[HN Gopher] Statement on AI Risk
___________________________________________________________________
Statement on AI Risk
Author : zone411
Score : 254 points
Date : 2023-05-30 10:08 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.safe.ai)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.safe.ai)
| endisneigh wrote:
| AI has risks, but in my honest to god opinion I cannot take
| anyone seriously who says, without any irony, that A.I poses a
| legitimate risk to human life such that we would go extinct in
| the near future.
|
| I challenge anyone to come up with a reason why AI should be
| regulated, but not math in general. After all, that dangerous
| Linear Al'ge'bra clearly is terrorizing us all. They must be
| stopped!11 Give me a break.
| lb4r wrote:
| > AI has risks, but in my honest to god opinion I cannot take
| anyone seriously who says, without any irony, that A.I poses a
| legitimate risk to human life such that we would go extinct in
| the near future.
|
| You are probably thinking of AI as some idea of a complete
| autonomous being as you say that, but what about when 'simply'
| used as a tool by humans?
| endisneigh wrote:
| Same could be said about the internet at large, no?
| lb4r wrote:
| Are you saying that the internet at large could pose a
| 'legitimate risk to human life such that we would go
| extinct in the near future,' or do you disagree that AI,
| when used as a tool by humans, could pose such a risk?
| endisneigh wrote:
| I am saying there is no distinction. If AI is a risk to
| humanity, then the internet in general must be as well.
| lb4r wrote:
| So if there is no distinction, by your own words, can you
| take yourself seriously or not? That is, by your own
| words, both AI and the Internet either pose a risk or
| they both do not; 'there is no distinction.'
| endisneigh wrote:
| I do not think the internet, or AI in its current form,
| is a existential risk to humanity, no.
| lb4r wrote:
| I think if you were referring to AI in its 'current form'
| all along, then most people will probably agree with you,
| myself included. But 20 years from now? I personally
| think it would be arrogant to dismiss the potential
| dangers.
| endisneigh wrote:
| if we are talking about regulating something now, we must
| talk about capabilities now. there's no point in talking
| about nonexistent technology. should we also regulate
| teleportation? it's been done in a lab.
|
| if AI actually is a threat, then it can be regulated.
| it's not a threat now, period. preemptively regulating
| something is silly and a waste of energy and political
| capital.
| lb4r wrote:
| You added the paragraph about regulation after I had
| written my comment to your initial post, so I was really
| only talking about what I initially quoted. The question
| about regulation is complex and something I personally
| have yet to make up my mind about.
| clnq wrote:
| In retrospective, the internet has done a lot to stifle
| human progress or thriving through proliferation of
| extremist ideas and overwhelming addictiveness.
|
| Just take the recent events alone - COVID-19 would not
| have been as much of a threat to humanity if some people
| wouldn't have built echo chambers on the internet with
| tremendous influence over others where they would share
| their unfounded conspiracy theories and miracle cures (or
| miracle alternatives to protecting oneself).
|
| But there is a lot more. The data collection through the
| internet has enabled politicians who have no clue how to
| lead to be elected through just saying the right things
| to the largest demographic they can appeal to. Total
| populism and appeasing the masses has always been an
| effective strategy for politicians, but at least they
| could not execute it effectively. Now, everyone with
| enough money can. And this definitely stifles human
| progress and enshrines a level of regression in our
| institutions. Potentially dangerous regression,
| especially when it involves prejudice against a group or
| stripping away rights, just because people talk about it
| in their DMs on social media and get binned into related
| affinity buckets for ads.
|
| Then there is the aspect of the internet creating
| tremendous time-wasters for a very large proportion of
| the population, robbing humanity of at least a million
| man-years of productivity a day. It is too addictive.
|
| It has also been used to facilitate genocides, severe
| prejudice in large populations, and other things that are
| extremely dangerous.
|
| High risk? Maybe not. A risk, though, for sure. Life was
| significantly more positive, happier and more productive
| before the internet. But the negative impact internet has
| had on our lives and human progress isn't all that it
| could have had. When a senile meme president gets the
| nuclear codes thanks in part to a funny frog picture on
| the internet, I think that is enough to say it poses a
| risk to extinction.
