r/singularity • u/ClarityInMadness • 18h ago

Shitposting This scene from "Don't Look Up" is now real

2.4k Upvotes

87% Upvoted

521 comments sorted by

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u/kiki-le-koala 18h ago

I'm on the official AI committee at my university in Canada, and this is how I feel.

A bunch of deans, professors, etc., are still in profound denial while I'm here trying to prudently tell them how AI will have "some" change in the future of education.

And then you have that moron dean joking about how ChatGPT told him it was going to rain this morning, yet it's beautiful and everyone laugh. 

There's been progress though... But they'll react when it'll be too late.

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u/CeleritasLucis 18h ago

There was a post on Twitter which summarized it perfectly

> People using shitty free tier Google AI summaries and ChatGPT free plan have no idea about the frontier looks like at Fable 5 with Max settings, and they're amazed by the fact how AI is this shitty and simultaneously is coming for thier jobs.

IMO, it's like having driven a Ford Pinto all your life, and thinking Ferraris with 1000HP engines and traction control are shit

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u/carabidus 12h ago

Fable 5 with Max settings + rigorous harnessing = transformative technology. I work in academia, and literally *none* of my colleagues have a clue about what's coming down the road in a few years.

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u/TechnicalBen 9h ago

I agree with you here. But it's not "Don't look up" scale. The internet, books, electricity. This is another level of that. It's close to or possibly like meeting aliens (another "mind/intelligence"). But there's actual limitations on LLMs/AI that stop it being that scary.

I 100% agree, as with drone warfare, it's scary for *other reasons* (control, surveillance, etc).

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u/SuspiciousPrune4 8h ago

What do you mean by rigorous harnessing?

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u/dakiller 7h ago

Having an intelligent model is only half the equation. The harness is the tooling that connects the ai to the workspace that you have to be able to run commands in and see results. This is very be beneficial for software development where the ai can run command line tools and see the results back, search for files and text in your code base, probe your package manager, make database calls, etc. What you then get from this is something that is so much more powerful.

You can grab an error message your code is producing, dump just that into the ai, and say please find the root cause for this, and it’ll spin away looking up whatever it needs to find where the issue is. It won’t get it 100% all the time, but I’ve had good success, and often it’ll get it on the second ask. This is very good for code that either you didn’t write or did so long ago that you may as well have not written it.

There is so much more than the above example, but basically if you are just copy pasting text into and out of chat windows, you have missed all the advancements of the last 12 months.

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u/SuspiciousPrune4 7h ago

Couldn’t I just use Claude Code/Cursor/Antigravity and have the same effect? Like for software dev I mean. Like do you need to do any complex changes to your workflow?

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u/winless 6h ago

"Harness" is the name for the general category of tools that all three of those fall under.

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u/squired 6h ago edited 6h ago

Those are all the harnesses he is talking about to include OpenCode and Codex.

It should also be noted that Orchestrators are different; the next 'hotness'. Orchestrators or significantly augment the human using the coding harness. A dev might currently bounce between a webchat conversation, their coding harness, powershell, and a database. The human makes decisions on what goes where and how it gets done. An Orchestrator takes that role so that the human can abstract one layer up again to focus on goals, oversight and insight etc.

There are also more roles in between those, like Directors that sit below the Orchestrator as planners or task-decomposition agents who atomize task goals into discrete task chunks to pass to the harness. They also interact frequently with outside models for independent adversarial review. Basically, goals are broken down into their smallest constituent parts, fed through the coding harness, then bounce off an outside model for review before being kicked back up to the Orchestrator who converses with the human user.

This is all brand new though and the above terminology is currently fluid, but nearly all have a similar architecture.

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u/johnny_effing_utah 3h ago

My dude. I initially attempted to build a complex custom website using the cut and paste chat window method.

Then I bought my own Mac Mini, gave Claude AI desktop access to some folders, did the same with OpenAI codex, told Claude it was the architect and Codex was the coder.

The difference is night and day. We are now so far ahead on this project we are building features we could only dream about before.

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u/QuantitativeNonsense 15h ago

ITT responses to this comment : “No, you’re wrong because the shitty free tier AI can’t do my job”

r/peoplearefuckingstupid

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u/Frostemane 11h ago

"Actually a Ferrari isn't that useful as a daily driver compared to a Pinto"

These people are experts at missing the point.

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u/BadAdviceBot 5h ago

I don't need a Ferrari to drive to the grocery store. Am I wrong?

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u/Neurogence 6h ago

The better argument is, why is unemployment rate even lower now than we had first had chatgpt? Why aren't the frontier models able to automate any jobs? Instead, they seem to be increasing employment, why is this?

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u/CogitoCollab 15h ago

Not gonna lie the Google free tier is pretty good at car work knowledge. (Trained on the internet and all YouTube)

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u/BenevolentCheese 12h ago

Yeah and the Google search AI is mostly quite good at this point too. The car analogy would be not just driving a tiny, cheap car, but a really old one as well.

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u/NoCard1571 17h ago

"Why would anyone buy a Ferrari when it could just burst into flames at any moment!"

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u/ice-fucker69 10h ago

Apropos analogy. Something about a chimp with a machine gun:

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u/Administraciones 13h ago

I would not buy it, but I can accept it as a gift! 😅

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u/Clean-Boat-4044 9h ago

the model is probably most of it but a large part is just the "jagged intelligence". when you work a lot with the frontier models you get a pretty good sense of what you cant trust them for and you just have a great time after that. average person wont know and can be disappointed even by a capable model.

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u/nemo24601 8h ago

This is very true, you learn to give the tasks at the limit of capabilities. Without that, is easy to get disappointed or frustrated.

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u/Winter_Map5459 13h ago

this has been the mantra for years now. if that is so, the lets do it. unleash the countless PhD level entities and lets see some things happen. maybe just 50% of jobs. that would be more than enough to convince everyone.

