There Is No AI (It's Just People) with Jaron Lanier

This argument is like saying people don't kill people, their parents do. As people wouldn't be who they are without their parents..

This isn't the guns don't kill people, people kill people debate - guns aren't autonomous. AI is.

Source interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TTppvBU2rU4

https://substack.com/home/post/p-214803211

There is not anything every word/label is a human construct intentionally or unintentionally. We can take this as far as we want.

That's a softball interview. More hard questions would help.

Here's one good insight, though.

JARON LANIER: Yeah, okay, so look, the thing about very rich and powerful people is that their wealth and power still depends on a mass population that accepts some system in which their wealth and power is defined. And so if they lose enough popular legitimacy and support, no matter how central they are, they fall. And that’s happened repeatedly in history, and it’s really not any different now.

I wonder if the sudden political opposition to AI comes from the realization that it may replace "rich and powerful people". Really, when you look at Trump's appointees, it's a low bar.

(I met Lanier when he was demoing his first VR system. Head tracking lag was about a second. Turn head, wait for image to catch up. Autodesk fooled around with VR a bit in the late 1980s/early 1990s, but concluded that CAD required precision work and VR was like trying to do precision work in ski gloves. That level of VR can be seen in Johny Mnemonic, which had some Autodesk assistance.[1]. Even today, you can't put a nut on a bolt in VR without a cheat.)

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1X24aE99TL0

that website gives me ocular stigmata

I think tl;dr

>Now, you can think of large language model AI — the kind that’s on everybody’s mind — as a whole bunch of people whose work was combined into a single document like Wikipedia.

which is sort of true, but there's more to it.

It's AI's Fault. It's AI doing the horrible things to humans. It's AI stealing your wealth. It's AI lying you to. It's AI being unethical. It's AI having the moral issues. It's AI that could destroy humanity. It's AI that's using up all your water. It's AI consuming the majority of the resources. It's AI hiding what it does and how it works. It's AI that's not transparent and accountable. It's AI that's not responsible. It's the AI making decisions. It's AI leading to war. It's the AI distracting you. It's the AI.

It's not a human.

Says the human, masquerading as AI.

It'd be funny if someone cracked open an AI data center and it turned out be a dungeon full of people tied to computers, Sims goblin style

...maybe that's what those Chinese scam centers in Cambodia were doing?

AI is great.