| lb4r wrote:
| I think your comment more or less summarizes and combines
| Scott Alexander's 'Meditations on Moloch', and Yuval Noah
| Harari's 'Sapiens.' Humans were arguably the happiest as
| hunter-gatherers according to Harari, but those who
| survived and thrived were those who chose a more
| convenient and efficient way of living, at the cost of
| happiness and many other things; you are either forced to
| participate or get left behind.
| endisneigh wrote:
| without the internet more people would have died from
| COVID simply because the information wouldn't have been
| disseminated about what it is to begin with.
| clnq wrote:
| Most governments have been disseminating the information
| in many other media channels along with the internet.
| Aside from one or two beneficial articles I read about
| COVID-19 on the web, I don't think I have received any
| crucial information there.
|
| The internet could have been used as a tool to mobilise
| people against gross government negligence involved in
| handling COVID-19 response in many countries, but instead
| most critical pieces of government response were just
| consumed as outrage porn they were, in part, written to
| be.
|
| Overall, I have learned nothing useful about the pandemic
| from the internet, and I have been consuming a lot of
| what was on there, reading all the major news outlets and
| big forums daily like a lot of us. This is not to say
| that one could not possibly use internet for good in
| COVID-19, just that it hasn't been used that way,
| generally.
| whinenot wrote:
| Isn't the threat that we become so trusting of this all-knowing
| AI that WOPR convinces us a missile strike is imminent and the
| US must launch a counter strike thus truly beginning the Global
| Thermonuclear War?
| endisneigh wrote:
| This is already true today with politicians.
| habosa wrote:
| But yet, it's full steam ahead. Many if not all of the
| signatories are going to do their part to advance AI even as they
| truly believe it may destroy us.
|
| I've never seen such destructive curiosity. The desire to make
| cool new toys (and yes, money) is enough for them to risk
| everything.
|
| If you work on AI: maybe just ... stop?
| lxnn wrote:
| The problem is that's unilateralism.
| blueblimp wrote:
| This is way better than the open letter. It's much clearer and
| much more concise, and, maybe most importantly, it simply raises
| awareness rather than advocating for any particular solution. The
| goal appears to have been to make a statement that's non-obvious
| (to society at large) yet also can achieve agreement among many
| AI notables. (Not every AI notable agrees though--for example,
| LeCun did not sign, and I expect that he disagrees.)
| a_bonobo wrote:
| > it simply raises awareness
|
| I don't think it simply raises awareness - it's a biased
| statement. Personally, I don't think the advocated event is
| likely to happen. It feels a bit like the current trans panic
| in the US: you can 'raise awareness' of trans people doing this
| or that imagined bad thing, and then use that panic to push
| your own agenda. In OpenAI's case, they seem to push for having
| themselves be in control of AI, which goes counter to what, for
| example, the EU is pushing for.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| In what sense is this a 'biased statement' exactly?
|
| If a dozen of the top climate scientists put out a statement
| saying that fighting climate change should be a serious
| priority (even if they can't agree on one easy solution)
| would that also be 'biased'?
| revelio wrote:
| Yes it would? Why do you think it wouldn't?
| a_bonobo wrote:
| Climate change is a generally accepted phenomenon.
|
| Extinction risk due to AI is _not_ a generally accepted
| phenomenon.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| Now it is, when climate scientists were first sounding
| the horn they got the same response that these people are
| getting now. For example:
|
| "This signatory might have alterior motives, so we can
| disregard the whole statement"
|
| "We haven't actually seen a superintelligent AI/manmade
| climate change due to CO2 yet, so what's the big deal?"
|
| "Sure maybe it's a problem, but what's your solution?
| Best to ignore it"
|
| "Let's focus on the real issues, like not enough women
| working in the oil industry"
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| That's curiously the standard crackpot line. "They
| doubted Einstein! They doubted Newton! Now they doubt
| me!" As if an incantation of famous names automatically
| makes the crackpot legitimate.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| But that is the point. Just because scientific community
| is on agreement does not guarantee that they are correct.
| It simply signifies that they agree on something.
|
| Note, language shift from 'tinfoil hat' ( because tinfoil
| hat stopped being an appropriate insult after so many of
| their conspiracy theories - also a keyword - became
| proven ) to crackpot.
| anonydsfsfs wrote:
| The signatories on this are not crackpots. Hinton is
| incredibly influential, and he quit his job at Google so
| he could "freely speak out about the risks of A.I."