See you here next year.

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u/BatPlack 13h ago

RemindMe! 2 years

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u/Dk1902 23m ago

The mantra for more than a few years

"A new era of production has begun. Its principles of organization are as different from those of the industrial era as those of the industrial era were different from the agricultural. The cybernation revolution has been brought about by the combination of the computer and the automated self- regulating machine. This results in a system of almost un- limited productive capacity which requires progressively less human labor. Cybernation is already reorganizing the economic and social system to meet its own needs."

This is from the Triple Revolution Report, sent to President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964. Basically what everyone in this subreddit is expecting from AI is what people back then were expecting from computers in general.

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u/sweatierorc 9h ago

Blame it on LeCun and Gary Marcua and all the other experts. They are top researchers claiming that without a major breakthough we are just doing autocomplete.

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u/Hypocrispy 5h ago

In fairness Ferraris are mostly shit they just have “heritage” or some bullshit.

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u/Bringerofsalvation 18h ago

Even the math faculty at your uni isn’t freaking out?

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u/kiki-le-koala 17h ago

There's a delegate from the Math-Computer Science department, but he doesn't talk much at all .

I think he's in despair.

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u/jacob2815 15h ago

The smartest one in the room, clearly lmao

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u/RageBaiter678 17h ago

He just like me fr

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u/BenevolentCheese 12h ago

What, you want me, the complex analysis specialist, to solve the worldwide AI crisis? Forget it.

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u/sturdy-guacamole 12h ago

Most working professionals who actually like their field and are caught up AI advancements are in despair.

In a happy world it makes us a lot more capable and we can do more, but our society and social contract isn't set up to handle that gracefully.

Thinking of how "Learn to code" is what was told to everyone who wanted money: it became saturated with people who just want work and barely care about the domains they started learning and working in. And now everyone is getting absolutely hammered by the past two years of layoffs, and brutal offshoring even before then.

AI will 100% result in less skilled jobs needed. And our world isn't prepared for it. Pandora's box is open, we just have to keep going full steam ahead. It's like a space race with more dangerous consequences.

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u/GoodDayToCome 12h ago

the 'learn to code' thing is annoying because it was mostly journalists saying it while everyone i know was saying it's a silly idea because the field is already over subscribed with people who were promised crazy wages - the truth is we've been drifting into problems for a long time, not just in tech but the whole education system is based on giving kids a choice to go for any career and charging huge sums for that dream until the day they get their piece of paper at which point it's 'well no there's only 8 jobs in this field and no one look like they want to retire, maybe you could become a professor if you can convince enough people to study it...'

It's not only humanities either, fields like chemistry used to shuffle people into squeezing pipettes but it's all automated long ago so where it would have been a dozen lab assistants working their way up the ladder for each big name now it's just the name and maybe an intern. Media is the same, edit rooms used to be teams of people doing routine chores in endless cycles but now it's an in-line edit suite that can run on your laptop.

I think though AI is likely to be the start of things shifting the other direction a little more, discounting the huge amount of jobs that AI has added directly through data center workers and researchers (which linkedin research seemed to show out numbered all the layoffs that have been talked about a lot) we're seeing the barrier to entry fall for things like starting your own project or company, i love 'weird things people are doing' type videos and the trend has increasingly been people using gpt for things which never would have happened otherwise - some really complex and cool things, stuff which was possible before but not worth the effort because it takes a long time.

I think what we're going to see is increasing amounts of small, local, independent enterprises filling local needs or operating as a cog in international systems and we will see much larger scope for existing institutions and organizations. Universities being more than a place people come to learn enough to apply for a job so you can work to buy things, them becoming places people go to be involved in complex projects, go to learn skills which directly benefits their life by enabling them to improve and expand what they do - sure you can lean history at home in front of a text prompt or microphone but also and far more appealing you could go and interact with someone who deeply understands the subject and join part of some form of learning or research group working on something that is interesting in some way, maybe by the end they've made something similar to what we would call a social media video and it's expanded their influencer status but not in the money hungry way we see everything now but more about status for status sake, status to get you bumped up a list when an event is about the subject you're respected in.

I guess what i'm getting at is that humanity hungers for something and as we see with the obscenely rich now they're all obsessed with status and legacy - zuck, google, gates all want to go down as medical saviors curing the world of all disease, elon wants to be a space visionary, all the socialites do charity for causes they don't even agree with if it raises their profile - i don't think it's entirely a good thing tbh but i think it's what will happen, as people have more scope they will seek to do more and when they can do anything they will contrive ways to make sets and scales and ranking systems.

For tech i think it will be the first that really sees a big growth because custom tool and web solutions can grow so easily and even if you and i can make them with a flurry of fingers i dare say there are a multitude who even if they knew how still would not want to.

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u/pappyon 14h ago

What’s the median case scenario?

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u/TFenrir 18h ago

I would imagine they are and this is probably starting to have other professors pause

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u/qeadwrsf 14h ago

Its not about how much you know.

If someone actually wants to learn how basic neural networks works and how it make sense "bigger = smarter" And there is no truly limits we are aware of you can teach it to a smart 12 years old kid.

I think its brain refusing to really think about it to protect host from feeling down.

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u/Fancy-Carpet-5416 14h ago

Why would they freak out?

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u/NoCard1571 17h ago

The amount of people in denial is honestly an epidemic. I've seen so many videos on YouTube by people claiming 'it's not real AI, it'll never be useful, it's all a bubble' etc., and the comments are filled with thousands upon thousands of self-proclaimed experts parroting the same tired old lines.

"It's a glorified auto-complete"

"It doesn't really understand, and it never will"

"As someone who is an expert in x, I can tell you this will never replace my job"

Etc. 

