Ask HN: Is AI potentially far worse than Web3 for the world?

4 points

3 years ago

Hi all.

I have been on HN since something like 2008, and I've seen many trends come and go here (including JS framework fads :)

I remember when blockchain and Web3 were massively popular (2014) with only a few dissenting voices and then became total anathema to the point where VCs like Andreessen Horowitz are spit-roasted for riding Web3 hype and selling to the public. (OpenSea was incubated in YCombinator btw.)

So I am genuinely curious because the same seems to be happening with AI, but the result seems absurd to me. With Web3, we are in the "this sucks and has no good applications" phase, but with AI we are in the "but it could have so many... amazing applications" phase.

Yes, I agree that AI might have some good potential applications, and I'll even (for argument's sake) grant that Web3 and smart contracts have no good applications at all. But the question here is about the DOWNSIDE to society. After all, that's what we should be talking about.

Web3 was mildly zero-sum for society, while AI is shaping up to be massively negative-sum, as more people get access to it. It's like giving bombs to everybody and hoping no one will use them in bad ways. At least with nuclear bombs we knew who was enriching the plutonium. Here, everyone has access to weapons, to be used as they please.

The key to when things go bad is swarms. When HN is overrun with swarms of bots a few years from now, you'll remember reading this. Web3 by contrast is just an immutable ledger, its worst applications are convincing people to voluntarily put some money into a buggy smart contract.

With AI, it's not voluntary participation, you can't opt out of being assaulted by swarms of bots peddling fake information, impersonating people, and actually being socially and economically forced to interact with it all, the same way Facebook and LinkedIn were highly needed for social and professional life online. And this is to say nothing of disinformation at scale, like we just saw with the officials in India.

Perhaps this video will bring it home, but for online usage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HipTO_7mUOw

What I'm curious about is, isn't HN supposed to exercise reason and logic, and not just ride the waves of hype and disillusionment like the less-tech-savvy public? Reason says AI can have much worse consequences than Web3 ever did. And the experts do too... this guy who used to work at OpenAI Safety Researcher says 20% chance it leads to most humans dead: