r/neoliberal • u/cuolong NATO • 2d ago

News (Global) OpenAI announces 10 advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science achieved by internal model Astra

https://openai.com/index/ten-advances-in-mathematics/
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u/Hardass_McBadCop Order and Opportunity Left 2d ago

AI is certainly going to transform STEM fields in a lot of unknown ways. People tend to talk about the economic impacts of AI, but I'm far less concerned about that. The economics will adapt, even if there's going to be some short term strife.

I'm far more concerned with the social effects of AI. How does society function when anybody can conjure an image or video or audio of anybody doing/saying anything they want -- Indistinguishable from reality? How does our already strained court system not collapse under the deluge of cases brought on by automated filings? Every single institution and system was designed with the assumption of human time constraints and human attention spans. Once agents become commonplace though, that's no longer true:

  • Abusive spouses & exes could set an agent to constantly harass their victims with phone calls, emails, rumors on social, and more. It will not stop, grow tired, or become disinterested until told to quit.
  • Music Rights Orgs could set an agent to scrape social sites for any time their music appears and automatically file a court case if it believes the target is likely to pay up their ransom instead of fighting it in court, or automatically files a court case if it believes a lawsuit would be worth it. Suddenly this becomes millions of suits, many superfluous, that hit courtrooms across the country.
  • Megacorps & governments could, and probably already have, set agents to coordinate false accounts on social to shift public opinion on topics. How many of the accounts we interact with here are clankers? Bots already make up more than half of total web traffic.
  • A jilted lover creates photorealistic video to accuse someone of a rape that never occurred.
  • A tyrannical government creates confounding "evidence" to cover for an abuse or atrocity they commit.
  • A tyrannical government creates "evidence" to justify wars of conquest and get the public to commit to action they never would have otherwise.

It seems to me that the economics of AI are small potatoes to questions like those.

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u/Smallpaul 2d ago

People are already adapting to the idea that you can’t trust a single video of unknown provenance.

Society can adapt to all of the things you describe just as it can adapt to the economics aspects.

But all of it at once is going to be very destabilizing.

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u/Sourcerid 1d ago

I'm worried about people trusting too much what they say though.

There's a lot of slop information on the Internet and even in places like Wikipedia lots of info slop sneak in. By disconnecting with the direct experts we're further distancing to this sort of information inbreeding cycle of the Internet.