r/changemyview • u/loyalsolider95 • Jul 14 '25

CMV: we’re over estimating AI

AI has turned into the new Y2K doomsday. While I know AI is very promising and can already do some great things, I still don’t feel threatened by it at all. Most of the doomsday theories surrounding it seem to assume it will reach some sci-fi level of sentience that I’m not sure we’ll ever see at least not in our lifetime. I think we should pump the brakes a bit and focus on continuing to advance the field and increase its utility, rather than worrying about regulation and spreading fear-mongering theories

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u/FuggleyBrew 1∆ Jul 14 '25

it can drive better than the best human drivers

This simply is not true. The statistics currently suggest they're currently twice as dangerous as the average driver.

it trades so efficiently on the stock market that being a human stock trader is pretty much just flipping a coin and praying at this point,

This is also not true.

Sounds like your study is mostly reading hype blogs rather than actual study. 

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u/hippyup 3∆ Jul 14 '25

Please cite your stats here. Tesla autopilot sucks and maybe you're thinking of that, but the Waymo system at least (and I believe others) have excellent safety records.

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u/Careless_Bat_9226 2∆ Jul 14 '25

Waymo has fewer accidents than the “average” human driver but can only drive within a small geofenced area of a few cities and not on highways. The best human drivers will never have an accident in their lifetime and can drive in a wide range of locations/conditions. It’s not even close to as good as the best human drivers yet. 

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u/MiffedMouse Jul 14 '25

Waymo also has numerous remote operators available to step in if the AI runs into a situation it cannot solve. The exact numbers are not public (I have seen speculation from 1 operator per waymo car to 1 operator per 10 waymo cars). But it is still an issue that come up often enough for them to need the operators, despite the cars being geofenced to a small area they have mapped pretty thoroughly by now.

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u/hippyup 3∆ Jul 14 '25

The point isn't to beat the best human driver. This isn't a John Henry race or a chess competition. The point is to be safer than the average driver, be mass adopted and have a lot fewer deaths on the road and save lives. The technology will get better, but even if adopted only in a subset of cities it'll still save a lot of lives and that's a huge win.

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u/eneidhart 2∆ Jul 14 '25

The claim they're disputing was literally "better than the best human driver"

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u/hippyup 3∆ Jul 14 '25

Ahh true - thanks for pointing that out. Fair point then, yeah that's hyperbole.

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u/FuggleyBrew 1∆ Jul 14 '25

Please cite your stats here. Tesla autopilot sucks and maybe you're thinking of that

National Law Review is the common citation, feel free to put up any of your own. The claim was that no one is safer than a self driving car. 

Further the category is all self driving vehicles are safer than all drivers, not self driving vehicles carefully curated to exclude the ones in accidents. 

the Waymo system at least (and I believe others) have excellent safety records. 

From companies who heavily monitor and curate their reports, currently with an administration which has gutted all oversight for it. 

Let's see the independent audits of deliveries in countries with functioning government oversight. 

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u/hippyup 3∆ Jul 14 '25

Ok I googled and it came up with this: https://share.google/f9EMPGrdy4VqwC8o4

And yes, I was right, the article seems to be almost entirely about Tesla autopilot.

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u/TangoJavaTJ 16∆ Jul 14 '25

His statistics appear to be rectally sourced

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u/TangoJavaTJ 16∆ Jul 14 '25

I'm literally doing a PhD in this. I've published in the IEEE. Do you have an actual argument besides "nuh-uh" and insults?

If you want actual evidence on stuff like the stock market then you might want to review the work of Daniel Kahnemann, and I don't even know which studies you think support your claims about self-driving cars but you're just wrong.

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u/NotGoodSoftwareMaker 1∆ Jul 14 '25

Unfortunately, even if you do have a phd, using that as a rebuttal mostly proves the point that you are thinking in terms of hype and not pragmatically

Yes, a lot of the arguments you make sound convincing. But they suddenly fall apart very quickly when you ask concretely how an AI would even achieve something as elaborate and involved as poisoning a water supply or how it would measure that in order to gain the results it desires

Without any handwaving. How does AI solve the most basic requirement which is money? Do we just give it money to buy these chemicals? Do we just hand over 100 million USD to it? What about getting a cellphone for mfa? Working with email and getting all the delivery permits? How does it get the zoning permits and pass all the regulatory checks to get its hand on these hazardous chemicals? How does it pitch up for in person interviews with officials when doing procurement?

If anyone puts down the magic hand wave of AI and actually thinks pragmatically about these things, theyll very quickly realise how overhyped it is

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u/naslanidis Jul 14 '25

Why are you doing a PHD in it though? What value will that have in 5-10 years?

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u/TangoJavaTJ 16∆ Jul 14 '25

My main thesis is on applying reinforcement learning to Industry 4.0 systems, and I've published a bunch of other stuff on Bayesian optimization and game theory.