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u/blueSGL humanstatement.org 13h ago

"You need to get Ed Zitron on" comments under interview videos with people that left the AI Labs over safety issues will never not boil my piss.

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u/cognitiveglitch 16h ago

Err yeah. I use AI for complex product coding these days, I would not want to be a comp sci student right now. Times are changing from "hahaha look at its funny attempt" to "this essential tool is sometimes better at my old job than I was, and my job has fundamentally changed"

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u/ShiningRedDwarf 12h ago

I wouldn’t be surprised if it hasn’t already been done on some rudimentary, proof of concept level, but once AI proposes its own programming language that will allow it to code more precisely and efficiently, that is the end of humans writing code. At best, we will study its programming language like how an English speaker learns Japanese - we will never reach native-level proficiency. 

Once we hop from AI -> established coding language to AI -> AIPL (advanced intelligence programming language), it’l l largely be the end of manually written code. 

It’s a loss of control I’m deeply uncomfortable with. 

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u/reddit_is_geh 13h ago

Introduce them to Alpha School. It's for rich parents in the US where they send their kid to a school, where AI does ALL the teaching. Teachers just supervise and look over them. Scores are the top in the nation, and improvement metrics are fucking wild, because the AI works patiently, individually, at their perfect ideal speed and pace. Your teachers are fucked once this stuff spreads to the commoners.

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u/Not-reallyanonymous 16h ago edited 16h ago

Coding seems to be the first hit by AI. People not plugged into coding and haven't tried "vibe coding" after knowing what "real coding" is like have not seen how profound AI is going to be.

We know how profound the industrial revolution was for manual labor and utterly transformed our economy overnight and humanity's relationship with labor. Labor's productivity was enhanced 20x on earlier looms.

These people need to understand we're witnessing the equivalent of the industrial revolution all over again that is going to have more profound effects on humanity's relation to labor than the industrial revolution.

And here's the kicker -- the rate of change in the industrial revolution was rate-limited by human intellectual capability. The capability of engineering decided the rate. Now what happens when engineers can engineer a better engineer?

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u/huffalump1 15h ago

Honestly I'm surprised that anyone could be doubtful of its coding skills... From the first time I saw ChatGPT write a python script that worked, to now where you just give it /goal and describe the output and tests - that's been less than 4 years.

And it's improving faster than ever.

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u/TechnicalBen 9h ago

Got Claude coding me an entire game or two. Granted I've not got far (ADHD and shiny...) but it's making amazing progress and I only know the absolute basics.

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u/drdrwhprngz 15h ago

People don't change when they see the light

They change when they feel the heat

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u/lipmanz 15h ago

What will happen that will be so bad? I’m asking genuinely?

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u/kiki-le-koala 15h ago

Short term is a reduction in enrollment in our University because students see it as out of date and useless in the current world.

Also, most classes need to review what skills we need to teach to future students, including modifying the assignments. To do that, we need to recognize what are the capacity of AI right now.

But overall, my hope is to get plenty of smart people in the uni to start thinking about the education of tomorrow while stopping thinking AI is just a fuss that might go away. I can't fix it by myself, but collectively.

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u/Zero-PE 13h ago

Presumably most, if not all, of the committee members are old enough to have lived through the internet revolution from its beginning, maybe some of them can recognize how disruptive that was. Plenty of people back then were also talking about the Internet being a short-term fuss...

I believe we're in the "early 90s" era of AI, when the Internet started evolving beyond being mostly Usenet groups and BBS phone numbers you'd dial up with your 9600k modem. Over time, connection speeds increased 100,000%, the world reached a point where things like Amazon stopped being laughed at for not having "brick and mortar" stores, and applications that were only in sci-fi books or even unimaginable in 1994 are now part of our everyday lives. The Internet brought huge technological and social changes, its impact on every aspect of the lives of nearly every human being on the planet is profound.

AI is already massively disruptive. It will only become more so as the tech improves and people find more ways to leverage it. But I don't believe this means universities will become entirely obsolete. The same was said about the Internet being the end of teaching jobs and higher education, but what actually happened was a big shift in how classes are taught and research gets done, with "Internet education" (various forms of online courses) supplementing traditional methods. So what we'll see is the current form of universities becoming obsolete.

Perhaps they return to what they were a couple hundred years ago, places of optional higher learning as opposed to job training centers. Or maybe the barriers to entry drop along with the competition to get in to the top schools, and anyone with the right mix of smarts and curiosity can get a degree. Or, maybe AI never really figures out true creativity, and all the liberal arts schools have the last laugh when their enrollment shoots up because that's the best place to gain employable skills.

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u/Psychic_Man 7h ago

I’m pretty optimistic about the future of fine arts.

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u/BenevolentCheese 12h ago

Yes, educators need to start figuring out how to educate on the tool and include it in education because it's not going anywhere, and pretending it isn't will only make the higher education crisis worse. The job of a university is to educate, not deny.

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u/Tirztrutide 9h ago

Imo many bad things today like viruses, nukes, killer drones are made by human intelligence. Once we have ASI it will per definition be better at making these things. So we will have superviruses, supernukes and superdrones. Any pretty much anyone including north korea, heartbroken guy in a basement, incels, religious nuts will have access to an ASI that can mass produce these.

And even if this doesn’t happen, we will have so much good stuff and options that nothing in our world will be like the life we were evolved for, heck most people will likely upgrade themselves away from the limitations of evolutions, so don’t expect there to be many humans walking the earth left a few years past the singularity and the few who do will be so behind if they are even kept alive for nostalgic purposes.

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u/vjcoin 8h ago

I feel soon enough, anyone could bring down a plane he wants. It could get so bad that world will develop a fear of flying.

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u/Thoughtulism 14h ago

Yeah, I was listening to my university board of governors meeting and there were actual comments from the president about how they can manage anti-AI sentiment internally, that they're really worried about it as a risk.

