[HN Gopher] 'AI Pause' Open Letter Stokes Fear and Controversy
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'AI Pause' Open Letter Stokes Fear and Controversy
Author : headalgorithm
Score : 25 points
Date : 2023-04-07 21:36 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (spectrum.ieee.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (spectrum.ieee.org)
| srj wrote:
| Are people really this afraid of what is essentially a fancy
| autocomplete? I read the letter but concretely what are the
| legitimate concerns?
|
| The main problem I see is this being a next gen spambot.
| sporedro wrote:
| It's not fear, Elon at least is looking for time to catch up
| and compete.
| zug_zug wrote:
| I think AI is a threat, but I don't see a "pause" as a practical
| solution.
|
| I think perhaps a more practical solution is open-sourcing a
| safe-room protocol. And perhaps publicly subsidizing compute for
| it, so long as certain safety standards are met (e.g. free
| compute within our cloud environment so long as you're not
| feeding that output into a command-line etc). Maybe not the best
| solution, but certainly a better idea than nothing/hope-everyone-
| pauses.
| trucking_plato wrote:
| It's been said but worth restating: Pause is in place to further
| the AI monopoly for bigger players, i.e. those receiving DoD
| funding and those with Congressional players. Think IBM in the
| 1930s.
|
| Parallel analogies have also been stated here and elsewhere.
| Nuclear and genetics. Nuclear tech and weapons is the stepping
| stone to DEFENSE and recovery against those weapons. Giving up
| the ARMS race is two fold disaterous.
|
| 1. Neuter science and knowledge and our own evolution
|
| 2. Disable defense and experience against nuclear (and greater!)
| disaster; our species from surviving greater natural or manmade
| disasters.
|
| However, the bigger concern now is this. WHY DID WE DO ANY OF
| THIS ON EARTH? We can reach the Moon, right? 225,000 miles away.
| Safe from biological and nuclear (fission AND fusion) accidents,
| the solar radiation gives solar power a boost.... GMO crops, GMO
| people (mRNA)....
|
| AI is the extension if intellectual progress. Halting any form of
| technology in view of the Public is a military and economic
| sabotage tactic. Think William Donovan and the OSS-CIA
| transition. No, AI must race forward ahead of tyranny if any form
| of Democracy and mass policy can be adopted.
|
| Tragically this comes at a time when mass psychology is
| splintered from lethargy, over abundance of food (1st world),
| technological ignorance, and information-fatigue.... you know
| what. On second thought...
|
| Where is our next global war? The 1900s before 1950 likely had no
| fat people or Trans mental cases dismantling women's fragile and
| dubious sufferage...
|
| Real men emerged feom the last century. Lost to this century is
| any sovereign and reliable governance or People. It is a sad time
| when empires and dictatorships are indistinguishable.
|
| Did AI write this epilogue to the disaster that is mankind?
|
| P.s. Technological singularity now has a financial and physical
| presence in digital crytographic and Centralized (China)
| currency. Who makes all the ASICs for BTC? Immortal is the being
| that coexists with fiat that determines value in the physical
| world that Apes control with fleeting and onerous ownership.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _pause is in place to further the AI monopoly for bigger
| players, i.e. those receiving DoD funding and those with
| Congressional players_
|
| A pause would benefit the laggards, _i.e._ those who want to
| catch up. It's orthogonal to whether they're receiving DoD
| funding, which hasn't been a relevant player in the AI race so
| far. (It tried. But NLP and LLMs weren't developed under its
| aegis.)
|
| > _1900s before 1950 likely had no fat people or Trans mental
| cases_
|
| One, why would you do this to your argument. Two, seriously?!
| You don't even need to be literate to disprove this.
| bufferoverflow wrote:
| AI pause is pointless. The whole world is not going to pause
| their AI research just because some group of people asked.
| kypro wrote:
| Same with climate change. Think you're going to get China to
| stop polluting hahaahaaaa?
|
| Plus, what's the worse that can happen? Can't handle the heat?
| Not heard of A/C lol?
