midjourney

      But I can't even get cartoons to most people for free, now. Without doing unpaid work for the profit-making companies...

  • I worry our Copilot is leaving some passengers behind | Josh Collinsworth
    • Copilot suggesting JavaScript when simple HTML works, harming website accessibility
    • Whose responsibility to safeguard AI generated code, considering its abundance
    • The difference between web search that is an active task with options to choose from, versus AI that is passive consumption with zero context given
  • A few social media influencers are shaping AI
    • Papers shared by 2 curators gets 2-3 times more citation counts
    • The consequence of a few influencers have outsized effect on the research industry
  • HN discussion on Devin: AI software engineer
    • What does it mean to create AI product, what problems are they solving?
  • Plentiful, high-paying jobs in the age of AI
    • Because compute resource is limited, comparative advantage and opportunity cost exist, human always have a job
  • What I learned from looking at 900 most popular open source AI tools
    • The owners of repos, the speed of adoption, China's OSS ecosystem, other stats
  • Meta's Open Source AI Ambitions
    • Two possible worlds:
      • Value accrues to the models: foundation models are different and have high switching costs, like cloud providers
      • Value accrues to the applications: models are substitutable for building better applications
    • Meta is an application company, and they are betting on the 2nd scenario
    • OpenAI is building iOS and Meta is trying to build Android
  • How Hallucinatory A.I. Helps Science Dream Up Big Breakthroughs
    • The slight variations, random probability distribution behind the scenes, helped scientists track cancer, design drugs and proteins, uncover factors in weather phenomena, etc.
  • My colleague Julius (HN)
    • A good read, about Julius, a guy who managed to succeed through his way with words
    • Management likes Julius, but knowledgeable people see his word make no sense
    • But AI is the same as Julius, Julius is everywhere now
  • How Go Players Disempower Themselves to AI
    • Reliance on AI for Go players slowly harm the players' ability to play the game
    • Gives good intuition on the risk of Gradual Disempowerment due to AI
    • Illustrates the laziness of humans, and how we can easily get used to the convenience of AI
    • Even if AI systems are fully aligned, would human gradually lose their ability to solve problems
  • If You are Asking for Human Attention, Demonstrate Human Effort (HN)
    • Human attention is scarce
    • If reading AI generated content wasn't worth your time, do not forward that to others
  • The Dead Economy Theory (HN)
    • The shift in the labour market due to AI can be quick, way quicker than agriculture and industrial revolutions
    • Prisoner's dilemma: fire labour to cut cost, but labour are the ultimate consumers of the economy
    • AI companies evolves into rent extraction rather than value creation
    • Universal basic income will not work because society needs economic activity to not collapse into despair
    • The misuse of philosophy theories to justify demolishing democracy and human labour rights
    • AI is doing well at closed games with feedback, but society is full of uncertainty and open problems. AI and Silicon Valley leaders mistook their intelligence to solve closed games as being indicative of their ability to solve open games
    • No better future should treat people alive today as acceptable casualties
    • Call to regulate AI and let the public take ownership of AI infrastructure

      The dead economy is the one where plenty happens and none of it requires you.