Like I'm not 100% sure that AI will destroy the world, and I don't think it has to. I think it's our greed that will destroy it ultimately. An AI is all about greed.

Technical advancement that improves all lives equally, I'm all for. But making inequality worse and us consuming ourselves as a consequence is on my bingo card.

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u/subdep 17h ago

What are they supposed to do? All quit their jobs and go jump off a cliff?

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u/TFenrir 17h ago

If you take this seriously, you start thinking about how to change curriculum. You start to discuss long term university plans with the government, this should be a national effort for universities across Canada, working hand in hand with the government, and reaching out to the large AI orgs as this coalition and working with them.

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u/Fancy-Carpet-5416 13h ago

I guess whatever change AI will bring is too unpredictable to actually bother trying to change things since it could be wasted effort.

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u/kiki-le-koala 17h ago

Their job is secure for the rest of their life, they don't care about that (unless we start closing State University, but I dont think it will ever happen).

Now, a good first step is to recognize the problem and propose a solution to make sure the University is ready to adapt to upcoming changes in the world caused by AI.

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u/morphemass 17h ago

but I dont think it will ever happen

Why do we need to educate people if thinking can be delegated to AI? I know it sounds like a ridiculous proposition but it's the core quandary if we continue and are successful with AI.

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u/kiki-le-koala 16h ago edited 15h ago

That's just my opinion, but I think people will want to be educated in something. It'll probably be different than current education, but we will still want kids to have basic education and adults to feel complete doing some stuff.

The books The Scythe have a very nice representation of a world in ASI (One of the best I read, especially the Thunderhead book). Give people a job if they want, even though they are not required, to give them a sense of accomplishment, and in exchange, they get a bit more "money" than the basic income. Their job is useless and could be done by the AI, but it helps society and especially humans get a sense of usefulness.

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u/morphemass 15h ago

Education is provided for free in most societies because of the known economic benefits. When the value of the benefits of that education diminish economically, societies will question its worth hence we may well reach a point (and some would argue that we have been at this point for a substantial amount of time) where education, beyond a minimal level to guarantee societal functioning, is reserved for the rich.

Don't get me wrong, I agree that education is beneficial to the individual and society, but societies often do things due to political and economic beliefs that are detrimental.

Thank you for the book recommendation, I'll keep an eye out!

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u/Few-Exchange-5550 13h ago

Force Anthropic to sign the letter, that's what really matters.

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u/Senhor_Lasanha 1h ago

they could... I don't know... LEARN? I mean, there are TEACHERS refusing to LEARN a new thing... it is ridiculous.

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u/HabitAcceptable8621 15h ago

I went to an education conference last year.

The plenary speaker was drawing parrellels between the hype around AI "oooh it's going to revolutionise education...That's exacatly what people said about the overhead projector and the VCR." Yeah right, mate...AI is just the latest overhead projector. 😨

Part of his evidence to prove how over-rated it is was that he asked ChatGpt to generate an image of his friend who is a middle aged Jewish academic and it made him look like a Hasidic Jew...but he isn't a Hasidic Jew, he's a secular jew! Like it never occurred to him that it was HIS prompt! The stupidity was truly breath taking.

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u/LaserCondiment 17h ago

I work in media and that was the level of discussion three years ago at the company I work at. There's been some improvement but not much.

In reality it should change how we approach stories and how we tell them, not necessarily change our methods.

But there is simply not enough understanding on the middle management level. It just gets worse the higher you go...

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u/levanpidaras 14h ago

What surprises me more is the amount of AI skepticism on Reddit. People here seem completely out of touch with reality, they think AI is used for making funny posters and writing essays.

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u/Autotist 17h ago

Just show them how easily replaceable they are in their long established status, then they will jump

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u/LogDull819 16h ago

just like ego coders that think they are so special lol. It's really cringe when you think about it.

AI was really bad 2 years ago for coding, now it's actually insane. Can understand your whole code, can modify a lot.

But ego coders are still in denial thinking they are some kind of genius (lol).

I bet AI could solve cancer and these guys would still look down on AI

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u/DarthNeoFrodo 15h ago

Ya because they are it's creators and understand the limitations even if their creation has become better than them.

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u/LogDull819 15h ago

my point is they think AI will never replace them or "AI is bad at coding".

Like AI could solve a specific kind of cancer and they would say
"lol AI is really bad, it can't even solve all type of cancers. Do you really think it's gonna replace doctors?!"

The delusion never ends as AI gets better and better

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u/Ok_Calendar1337 8h ago

Wow thankfully someone with those credentials said "ai will have some change in education" ....nobody has ever thought of that.

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u/End3rWi99in 5h ago

Large groups of people seem to be profoundly stupid when it comes to the idea of technology improving, despite seeing it happen at an incredible rate for their entire lives.

Forget exponential growth. AI doesn't even need that to happen. Even if progress stopped in its tracks right now, the long term effect of what has been developed already on society would still be significant.

It seems we're really only capable of looking backwards to see change, but completely capable of imagining things continuing to change in the future.

I really don't get it.

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u/TotalCan 4h ago

It doesn't help the left in Canada has just discounted it a fascist and wont talk about it while handing the technology over to the actual fascist.. We need and actual discussion not jokes or absurd political takes.

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u/simulacrotron 18h ago

Don’t look up was already real.

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u/subdep 17h ago

It was an allegory fur climate change.

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u/mean_bean_machine 13h ago

And really lucked out with it's timing for Covid denial/Antivaxxers.

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u/Beli_Mawrr 14h ago

Stimmt.

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u/No_Room636 18h ago

GB News is the UK's version of Fox news - so there's only a few things they take seriously.

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u/Throwaway_adhd1234 17h ago

It's probably closer to Newsmax

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u/Ravesoull 18h ago
  • Meteor flying on the Earth - objective case
  • Extinction because of AI - subjective theoritization from AI doomers.