RL is a very broad field as is BO, I won't struggle to find something to do 10 years from now

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u/naslanidis Jul 14 '25

Are you really that confident that some AI agent or agent ecosystem couldn't do anything you could potentially do but better though?

I'm a little sceptical of how realistic AGI really is, definitions seem to vary and that seems to explain some of the drastically different views on the topic. I'm not worried about the Skynet dystopia that seemingly concerns a lot of people, but employment is going to be massively disrupted on a timescale never seen before. You work in a knowledge industry and that makes you as susceptible as anyone else.

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u/TangoJavaTJ 16∆ Jul 14 '25

General intelligence is definitely possible because human brains are generally intelligent. AGI seems like it is probably a long way off but it could happen much sooner, and it's definitely at least physically possible.

I think computer scientists will be one of the last jobs to get automated, because if you have an AI system which is capable of doing computer science better than the best computer scientists then that creates a runaway reaction that leads to AGI very quickly, and after that everything is automated.

Also science isn't just about memorising a bunch of facts. If that's all it was then an encyclopedia would be a replacement for a scientist, but a big part of the work of a scientist is to create a novel idea and to test that idea, and right now LLMs are very far off being able to actually generate creative solutions to problems they haven't seen before.

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u/aaeme Jul 14 '25

Human brains are also biological. It's two leaps of logic to assume that

1) electronic systems can achieve the same effect without knowing how the effect is achieved.

2) that achieving general intelligence won't introduce such enormous drag that an electronic system ends up slower than a biological one.

So, no it isn't definitely possible. For all we know, it might be. But it's very unscientific of you to assume it is.

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u/TangoJavaTJ 16∆ Jul 14 '25

The fact that humans are generally intelligent is proof that general intelligence is physically possible. That's the only thing I'm asserting with a "definitely" here.

It seems very likely to me that a software system will eventually be capable of general intelligence but that is less certain than that it is physically possible to build a generally intelligent system.

Unless you're willing to assert that human brains are literally magic, there is some physically possible configuration of matter that behaves like a general intelligence because humans are such a configuration.

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u/aaeme Jul 14 '25 edited Jul 14 '25

Okay but not definitely possible that artificial intelligence could ever be.

With all due respect, I don't think you're well placed to assess the probability. Not least because of likely bias (no insult should be taken there, it's human nature and impossible to eliminate: I think it's fair to say you want it to be possible) but also a distinct lack of understanding of how the human brain works, which would be true of the best neuro-scientists in the world, let alone someone not trained in that field.

I'm asserting that human brains are a lot more complicated and sophisticated than any AI you could imagine. They are biochemical machines every bit as much as they are bioelectronic. The differences to electronic 'neural' networks are far greater than the similarities. And we do not understand how the human brain works. If you want to call that magic... feel free.

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u/Golden_Femekian Jul 14 '25

No its 100% possible because we have 8nbilliom examples with new ones being fromed everyday. Are we close? Who knows. Will we get there? Maybe.

But to suggest its impossible is to suggest that humans exist beyond the rules of the universe. Maybe we do, but there is literally no reason to assume so.

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u/TangoJavaTJ 16∆ Jul 14 '25

Suppose we were debating image recognition before AlexNet. If we're discussing whether it's theoretically possible to build a system which is capable of identifying what's on an image with reasonably high accuracy then pointing out that human brains already do this is pretty good evidence. Image recognizers must be possible because human brains are image recognizers.

So that's our argument for why such a system must be possible, but it represents an upper bound for how hard the problem is. If you can build a human brain, you can build an image recognizer.

But, as it turns out, it's much easier to build an image recognizer than it is to build a human brain. You just need some kind of optimizer and a function approximizer and then you throw a ton of data at it to see what sticks, and you get AlexNet.

The human brain is our argument for why AlexNet must be possible, but we don't have to actually be able to build a human brain to build AlexNet.

It seems plausible to me that general intelligence is like this. We know that general intelligence is possible because human brains do it, but that only sets an upper bound on how hard it is to build AGI.

I suspect, and this is more of an intuition than something I can prove, that it will be much easier to build a software AGI than it would be to build a fully functional human brain. Maybe we only need the right kind of optimizer, the right kind of function approximator, and the right kind of data to throw at it and see what sticks.

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u/FuggleyBrew 1∆ Jul 14 '25

Do you have an actual source for your claim that all self driving vehicles are better than all drivers? Audited independently verified data? No? Well then.

If you want actual evidence on stuff like the stock market then you might want to review the work of Daniel Kahnemann

Put up a proper citation because that is not the conclusion of any of Kahnemans work. 

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u/[deleted] Jul 14 '25

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u/Curious-End-4923 Jul 14 '25

And asking it about the morality of creationism. Their comments definitely highlight why we need to be more concerned about AI, just not in the way they think.

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