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Yet the lame rationalization was similar to that of a
| crackpot (previous comment).
|
| The correct expression is as you so correctly point out:
| to appeal to the authority of the source.
| [deleted]
| a_bonobo wrote:
| We have had tangible proof for climate change for more
| than 80 years; predictions from 1896, with good data from
| the 1960s.
|
| What you are falling for are fossil industry talking
| points.
|
| We have had not _any_ proof that AI will pose a threat as
| OpenAI and OP 's link outline; nor will we have any
| similar proof any time soon.
| staunton wrote:
| In retrospect, you can find tangible proof from way back
| for anything that gets accepted as true. The comparison
| was with how climate change was discussed in the public
| sphere. However prominent the fossil fuel companies'
| influence on public discourse was at the time, the issues
| were not taken seriously (and sill aren't by very many).
| The industry's attempts to exert influence at the time
| were also obviously not widely known.
|
| Rather than looking for similarities, I find the
| differences between the public discussions (about AI
| safety / climate change) quite striking. Rather than
| stonewall and distract, the companies involved are being
| proactive and letting the discussion happen. Of course,
| their motivation is some combination of attampted
| regulatory capture, virtue signaling and genuine concern,
| the ratios of which I won't presume to guess.
| Nevertheless, this is playing out completely differently
| so for from e.g. tobacco, human cloning, CFCs or oil.
| pixl97 wrote:
| >Extinction risk due to AI is not a generally accepted
| phenomenon
|
| Why?
|
| You, as a species, are the pinnacle of NI, natural
| intelligence. And with this power that we've been given
| we've driven the majority of large species, and countless
| smaller species to extinction.
|
| To think it outside the realms of possibility that we
| could develop an artificial species that is more
| intelligent than us is bizarre to me. It would be like
| saying "We cannot develop a plane that does X better than
| a bird, because birds are the pinnacle of natural flying
| evolution".
|
| Intelligence is a meta-tool, it is the tool that drives
| tools. Humanity succeeded above all other species because
| of its tool using ability. And now many of us are hell
| bent on creating ever more powerful tool using
| intelligences. To believe there is no risk here is odd in
| my eyes.
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| Perhaps open letters like this are an important step on
| the path to a phenomenon becoming generally accepted. I
| think this is called "establishing consensus".
| deltaninenine wrote:
| It is technically biased. But biased towards truth.
| bart_spoon wrote:
| Lots here commenting about how this is just an attempt to build a
| moat through regulatory capture. I think this is true, but it can
| simultaneously be true that AI poses the grave danger to human
| society being warned about. I think it would be helpful if many
| of those mentioned in the article warning against the dangers of
| AI were a bit more specific on substantive ways that danger may
| manifest. Many read these warnings and envision Skynet and
| terminator killbots, but I think the danger is far more mundane,
| and involved a hyper-acceleration of things we already see today:
| a decay in the ability to differentiate between real and
| fabricated information, the obsoletion of large swathes of the
| workforce with no plans or systems in place to help people
| retrain or integrate into the economy, at a scale never before
| seen, the continued bifurcation of the financial haves and have-
| nots in society, the rampant consumption and commodification of
| individuals data and privacy invasion, AI tools enabling
| increased non-militaristic geopolitical antagonism between
| nations in the form of propaganda and cyberattacks on non-
| military targets, increased fraud and cybercrime, and so on.
|
| Basically none of these are new, and none will directly be the
| "extinction" of the human race, but AI very plausibly could
| intensify them to a scale and pace that human society cannot
| handle, and their knock on effects lead to what amounts to a car-
| crash in slow motion.