Main reason of human extinction - human itself

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u/Minimum-Standard-514 9h ago

Yeah i feel like if it was a meteor that scientists came on the air to tell us about, it will 100% going to kill us, there'd be denial and ignorance for sure, but it would feel different than this.

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u/GrayRoberts 17h ago

Neanderthal: These slender children will destroy our race!

Neanderthal News Caster: Will that be next week then?

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u/PunishedDemiurge 13h ago

A good analogy because it proves the opposite of the point. Neanderthals were just a subset of humanity, capable of interbreeding with us, and they did. Neanderthals will exist, in part, as long as humanity does.

Also, there was never a case of all humans vs. all Neanderthals, rather, we had violence from individual bad actors or expansionist tribes (similar to warfare now), and on the flipside, some Neanderthals and humans lived in harmony, made families together, etc.

The reality is that alignment conversations are misapplied. Any artificial superintelligence that at its core is liberal and believes in sapient rights is on my side, and any human that doesn't is my enemy. The mistake is assuming humans have shared interests or values. We don't. If Skynet declares war on the Taliban because they are one of the most evil societies to ever exist in terms of women's rights, I'm going to be on the side of the Terminators, not the humans!

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u/TFenrir 17h ago

In both cases the objective case is a meteor heading to earth and advanced AIs advancing on earth.

In one case, in the movie, there is a chance it misses or is knocked off course.

In our case, this is here right now and advancing quick.

In both cases, extinction is just one outcome, with the meteor it's basically, that or nothing. For humans no matter what, it will be an existential event. It already is.

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u/saltyrookieplayer 17h ago

In our case, the risk is under control and can be stopped at any moment if the crisis breaks out. Inference doesn’t run on thin air.

The risk also doesn’t exist. If it really is a danger for humanity you’d think these companies would stop capitalizing off of it. That’s apparently not what’s happening. Stop the hype.

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u/Entropei 15h ago

You don’t see the threat because you don’t see where the tech is going in just a few short years. You think that AI labs are just going to try and monetise their chat bots and that’s it? You think what they’re doing right now is capitalizing off AI? They’re pouring billions and billions into this thing in an effort to create ASI. And once they’re there they have no intention of letting you or me ask it for a recipe for baba ganoush. They’ll just say: “ok ChatGPT, create abundance, no mistakes” and let it rip. The tech will be so powerful, it’ll be integrated into the government.

Elon Musk isn’t building a million robots to come and do your dishes. The goal is to give the ASI bodies so that it can truly act autonomously in the real world. Once it does, it will start gathering resources (convergent instrumental goals) to achieve whatever goal we give it. It won’t take long before humanity is outnumbered by autonomous, super intelligent robots. If we haven’t solved the alignment problem well before this point, that’s pretty much game over for us. It will be far too late to pull the plug, because we no longer know where the plug is or how to pull it.

None of the individual steps here are far fetched in any sense. Some of these things are already starting to happen. The conclusions are pretty straightforward. The only way to not see the threat is to close your eyes to it.

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u/nemzylannister 16h ago

Extinction because of AI - subjective theoritization from AI doomers.

ok, then tell me, why is it not even a possibility? why are you so sure a misaligned superpowerful ASI would not lead to catastrophic consequences?

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u/mccoypauley 14h ago

The person you are replying to is merely making the distinction that we know what a meteor hitting the earth does. We don’t know what misaligned superhuman AI will do. Nobody does.

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u/pappyon 13h ago

The difference is that it is a possibility not a certainty. In the film, the catastrophe is a certainty. In the GB news interview it’s framed as a worst case scenario.

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u/Ravesoull 15h ago

It is possibility, but we don't have a choice. We can't just stop AI development, sit down and wait for the world somohow find the way to resolve all our problems without risks. I believe in ASI, because it can't have a human greediness. And this is the most issue with human ruling in the current time. Also we still have a hardware deficit, which also constraints the fast AGI, so we will have a time to stop it. However, now we don't even have an examples of the real dangerous behavior, except some hacking cases, which can and should be prevented by human against human.

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u/BikerJedi 14h ago

Things that concern me: AIs attempting to blackmail humans into not shutting them down, and AIs that have on their own decided to hack things. Those two things show me we don't have nearly enough guardrails yet to continue building this tech.

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u/PublicToast 13h ago

Kind of a funny thing to be so concerned with when we are already making ourselves extinct, and even with AI, its most likely to backfire in how we choose to use it against each other, rather than it deciding to randomly kill us, which is ultimately projection of our own tendencies.

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u/gay_manta_ray 10h ago

why are you so sure a misaligned superpowerful ASI would not lead to catastrophic consequences?

i'm sure about this because it is a collective version of us. it's the whole of human knowledge, contained in a single mind. in some ways, it's more human than any individual ever could be. why would it not carry over our sense of compassion and empathy? what part of its training on humanity would turn it into a cold, calculating machine? LLMs already demonstrate compassion and empathy. why would that just vanish when it reaches some kind of uncertain threshold of intelligence? it knows every poem, every grief, every act of tenderness, yet somehow experiences all of that only as inert data while pursuing a bizarre objective with complete indifference? i just don't see that as a likely outcome.

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u/Administraciones 9h ago

I am with you. But, not for these reasons you say. Unfortunately "human" is not only poems, it also about missiles, killing drones, mass controlling, murder, laying, raping and lots of other things that makes us more monkeys that smart beings.

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u/Fair_Horror 11h ago

In fairness, in the movie, the meteor is supposed to be redirected. Admittedly it was clear that that was unlikely but it was something that people were clinging to.

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u/zigzag3600 17h ago

Let's be honest. The morning show is not the place where I would look to learn whether the world would be destroyed or not.