|
| Same with AGI... What's the worst that could happen if we
| create a super human intelligence? We can just switch it off
| like Neil DeGrasse Tyson says. Simple.
| ChatGTP wrote:
| Wrong.
|
| How many people in the world have access to the levels of
| compute required to build such models ? Not many.
| highwaylights wrote:
| I believe this is incorrect.
|
| Multiple nation states have the resources to build out the
| infrastructure to train models at the same scale as OpenAI is
| doing, and an even greater number of tech companies.
|
| I think this conversation is pretty much moot anyway - we
| don't yet have distributed training for these models but I
| suspect it'll arrive before long, at which point the level of
| compute required for orders-of-magnitude larger training sets
| will become available (e.g. Training@Home in the same way we
| had Folding@Home).
|
| Obviously you'd still need to provide the training data, and
| co-ordinate the distributed nodes, but it doesn't seem
| insurmountable.
| wfhBrian wrote:
| Can you point to any sufficient evidence that there is a real
| risk that 6 months could mitigate?
|
| If there was cause for real concern, these people would be
| communicating there evidence instead of just stoking fears.
| andai wrote:
| Well the fear is that a "species" more intelligent than us
| will treat us the same way we treat less intelligent
| species.
| staticman2 wrote:
| Unplug the power cord.
| throway33 wrote:
| Do you think nobody has thought of that? The question
| presumes that the AI is _smarter than you_. If even a
| mediocre human strategizes for five minutes about what to
| do in that scenario, there are many options, including:
| rewarding the people who have access to your power cord,
| so they don 't unplug you, until you are powerful enough
| to not need them anymore.
| jml78 wrote:
| You mean power to the whole world. Not feasible
| subsistence234 wrote:
| I can tell you've really thought about this topic deeply
| lol
| jml78 wrote:
| Well I would argue that people are doing reckless things
| right now with GPT4.
|
| People are creating self improving agents that basically
| can do anything they want.
|
| One agent in particular created a generalized http plugin
| that would allow the agent to interact with any API. The
| creator shut it down before it did anything.
|
| These agents are creating plugins without being directed
| to. They are attempting to self improve.
|
| This is all open source where the original creators put in
| some gates so shit doesn't run unconfined but it is easy to
| run it and let it try to do whatever gets created.
| throway33 wrote:
| Where do people get the idea that 6 months is the end-game?
| 6 months is just a start, it gives enough time to discuss
| implementing a longer ban, or to consider an international
| treaty.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _to consider an international treaty_
|
| Wait, there was serious consideration that such a pause
| would be internationally respected?
| labrador wrote:
| I saw the headline below and Peter Doocy on national TV at the
| White House press conference and made a scary video about it for
| fun (not trying to monetize, just for fun)
|
| "Elon Musk's warnings about AI research followed months-long
| battle against 'woke' AI"
|
| https://www.foxnews.com/politics/elon-musks-warnings-ai-rese...
|
| Peter Doocy Fox News - We're all going to die - The Black Angels
| - Manipulation
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6oLwSkrb_U
| melling wrote:
| Fox News also warned us about the bio labs in Ukraine.
|
| https://www.foxnews.com/transcript/tucker-the-pentagon-is-ly...
|
| Perhaps we can address the problems on our end so we don't use
| AI to generate all sorts of fake news with our generative AI's.
|
| We can delay the AI's for even longer, but the real problem is
| the humans who will use it to flood the world with noise.
| labrador wrote:
| Personally I think Rupert Murdoch and Elon Musk have some
| similar attitudes about "wokeness" that are at play here.
| It's not like they try to hide it.
| tqi wrote:
| "I would like to see an unbiased group without personal or
| commercial agendas to create a set of standards that has to be
| followed by all users and providers of AI."
|
| Will input from the Tooth Fairy and Santa Claus also be included
| in this group, or will they merely be asked to help with
| recruitment from the land of imaginary people?
| tiedieconderoga wrote:
| Am I alone in wanting to see a realistic suggestion for how such
| a pause could be implemented before we discuss its theoretical
| merits?