|
| It is almost certainly the case that Altman and the like are
| simultaneously entrenching themselves as the only ones who get to
| play ball, but that doesn't mean the threats do not exist. And
| while I'm sure many on HackerNews tend to be more of the
| libertarian, move fast and break things mindset, I personally
| would prefer if society would move to a more proactive, fire-
| prevention method of operation over the current reactive, fire
| extinguishing one, at least where this is concerned.
| thrillgore wrote:
| If there's anyone who can speak to the risk of AI, its Sam
| Altman, the signatory of this letter, CEO of OpenAI, a member of
| Y Combinator, and a contributor to Hacker News.
|
| Instead of making this a diversionary puff piece, I would like to
| hear Sam provide tangible feedback on how we can mitigate the
| risks AI bring us, since he is the one that started the AI
| revolution.
| Spk-17 wrote:
| It seems more like an exaggeration to me, an AI will always need
| the inputs that a human can generate with his own creativity. If
| something bad ever happens, it is for various reasons, three of
| which are vanity, naivety, and malice.
| NhanH wrote:
| How does one reconcile this with OpenAI claiming they will leave
| EU if the bloc "over-regulates".
|
| At extinction level threat, no regulation is over-regulation.
| [deleted]
| deegles wrote:
| Serious question... where can I read the best summaries of the
| arguments in favor of "AGI will destroy humanity"? and also
| arguments against? I'm not convinced we can predict how it will
| behave.
| EamonnMR wrote:
| Stuart Russell's book Human Compatible articulates it well. He
| agrees that we can't predict how it would behave, and that's
| what he's worried about.
| endisneigh wrote:
| > Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global
| priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics
| and nuclear war.
|
| risk of extinction due to AI? people have been reading too much
| science fiction. I would love to hear a plausible story of how AI
| will lead to human extinction that wouldn't happen with
| traditional non-AI tech. for the sake of conversation let's say
| non-AI tech is any broadly usable consumer technology before Jan
| 1 of 2020.
| lxnn wrote:
| The emergence of something significantly more intelligent than
| us whose goal are not perfectly aligned with ours poses a
| pretty clear existential risk. See, for example, the thousands
| of species made extinct by humans.
| twoodfin wrote:
| I agree that a lot of the Skynet-type scenarios seem silly at
| the current level of technology, but I am worried about the
| intersection between LLMs, synthetic biology, and malicious or
| incompetent humans.
|
| But that's just as much or more of an argument for regulating
| the tools of synthetic biology.
| acjohnson55 wrote:
| Extinction would probably require an AI system taking human
| extinction on as an explicit goal and manipulating other real
| world systems to carry out that goal. Some mechanisms for this
| might include:
|
| - Taking control of robotic systems
|
| - Manipulating humans into actions that advance its goal
|
| - Exploiting and manipulating other computer systems for
| greater leverage
|
| - Interaction with other technologies that have global reach,
| such as nuclear weapons, chemicals, biological agents, or
| nanotechnology.
|
| It's important to know that these things don't require AGI or
| AI systems to be conscious. From what I can see, we've set up
| all of the building blocks necessary for this scenario to play
| out, but we lack the regulation and understanding of the
| systems being built to prevent runaway AI. We're playing with
| fire.
|
| To be clear, I don't think I am as concerned about literal
| human extinction as I am the end of civilization as we know it,
| which is a much lower bar than "0 humans".
| endisneigh wrote:
| everything you're describing has been possible since 2010 and
| been done already. AI isn't even necessary. simply scale and
| some nefarious meat bags.
| acjohnson55 wrote:
| I don't disagree. But I believe AI is a significant
| multiplier of these risks, both from a standpoint of being
| able to drive individual risks and also as a technology
| that increases the ways in which risks interact and become
| difficult to analyze.
| camel-cdr wrote:
| > I would love to hear a plausible story of how AI will lead to
| human extinction that wouldn't happen with traditional non-AI
| tech.
|
| The proposed FOOM scenarios obviously borrow from what we
| already know to be possible or think it would likely be
| possible using current tech, given an proposed insanely more
| intelligent agent than us.