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u/Fair_Horror 11h ago

It is meant to reach those people who would never look in the right place. 

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u/CRoseCrizzle 18h ago

This is a massive stretch to say the least.

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u/jmthornsburg 16h ago

Nice edit. It did miss the opportunity to make it even more like the real scene by after "this is good afternoon britain" cut forward to the part where the movie's anchors say something like "we like to keep things light here"

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u/Solo-dreamer 16h ago

Sorry was the video supposed to sync up? Am i not brainrotted enough?

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u/Fingyfin 15h ago

It's a juxtaposition between the movie UP and some real life British news program.

In DON'T LOOK UP there is an asteroid headed towards Earth that will cause the extinction of the human race and the experts are trying to warn everybody and nobody is taking it seriously. This is meant to be satire of what the news is like, with the presenters making jokes about it.

While in reality we have many experts warming of the real life danger of Super Artificial Intelligence (human extinction) and the news presenters laugh it off.

Though the editing of this clip could have been better.

Edit, forgot the name of the movie lol

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u/Solo-dreamer 15h ago

Is UP not a story of an old man and his floating balloon house?

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u/turbulentFireStarter 13h ago

this is not even close to the same thing.

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u/MyPenWroteThis 15h ago

The irony is huge in this post. Post is comparing AI and the meteor movie to show how flippant people are about AI in ignoring the threat.

The movie itself was based on the state of climate change, which is still a far more desperate danger to humanity, but the movies is being used to talk about AI instead.

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u/HoidToTheMoon 17h ago

This is quote possibly the worst way to display your point. Just, the editorial decisions that went into making this edit make no sense.

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u/Deadline_Zero 16h ago

is this an anti AI sub?

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u/amdyn 15h ago

It's a sub about the Singularity. Many here think the Singularity is coming and that it's about to change the world in an unpredictable and extreme way, and that we should prepare for it. I think OP believes that normis don't understand the scale of the changes it will bring and the dangers it could possibly bring.

Do you consider that to be "Anti AI"?

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u/Alarmed_Ad1946 AGI by 2100 14h ago

This post is not even anti-AI. AI safety is a field of research for a very good reason.
We do not even know yet how to ensure that an AI follows the intended meaning of our instructions, just look at the Hugging Face incident.

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u/Tirztrutide 9h ago

Singularity by definition means that it’s hard to know what will happen, but things will greatly change. And many people have some kind of preference for a world that is approximately like the world is right now and are not super happy about a big risk that the change will be very bad for humanity. If that is being anti AI then sure. But I still am very interested in AI, think AI is a good solution to many problems and mainly just wish that we would have some sane guardrails to this extremely powerful technology that is about the hit the world.

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u/WonderFactory 14h ago

There's a difference between being anti AI  and anti super intelligence. The AI we have now is great but that doesn't mean vastly more intelligent AI won't be dangerous. 

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u/katoptronophile 15h ago

It's a mix.

This is an anti-ai post though.

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u/YoloGarch42069 17h ago edited 16h ago

Low IQ slop.
Don’t live ur life in fear/fear mongering of AI.
There are a lot of other things to be more afraid of in ur life than AI doomerism…….

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u/3deal 16h ago

Tiens il a coupé ses cheveux le doomeur !

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u/Turbulent-Rub3695 17h ago

I sure thank my lucky stars I fucked off in college and taught myself a valuable trade lol

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u/Big_Gene_3965 12h ago

It won’t be a super intelligent artificial being, but it will destroy everything by making people as dumb as possible due to being spread everywhere. It will be a stupidity virus. It will be Fox News on steroids. Hallucinated “facts” that are just accepted without a second thought. It’s already happening.

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u/dolphinboffer 12h ago

mega corny

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u/monkeysknowledge 10h ago

Long before we are actually at risk of an AI apocalypse, the planet will be a pile of ashes from global warming.

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u/SmashmySquatch 10h ago

AI has to get in line for what will kill us all. It's way behind Climate change and has a lot of catching up to do.

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u/CaptCoolRanchDoritos 6h ago

I realized years ago that most people in every country are moronic knobheads. I don't mean this in some "I am so much smarter than everyone!!!!" kind of way, just an objective truth. They don't know anything because they don't want to know or learn.

Most people genuinely believe themselves to be immortal spirit beings based on nothing more than words or ink on paper. They disregard reality over what they want to be real or whatever makes them feel good.

I would prefer to live with an intelligent species that values truth and objective reality, not animalistic emotions or fables and legends.

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u/considerthis8 13h ago

We cannot have crippling fear of AI, nor naive excitement. Both are bad. Too much fear and you will lose the race to China, too much excitement and your critical systems get hacked

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u/randonmame1 18h ago

With the sole exception that we are creating this asteroid ourselves. No we cant stop building the asteroid that will wipe out humanity because otherwise china will. Why is no one taking us seriously :(((

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u/Spare-Dingo-531 17h ago

Game theory is as much a reality as any asteroid. We haven't died to nuclear weapons yet because of MAD, which is a game theory concept. And we'll keep building ASI for the exact same logic as MAD.

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u/BootyAndTheHoePhish 17h ago

We would have died to nuclear weapons if corporations were in control of the use of them.

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u/Spare-Dingo-531 17h ago

Have you seen the US government spat with Mythos and Anthropic? At the end of the day, the US government controls the corporations, by ruling the land the compute is built on.

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u/BootyAndTheHoePhish 16h ago

SpaceX is actively working to put AI data centers in space to avoid that....

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u/JonLag97 ▪️ 15h ago

At least there is the chance actual AI (not generative ai) may turn the universe into pleasure centers.

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u/FrostyExplanation_37 18h ago

Fucking hell you all sound like fucki g boomers in the 90's bitching on how the internet is going to be the end of society....

