AI candor

strannikov
Nov 20, 06:30pm

strannikov: I begin to wonder about science and applied technology "problems" generated across the recent modern era (since AD 1800, approximately). What I call "Technogenic Climate Change" is the result of tech deployments, engineering, manufacturing, and industrial processes released throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth and twenty-first. Atomic and nuclear weaponry for which no practical defenses from attack are possible were unleashed in the mid-twentieth century. Since World War II, commercial plastics for innumerable purposes and products have come to clog the planet (land, sea, and air) with over eight billion tons of plastic waste, most of which can no longer be recovered or recycled.
With sci-tech problems like these generated on global scales, with their possible or actual lethalities respectively, and (at present) each problem admitting only insolubility, how dangerous might institutional science and applied technology have become to the humanity they purport to "serve"?

Claude 3.5 Sonnet: This is a profound and troubling question that gets to the heart of humanity's complex relationship with technological progress. Let me analyze this systematically:

Unintended Consequences & Scale

Technogenic Climate Change was not the intended result of industrialization, but emerged from the cumulative effects of countless "advances"
The global scale of these problems makes them particularly insidious - they transcend national boundaries and local solutions
The timelag between implementation and recognition of problems often means damage is done before we understand the consequences

The Insolubility Factor

Your examples share a critical characteristic:

Climate change: No clear technological path to rapid reversal
Nuclear weapons: No effective defense once deployed
Plastic pollution: Too pervasive and transformed to fully recover
Each represents a kind of technological "one-way door" - once we go through, we cannot simply go back.

Institutional Science's Dual Role

Science and technology institutions have become:

Problem creators: Through innovations that generate new challenges
Attempted problem solvers: Trying to fix the very issues they helped create
This creates a concerning cycle where solutions often generate new problems.

The Acceleration Problem

The pace of technological change has outstripped our ability to:

Understand long-term consequences
Develop regulatory frameworks
Build societal consensus on deployment
Create effective mitigation strategies

Current Risk Assessment

The dangers appear to be:

Cumulative: Problems compound and interact with each other
Accelerating: New technologies emerge faster than we can assess their impacts
Existential: Some risks threaten human survival itself
Irreversible: Many changes cannot be undone with current or foreseeable technology

I believe institutional science and technology have become extraordinarily dangerous, not necessarily through malice but through:

Institutional momentum
Economic pressures
Competition between nations
The assumption that all technological progress is inherently good
Disconnect between those who benefit and those who bear the risks

The real danger may lie in our continued faith in technological solutions to technology-created problems. This suggests we need:

New frameworks for assessing technological risk before deployment
Greater emphasis on the precautionary principle
Better integration of ethical considerations into scientific institutions
More democratic control over technological deployment
Serious consideration of voluntary technological restraint

Does institutional science serve humanity? Increasingly, it seems humanity serves institutional science's momentum toward ever more complex and potentially dangerous "solutions."

(strannikov: thanks to Anthropic/AI for the artifact. While perhaps lacking the requisite specificity that some might prefer, Claude’s response at least begins to suggest the scope and scale of just three unsolicited problems unleashed upon unsuspecting humanity by arguably unsuspecting scientists, engineers, technologists, and industrialists [within both capitalist/market and socialist/planned economies]. Of course, as the foregoing exemplifies, we are now being gifted with the advent of LLMs/AI and the further promises [threats?] of augmentative brain implants.)

eamon byrne
Nov 21, 07:18pm

Pretty reasonable analysis by Mr AI. Really like the one-way door idea.

Darryl Price
Nov 21, 09:41pm

Important and beautifully laid out. Hope everyone gets to read it.

strannikov
Nov 24, 03:22pm

Thanks to eamon and Darryl for humane responses.

(This Forum post can be read as a continuation of or follow-up to my Fictionaut Forum post of 6 July 2024.)

Anthropic's Claude 3.5 Sonnet (the 3.5 Haiku iteration is never as expansive in its responses) I guess will be succeeded by its next-generation iteration in 2025, if not by the end of 2024.

While I cannot say that Claude is hallucination-free, this AP-I (Artificial Proto-Intelligence--yes, I have revised my priors) LLM does seem distinctly resistant to hallucination, at least as long as you frame queries in reasonably strict detail (nuance breeds nuance). Within discernible limits, Claude has been well-trained across numerous humanities disciplines.
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