It's a goddamn stochastic parrot, starting from zero on each invocation and spitting out something passing for coherence according to its training set.

"Not understanding what is happening" in regards to AI is NOT "we don't jniw how it works mechanically" it's "yeah there are so many parameters, it's just not possible to make sense of / keep track of them all".

There's no awareness or thought.

There may be thought in a sense.

A analogy might be a static biological “brain” custom grown to predict a list of possible next words in a block of text. It’s thinking, sorta. Maybe it could acknowledge itself in a mirror. That doesn’t mean it’s self aware, though: It’s an unchanging organ.

And if one wants to go down the rabbit hole of “well there are different types of sentience, lines blur,” yada yada, with the end point of that being to treat things like they are…

All ML models are static tools.

For now.

Clickbait.

More random anti-ai fear mongering. I stopped looking at r/technology posts in reddit because that sub is getting flooded with anti-ai propoganda posts with rediculous headlines like this to the point that those posts and political posts about technology ceos is all there is in that community now. (This one is getting bad too, but there are at least 25% of the posts being actual technology news. r/technology on reddit is reaching single digit percentages for actual technology posts. )

Is the rock ok?

The real question is whether the author doesn't understand what he's writing about, or whether he does and is trying to take advantage of users who don't for clicks.

Since "AI" doesn't actually exist yet and what we do have is sucking up all the power and water while accelerating climate change. Add in studies showing regular usage of LLM's is reducing peoples critical thinking I don't see much "fear mongering". I see actual reasonable issues being raised.

Uuh... skipping over the fact that this is a pointless article, didn't Asimov himself write the three laws specifically to show it's a very stupid idea to think a human could cover all possible contingencies through three smart-sounding phrases?

Saw your comment as mine got posted, exactly! Those were cautionary tales, not how-tos! Like, even I, Robot, the Will Smith vehicle, got this point sorta' right (although in a kinda' stupid way), how are tech bros so oblivious of the point?!

Most likely the clicks

Yeah it got bought up by Microsoft and Meta at the same time. They are using it to lay off people.

Asimov had quite a different idea.

What if robots become like humans some day?

That was his general topic through many of his stories. The three laws were quite similar to former slavery laws of Usa. With this analogy he worked on the question if robots are nearly like humans, and if they are even indistinguishable from humans: Would/should they still stay our servants then?

agentic ai is a thing. AI can absolutely do things... it can send commands over an api which sends signals to electronics, like pulling triggers

¿Por que no los dos?

exactly. But what if there were more than just three (the infamous "guardrails")

Good God what an absolutely ridiculous article, I would be ashamed to write that.

Most fundamentally of course is the fact that the laws are robotics are not intended to work and are not designed to be used by future AI systems. I'm sure Asimov would be disappointed to say the least to find out that some people haven't got the message.

Yepyep, agreed! I was referring strictly to the Three Laws as a cautionary element.

Otherwise, I, too, think the point was to show that the only viable way to approach an equivalent or superior consciousness is as at least an equal, not as an inferior.

And it makes a lot of sense. There's not much stopping a person from doing heinous stuff if a body of laws would be the only thing to stop them. I think socialisation plays a much more relevant role in the development of a conscience, of a moral compass, because empathy (edit: and by this, I don't mean just the emotional bit of empathy, I mean everything which can be considered empathy, be it emotional, rational, or anything in between and around) is a significantly stronger motivator for avoiding doing harm than "because that's the law."

It's basic child rearing as I see it, if children aren't socialised, there will be a much higher chance that they won't understand why doing something would harm another, they won't see the actual consequences of their actions upon the subject. And if they don't understand that the subject of their actions is a being just like them, with an internal life and feelings, then they wouldn't have a strong enough* reason to not treat the subject as a piece of furniture, or a tool, or any other object one could see around them.

Edit: to clarify, the distinction I made between equivalent and superior consciousness wasn't in reference to how smart one or the other is, I was referring to the complexity of said consciousness. For instance, I'd perceive anything which reacts to the world around them in a deliberate manner to be somewhat equivalent to me (see dogs, for instance), whereas something which takes in all of the factors mine does, plus some others, would be superior in terms of complexity. I genuinely don't even know what example to offer here, because I can't picture it. Which I think underlines why I'd say such a consciousness is superior.

I will say, I would now rephrase it as "superior/different" in retrospect.

I genuinely think it's impossible. I think this would land us into Robocop 2, where they started overloading Murphy's system with thousands of directives (granted, not with the purpose of generating the perfect set of Laws for him) and he just ends up acting like a generic pull-string action figure, becoming "useless" as a conscious being.

Most certainly impossible when attempted by humans, because we're barely even competent enough to guide ourselves, let alone something else.

Maybe the author let AI write the article?

The laws were baked into the hardware of their positronic brains. They were so fundamentally interwoven with the structure that you couldn't build a positronic brain without them.

You can't expect just whatever random AI to spontaneously decide to follow them.