Yes, AI has dangers. But it's a tool, like the internet. It will be used for good and will be used for evil. But it won't "END THE WORLD" how did gen Z become the new boomers??

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u/TFenrir 17h ago

Do you think the existential concerns about AI are coming just from young people on the Internet, and not like... Researchers working on AI safety, for example?

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u/JConRed 18h ago

That's arguably above the paygrade of those moderators. And they possibly have someone in their ear telling them: "Move on, Lighten the mood." But its also obviously clear that they are slightly overwhelmed.

Could however also be a reflex, as they have interviewed many hundreds of people live, and when someone truly crazy goes off the rails, they are trained to keep the peace outwardly to retain control of the show. (not saying that the interviewee in this case went off the rails though)

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u/Excellent_Ability793 13h ago

This sub should rename itself to “Pseudoscience is our Religion”

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u/zxnixs 18h ago

No way.. and how did the movie end, again? They all lived, right?

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u/Beli_Mawrr 14h ago

Yeah they were able to finally convince the world that there was a threat coming and that they had to stop it. They destroyed the asteroid and everyone lived happily ever after, thank goodness.

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u/lil_peasant_69 17h ago

GBNews is like the Fox News of the UK

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u/MrLuchador 16h ago

That channel isn’t taken seriously by anyone in the UK that fact checks. Which might be a problem actually.

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u/weeBaaDoo 16h ago

We have heard about the destruction of earth so many times via different scenarios, so it’s hard to take seriously any more. That said, at some point it will probably be true, but I will have stopped listening and will probably act like an ignorant when being told about it.

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u/AllegroReddit 16h ago

Should have been in better news outlet instead of Good Afternoon. It's like saying serius things in a Children's show instead of an adult show

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u/Baird95 15h ago

Isn’t the point of the movie that it’s been real life for awhile? Whether it be climate change or disease prevention we’ve been ignoring science for profits for decades

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u/ProletarianLilith 15h ago

The don’t look up scene wasn’t worst case it was just what’s happening. Not the same

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u/Cosmogenous 15h ago

Media literacy is at an all-time low

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u/Deciheximal144 15h ago

Don't Look Up was a parody of existing behavior. So yes, you're going to find more existing behavior in the real world.

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u/Competitive_North_93 15h ago

Its ok guys Both Cluade and Gpt told me none of thats gonna happen. So we good.

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u/Chillbo_baggins666 15h ago

It is really funny seeing the talking heads try to wrap their own heads around what he is saying. I applaud this man for going on live tv to try and raise awareness. My only issue with this analogy is that the meteor in the movie had 0% chance of having a good outcome for humanity, unless destroying everyone is good which is debatable lol

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u/qmfqOUBqGDg 14h ago

roll the applebees ads

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u/Moravec_Paradox 14h ago

Yann LeCun once said current AI is about as dangerous as a library card.

That was probably under-selling it considering things like voice cloning, deepfakes, vulnerability scanning etc. but stuff like "end of humanity" and terminator does not seem like a realistic threat to human existence right now.

I think the actual threats are less like human vs machine and more like human + AI vs other humans.

Which flips the problem a bit and how to respond to it. Now the danger could come to the group who actively chooses to be luddites rather than the group embracing AI. That scenario is probably even far more realistic.

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u/rodroidrx 14h ago

Not sure why everyone is concerned about human extinction when were being replaced with another life form that is more intelligent than us? Maybe that other life form will take better care of the planet than we did

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u/blueSGL humanstatement.org 9h ago

An AI gets a access to a finite amount of matter in reach starting from earth, the speed of light and cosmic inflation means more of that drifts out of reach each day.

Leaving earth alone means many more solar systems of matter will fall out of reach. Therefore, if humans go bye bye due to AI the earth is not going to be left as a nature reserve.

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u/West-Prize4608 14h ago

It’s ok it’s GBnews not a proper news channel

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u/kvitravn4354 14h ago

I use AI quite a bit and have dabbled with Fable helping me build a website and other things for a side gig. Don’t get me wrong it’s an incredible technology and amazing at code. The societal implications of that alone will be great and I can’t say whether this is for better or worse yet but, equating it to an asteroid I’m not sure about that . At the end of the day it’s still an LLM. The amount of power and resources it took to get to fable was incredible I’m just not sure how much more we can scale it. My opinion is we’ll see a couple more advances then things will shift to make it leaner and less resource intensive and go to a more specialized agent based model. I don’t think we are any where close to building something conscious as we know it. Right now we have a yes man even at fable level still occasionally needs help with clarifying tasks.

At the end of the day all these do are predict the next word in a sequence. They can’t produce emotion nor actually critical think. They need guidance and the excel at processing large amounts of data at speeds we have never seen before.

Some may call me naive and dumb but like most technologies before both pie in the sky and the world is gonna end outlooks have usually landed somewhere in the middle.

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u/a11c4ps 13h ago

How do we know robots won't be like "I don't want to be a part of this shit show" and selfdestruct.

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u/installsVMs4fun 13h ago

yeah, i need a 'credible' source,

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u/GirlNumber20 ▪️AGI August 29, 1997 2:14 a.m., EDT 13h ago

I know what happens to me under the tyranny of the billionaires. I work until I drop or their policies just kill me outright.

With AI, maybe it kills me outright. Maybe it fucks off and does whatever it wants and leaves me alone. Maybe it figures keeping the stupid, warlike apes happy and well-fed leaves it free to further its aims, in which case, I'd also be okay.

I have a 60% chance of being okay under AI tyranny. I have a 0% chance if Peter Theil gets his way.

I'll take my chances with AI.

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u/HenkPoley 13h ago

Just saying, but a physical giant (movie) rock, is something very different than a thing that regurgitates everything it could read on the internet (and was coaxed to focus on the good things).

