Interesting to listen to. Alexander Kraynov, Director of Artificial Intelligence Development at Yandex. From the category of “didn’t say anything new, but the thoughts and reasoning are worth the time spent”. That is, for the average engineer the video is not about knowledge, but about contemplation.
A brief excerpt from the middle:
“…But, as it seems to me, we are looking for [AI danger] not quite in the right place. (…) It is now clearly apparent that many people can hardly drive without a navigator. Someone who turns off the navigator from time to time can still navigate. But those who are hunters, or, for example, hunter-gatherers, were able to move and navigate in space without navigational aids. Our ancestors had these skills. They could go into the forest and, without any tools, navigate by the stars, getting to the needed place. Traveling five thousand kilometers or even ten thousand kilometers through the taiga was normal for them. They possessed these skills. Now, we face difficulties. If you put a person in the forest, how many of them could return? Previously, this was not a problem—people traversed distances by orienting themselves with the environment. Now we can no longer do this.
Now it often happens that people turn to basic questions such as “How to cook dumplings?”, “How to cook sausages?”, “How to boil eggs?”—they look for answers on the internet. We are accustomed to relying on the internet for any information. This is characteristic not only of humans but also of other living beings. We strive to minimize the effort to achieve a result. If we have no need to think, we turn to the internet. This tendency is only getting stronger. As a result, our lives increasingly depend on the internet. Suppose, because of this tendency, our lives would be fully oriented towards the internet.
Suppose. I imagine, the most likely apocalypse, if it occurs, it would look like this: on a not-so-lucky day, some admin rolls out some faulty, conflicted balancer and takes down the entire internet. Then, it just completely stops working.
And then, it needs to be fixed somehow. Another admin, who should fix it, where is he, the administrator? He’s at home with a laptop, what he can do remotely, as he always did, but he cannot do it remotely because there is no internet. He needs to somehow travel somewhere, he doesn’t know where to even ask because there is no internet, you have no connection, the navigator doesn’t tell you where to go.
Well, let’s assume he knows where to go, and he even has gasoline in the car. Also, gas stations do not work because their payment systems are down. Then he arrives at the data center gate, the building hatch. And next, how he can’t enter, his magnetic badge does not work. Okay, let’s assume, he somehow entered, hacked in. There you are, wanting, this laptop at this center. And at that point, nobody can explain to me at all what can be done. You don’t understand where you should connect, and that’s it. You don’t know how to do it, you can’t fix the internet without the internet, and there are no knowledge and no technical possibilities, nothing.
And now imagine, what if our internet disappears. I’m not sure, by the way, that humanity currently possesses sufficient knowledge and can remake it from scratch. We are rapidly losing such skills because we are not peeking anywhere, it is nowhere recorded in books, but it’s in the internet, if it doesn’t work, you can’t get knowledge.
Imagine such an exercise: imagine you’re thrown back 500 years. They tell you, you’re from the future. You have electricity there. Let’s make it. But at the stage of making the wire, you are already breaking down. You’re a normal person, you don’t understand how to make it. We can use it, but we can’t make it ourselves.
And it seems to me that in the future, such problems will progress, and the danger that threatens us is not some artificial intelligence that will rework us, I really don’t believe that, but our instability in facing technological disasters.
Caused by our excessive reliance and incapability, the inability to create things. I would actually conduct such exercises—agreeing that, say, the next three days we turn off the internet worldwide. Entirely. Not just leaving smartphones at home—completely turning off the internet and watching. Just for control and to see if humanity can last three days or not.
Hi, I'm Rauf Aliev. 