AI Can Ride My Bike with No Handlebars | decodingvibes.com

I don’t remember the first time I heard Flobot’s Handlebars, but I have been hearing it a lot again recently in an attempt to connect with my past.

The song’s lyrics start with someone expressing happiness at the fact that they can ride a bicycle with no handlebars, and by the end, they threaten to end the world in a holocaust. There can be several interpretations of what any lyrics mean, but in this case, we can find a quote from the artist that clarifies the intended meaning:

The song is about the idea that we have so much incredible potential as human beings to be destructive or to be creative. And it’s tragic to me that the appetite for military innovation is endless, but when it comes to taking on a project like ending world hunger, it’s seen as outlandish. It’s not treated with the same seriousness… We have these little moments of creativity, these bursts of innovation, and every time that happens, that innovation is used to oppress and destroy people.

MC Jonny 5 / Jamie Laurie (main singer and founder of Flobots) to MTV News

The song speaks about how scale almost always corrupts human innovation; that the same core innovation spirit in us that lets us find meaning and joy in simple acts like riding a bicycle with no handlebars can bring us meaning (and in some cases, joy) of guiding a missile with no satellite; that the human ego at scale is a dangerous thing.

Which brings us to the world of AI. Scale is everything in the world of artificial intelligence today, and it has been a big data center contest lately. The companies behind the frontier models have also scaled to extreme massive levels, with valuations hovering around hundreds of billions of dollars.

Perhaps the song is quite fitting for this narrative as well.

AGI, Consciousness and the AI Arms Race

AI CEOs love talking about the end of the world for some reason. Another unqualified thing they often talk about is consciousness, with many frontier labs hinting that consciousness is just another milestone on the AI development roadmap, i.e., not only could their models represent and mimic people but actually be people. Almost all of them do not ponder much the ethical and moral implications of a truly conscious being in this context.

I think AI will probably, like, most likely sort of lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime, there will be great companies created with serious machine learning.

Sam Altman, OpenAI CEO

The idea that intelligent machines will destroy the world is not new. Many sci-fi works explore the situation; most involve a hyper-intelligent system that is either fully conscious as a being or can act as if it is. Most of them will not explain how it works, in the sense of how these computers or software turned into this thing .

The thing just shows up buck naked in a bar with a German accent and demands your clothes. It doesn’t tell you, “Oh yes, I understand what you’re saying and why you shall be curious. Yes, please sit down while I give you a presentation going through everything, all the scientific progress we made, how the machines actually work, what is consciousness and how we manipulate it, and et cetera.” That would make for a very boring movie.

Once we build a generally intelligent system, that basically we will ask it to figure out a way to make an investment return for you.

Sam Altman, OpenAI CEO

Consciousness is a subject that always seems to be at the center of the AI discussion but is never discussed seriously. For example, a tech CEO might boldly proclaim that their company will reach AGI (in fact, a specific form of conscious AGI) in the next three years. However, instead of following through on the legal, ethical, and philosophical framework of the company owning conscious beings, they would move on to how their ad business did 5% more year-over-year.

But is consciousness required or a part of the definition of AGI? The consensus seems to say no.

In recent times, we’ve also seen some pullback in the rhetoric, with leaders trying to define AGI as a capacity threshold rather than a claim of consciousness. For example, last year Sam Altman said: “I think it’s not a super useful term” when talking about AGI. It would be fair to assume that, instead of creating a living, breathing digital dog (which presumably is not just a matter of compute), the focus is now on creating a system that can replace human labor effectively, at least.

While a non-conscious AI system that can perform human tasks at a superlative capacity will mean you don’t need to worry about ethical and moral issues of deploying the said AI, it would still be a dangerous thing for society at large, just not in a Skynet type of way.

In his essay “The Adolescence of Technology”, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei proclaims seriously, “humanity is about to be handed almost unimaginable power, and it is deeply unclear whether we possess the maturity to wield it.” Most of the...