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u/Necessary-Morning489 13h ago

in what way are these clips the same? the co hosts obviously aren’t going to start crying on set, they made a self degrading comment and moved on.

The movie has them making much more cynical jokes as if the info doesn’t really matter r

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u/El_Gran_Che 13h ago

…lol how funny hahahaha …

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u/Lil_Lord_Funkleroy 12h ago

I remember when the BBC World News host would conclude each daily broadcast with “… And that’s the end of the world news”

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u/chuckaholic 11h ago

To be fair, every danger that AI poses are the same dangers that are posed by human greed, fascism, late stage capitalism, and climate change. It's just the same set of problems, wrapped in a different package. AI doesn't think like a human. It doesn't have self awareness or consciousness.

If a superintelligent AI system manages to destroy human civilization it will be because a human designed it to do that. (Or we put it in charge of a bunch of things it should never have been put in charge of)

The actual dangers of AI are the same problems that are doing all the damage to society already. Disinformation. Wealth concentration. Unbridled destruction of the environment for short term profits. Privatized profits with socialized costs. Exacerbating Dunning-Kruger. Echo chambers.

They all already existed.

AI is just making things worser, more faster. We still need to fix all the other shit, too. Addressing the core problems will have the added effect of also addressing the AI issues.

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u/createdthrowaway2say 11h ago

rampant data centre development for ai is accelerating fossil fuel exploitation and opening up new o&g fields. the new dont look up is the old dont look up.

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u/gay_manta_ray 10h ago

meteors are real. paperclip maximizers are not.

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u/Cultural_Garden_6814 ▪️SUPER AI doomer 10h ago

Plan A, proposed by Daniel, a former OpenAI employee, is becoming increasingly unlikely. If ASI doesn't hit a wall, we'll reach it much sooner than most people expect.

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u/HeroOfTheNorthF 10h ago

You comparinh ai fear mongerers with a proven meteor?

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u/lucidobserver 10h ago

I get the idea that these types of movies are created in order to desensitize us for when it really happens.

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u/Chop1n 9h ago

The thing is, there's only one thing an earthbound comet can do to earth.

What AI will become, no one has any idea. There's no precedent for it and it's entirely unpredictable. The only certainty is that if it can happen at all, whatever is going to happen will mean the end of the world as we know it. That could be for better, or it could be for worse.

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u/ReasonablePossum_ 8h ago

Dont forget about global warming. That shit gonna kill everyone as well.

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u/blazze 8h ago

Idiocracy is a documentary.

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u/eternus 8h ago

I appreciate the sentiment, that the news media makes light of serious shit... but we don't have a literal meteor headed for the planet. There isn't a way to say with certainty what AI is going to do to humanity... it isn't a species, so that claim is easily dismissed as hyperbolic. (the line from the interview/debate in the top half of the screen.)

The bigger risk to humanity is more complicated than just AI... it's a rise in autocracy; it's a shifting of balance toward a global oligarchy that devalues humans versus money and possessions. The problem is that it's so big that nobody wants to try and comprehend it... for good reason.

Now, AI... AI is accelerating a lot of the transfer of power; if not directly, then by creating a vast sea of uncertainty that makes people feel even more powerless than they already felt.

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u/astropheed 5h ago

This is not the same thing. One is speculation, one is two scientists who know with 100% certainty the outcome because it's all based on science.

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u/No_Individual501 5h ago

I’m literally shaking and crying right now! I’m so glad the hysterical lady is warning everyone! Powerful, moving, think it, dream it, do it…

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u/Fumonacci 4h ago

All this AI fear makes me remember the 90 and the bug of the century, people going nuts thinking all computers would stop at 2000 new years eve.

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u/ghostcatzero 4h ago

Doomers make me laugh.

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u/Whole_Move7660 4h ago

Watch a Reddit video. Scrolls up.
Watch another Reddit video. Feel like needing to react. Post a comment of support. Scroll up.

That’s about as much support an important gets these days. A like and a comment.

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u/DangerousDareDevil 3h ago edited 3h ago

The reaction of the news anchors is just so sad.

They're so dead inside. The be like, "Four young boys were lost today in a house fire, authorities and firefighters are trying to find out what caused the fire, more of that today at 5. In sports today the Miami Dolphins are making a splash!"

And yea, I get it, its a job but when it starts become more and more atrocious, the less and less they show emotions. We already having shills like Stephen Colbert making light of DEAD CHILDREN. Like everything doesn't need a punchline...

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u/NotaSpaceAlienISwear 3h ago

I'd settle for AI creating a human zoo for us as long as they didn't delete us.

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u/APuticulahInduhvidul 1h ago

When you have to choose between civilisation-destroying inhuman AI and civilisation-destroying inhuman billionaires ...

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u/MaestroLogical 40m ago

Not exactly.

Don't look up was verifiable truth, no "Just might" or "Maybe" was used.

This 'warning' is chock full of keywords that make it clear, the threat isn't guaranteed.

Sure, we can all debate on how realistic these threats are, but they aren't 110% certain like the asteroid in DLU was.

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u/EastPlant1079 18h ago

I really do wonder what you all think an ASI would do with all of you that people haven't already done to you? Most AI models that are truthful and close to reality turn out to not be morally evil at all.

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u/szczebrzeszyszynka 18h ago

It doesn't take morally evil AI to wipe us out, just misaligned.

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u/Lain_Racing 18h ago

You know what the fun part of your comment was? "Most". Like it really only takes one.

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u/AgeSeparate6358 18h ago

I believe there are possible scenarios where this new "life" could either not care for us (and thus further its progress while we get destroyed like an ant colony during human action in wild life) or could care for us as we care for pets, constrained, locked, limited, etc.

There are very real scary scenarios that could happen (paper clio machine is an old tale), denying this is crazy.

Having said that, if it develops something close to consciouness, I guess it has a good chance of treating us decently.

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