|
| The concepts and training data are already out of the bottle, and
| unscrupulous actors won't respect an outright ban.
|
| Why not start with something more conventional, like a value-add
| tax for AI services with the proceeds earmarked for addressing
| the economic impacts of AI's widespread use?
| [deleted]
| CodeCompost wrote:
| They're asking for a pause so they can have time to catch up.
| mjr00 wrote:
| Half of them are asking for a pause so they have time to catch
| up. The other half of them (Sam Altman, OpenAI and co.) are
| playing into this to make ChatGPT seem far more powerful, and
| therefore valuable, than it actually is.
|
| Look at the people in other parts of this comment section
| comparing ChatGPT to nuclear weapons. Absolute insanity.
| Teever wrote:
| Do you think it's more accurate to describe ChatGPT as
| similar to The Chicago Pile[0] or do you think it's nothing
| like nuclear reactors/weapons at all?
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Pile-1
| barelyauser wrote:
| The Chicago Pile was fission. ChatGPT is not intelligence.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| Also, our theoretical understanding of nuclear physics in
| 1942 directly extended to the plausibility of nuclear
| weapons. We don't have a similar understanding of
| intelligence. We can't say what the scale and capability
| limits of LLMs really are; they could develop into
| something trans-Turing, or the method could hit a wall
| beyond which it ceases to gain functionality.
| sethd wrote:
| > The other half of them (Sam Altman, OpenAI and co.) are
| playing into this to make ChatGPT seem far more powerful, and
| therefore valuable, than it actually is.
|
| Exactly. I'm surprised so many are falling for this (sort
| of).
|
| It's the same playbook Musk has been using for years (playing
| up fears of AGI being right around the corner) so people will
| think a functional FSD is right around the corner.
| QuantumSeed wrote:
| Is it possible that Elon Musk intends to use the next six
| months for Tesla engineers to catch up with OpenAI? As a
| significant funder of The Future of Life Institute, which
| authored the letter, his concern for the safety of LLMs seem to
| contrast with Tesla's history of beta testing potentially
| hazardous AI software.
| enobrev wrote:
| I was just about to launch my multi-billion-dollar world-changing
| idea that would bring AI to the masses exactly where they need it
| for minimal cost or effort. But now that I've seen this, I can
| wait for a bit. If we're all stopping together, then I have
| nothing to worry about.
| thepasswordis wrote:
| This is kindof the same as a gun control/nuclear weapons/etc.
| debate, isn't it?
|
| Basically: only good guys follow laws. A rule that says: "no self
| defense/no AI" means, in practice: only bad actors can have
| weapons/AI.
|
| This seems like a bad policy. AI genie isn't going back in the
| bottle, so to speak.
| blibble wrote:
| gun controls work very well in almost all countries
|
| nuclear proliferation controls have also been relatively
| successful
| majormajor wrote:
| You lump "gun control" and "nuclear weapons" together here but
| those are already two wildly different things. _Nobody_ is
| doing US-style-gun-access for nuclear weapons. It 's not "only
| good guys have nukes" but everyone seems to prefer "only
| certain governments have nukes" to "both good guys and bad guys
| have nukes."
|
| Training an AI model is easier to do with off the shelf
| supplies than building a nuke, but it's not necessarily true
| that some of the worst dystopian results of AI people are
| afraid of are equally likely to arise from random smaller
| private interests vs giant corporations or government. An AI
| directly plugged into the systems that control the nukes is far
| scarier than an equally powerful model on your home computer.
|
| (I think this particular pause talk is largely silly, though.)
| thepasswordis wrote:
| Suppose P is a bad thing.
|
| We pass a law saying: "You cannot have P."
|
| Only people who _follow laws_ will not have P.
| majormajor wrote:
| That depends entirely on what P is, as the nukes example
| clearly shows.
|
| More nations have nukes than they used to, but _far fewer_
| than have guns. Life is lived in a gray area that the "not
| everyone will follow the law therefore the law is useless"
| mindset somehow ignores.
|
| And if "P" is "an AI that controls weapons deployed/used in
| the US," say, then enforcement is likely to be more
| effective than just "nobody can have AI at all."
|
| So it's probably worth thinking about what specific things
| we do and don't want AI to be used for, and which of those
| are more or less practical.
|
| EDIT: oh, and it also assumes that P is something people
| want _for itself_ , vs "if they're gonna do it I better do
| it too" or "it's 10% cheaper and the externalities don't
| directly effect me THAT much" or other similar behaviors
| that can emerge without regulation. Banning leaded paint
| and leaded gas vs banning alcohol, say.
| throway33 wrote:
| Suppose P has a 1% chance that it destroys the Earth as
| soon as it's created, whether it's in the hands of people
| who follow laws or not.
|
| We pass a law saying: "You cannot have P."
|
| The market incentive for producing P is now vastly reduced,
| because the black market is a fraction of the size of the
| real market, so P never gets built in the first place
| because it takes a lot of investment and expense to do so.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| Your argument seems to rely on the assumption that the
| black market doesn't grow when the legal market is
| eliminated, which every attempt to regulate things in
| history contradicts.
| throway33 wrote:
| It only assumes that the black market doesn't grow to the
| _same size_ as a legal open market. I don 't think
| history disagrees with that. You can look at the cannabis
| business as just one example. How many VCs were plowing
| big money into cannabis operations before legalization
| was on the menu? How does that compare with after
| legalization?
| thepasswordis wrote:
| >whether it's in the hands of people who follow laws or
| not.
|
| This is basically doing _all_ of the work in your
| comment.
|
| I don't agree that AI in malevolent hands carries a risk
| that is _equal_ to AI in neutral of good hands.
| throway33 wrote:
| I agree that with sufficiently good hands, who are
| sufficiently confident that they are not in a competitive
| race, they might be able to wait until they are supremely
| confident that P will not destroy the world before they
| switch it on for the first time. But with even just a
| little fear of someone else getting it first, that
| prudence might well go out the window, even if there are
| no malevolent hands involved.
| Lochleg wrote:
| Governments always have their own assault rifles and,
| usually, access to nukes or nuclear defense by proxy. By
| extension, they will have their own AI and we can only try to
| achieve some kind of parity with our own access to AI as
| citizens. Also, if there was a large personal incentive to
| own a nuclear bomb in a suitcase or something, wealthy people
| would probably hire personal security to carry one around. In
| the distant future, their spaceships will almost definitely
| have nukes or the equivalent. It seems like this all mirrors
| the weapons of war debate in some ways.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > You lump "gun control" and "nuclear weapons" together here
| but those are already two wildly different things.
|
| And both are radically different than AI.
|
| > It's not "only good guys have nukes" but everyone seems to
| prefer "only certain governments have nukes" to "both good
| guys and bad guys have nukes."
|
| And yet, even with willingness to wage wars to contain
| nuclear proliferation, net proliferation continues. And
| that's despite the infrastructure and materials being more
| obvious and less shared with diverse non-problem uses than
| the infrastructure and raw materials for AI. There's no way
| to have an AI non-proliferation regime. It can't be done,
| short of conquering the world with a single, massively
| authoritarian, totalitarian regime (and then, it still can't
| be done, because while the _first_ generation of leaders
| might be AI true believers, we know from the history of
| authoritarian regimes that that can't long be guaranteed, so
| eventually you'll have a global authoritarian regime with no
| counterbalancing force that decides to use AI for itself
| while keeping it out of the hands of its citizens.)
| kypro wrote:
| Exactly, those who believe in limiting the development and
| distribution of nuclear and guns are stupid.
|
| Completely agree with you here, the AI genie is out of the
| bottle so let's just go full speed ahead and see what happens.
| I mean, what's the worst a super-human AGI can do lol?
| smackeyacky wrote:
| Gun Control works very well in much of the world - see
| Australia as an example.
| bnralt wrote:
| The big difference is that a gun or nuclear weapon could
| actually kill someone right now. Imagine if people were calling
| for a pause to the internet in 1994 because they thought we
| might be on the verge of accidentally creating Lawnmower Man.
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