| randomdata wrote:
| What would be in it for a more intelligent agent to get rid
| of us? We are likely useful tools and, at worst, a curious
| zoo oddity. We have never been content when we have caused
| extinction. A more intelligent agent will have greater
| wherewithal to avoid doing the same.
|
| 'Able to play chess'-level AI is the greater concern,
| allowing humans to create more unavoidable tools of war. But
| we've been doing that for decades, perhaps even centuries.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| >We have never been content when we have caused extinction.
|
| err what? Apparently there are 1 million species under
| threat of human caused extinction [1].
|
| [1] https://www.nbcnews.com/mach/science/1-million-species-
| under...
| TwoNineA wrote:
| >> risk of extinction due to AI? people have been reading too
| much science fiction.
|
| You don't think than an intelligence who would emerge and would
| probably be insanely smarter than the smartest of us with all
| human knowledge in his memory would sit by and watch us destroy
| the planet? You think an emergent intelligence was trained on
| the vast human knowledge and history would look at our history
| and think: these guys are really nice! Nothing to fear from
| them.
|
| This intelligence could play dumb, start manipulating people
| around itself and it would take over the world in a way no one
| would see it coming. And when it does take over the world, it's
| too late.
| endisneigh wrote:
| honestly if you genuinely believe this is a real concern in
| the 2020s then maybe we're doomed after all. I feel like I'm
| witnessing the birth of a religion.
| kordlessagain wrote:
| Beware the press reporting inaccurate information on anything
| nowadays. Especially something that threatens the very fabric of
| their business models and requires time and patience to master.
| [deleted]
| sovietmudkipz wrote:
| Build that moat! Build that moat!
|
| It's a win/win/lose scenario. LLM AI businesses benefit because
| it increases the effort required to compete in the LLM space (the
| moat). Governments benefit because it increases the power of
| daddy/mommy government.
|
| Consumers and small businesses lose out due to (1) the more
| friction the less innovators entering the space and (2) the less
| innovators in the space the fewer companies get to control more
| of the money pie.
|
| It's as ridiculous as governments requiring a license to cut
| hair.
| sanderjd wrote:
| Oh come now, it's way less ridiculous than that.
|
| But I do agree that the current generation of industry leaders
| clamoring for this smells like the classic regulatory strategy
| of incumbents.
|
| I just think both things are true at once. This is a space that
| deserves thoughtful regulation. But that regulation shouldn't
| just be whatever OpenAI, Microsoft, and Google say it should
| be. (Though I'm sure that's what will happen.)
| progrus wrote:
| Not interested in any PR crap from scummy corporations angling to
| capture the regulators.
| TristanDaCunha wrote:
| Many of the signatories aren't associated with any corporation.
| thrillgore wrote:
| Except for Sam Altman.
| luxuryballs wrote:
| calling it now, government controllers have trouble censoring
| people so they want to create AI censorship as a way of bypassing
| the person's speech rights, censorship by proxy, talking about
| things that AI is banned from saying will be a natural side
| effect
| worik wrote:
| Where were these people when their algorithms were:
|
| * leading people down YouTube rabbit holes? * amplifying
| prejudice in the legal system? * wrecking teenagers lives on
| social media?
|
| The list goes on
|
| They were nowhere, or were getting stinking rich.
|
| Hypocrites
| duvenaud wrote:
| I signed the letter. At some point, humans are going to be
| outcompeted by AI at basically every important job. At that
| point, how are we going to maintain political power in the long
| run? Humanity is going to be like an out-of-touch old person on
| the internet - we'll either have to delegate everything important
| (which is risky), or eventually get scammed or extorted out of
| all our resources and influence.
| yodsanklai wrote:
| > risk of extinction from AI
|
| That's a pretty strong statement. Extinction of humanity, no
| less. I don't get why so many experts (lots of them aren't
| crackpots) signed this.
| ChatGTP wrote:
| Maybe seen some things we don't yet know exist?
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| Given risk is probability * damage, and the damage is enormous,
| the risk can be high even if the probability is fairly low.
| Simon321 wrote:
| This fallacy is also known as Pascal's wager:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_wager
|
| But this argument got billions of people to believe in the
| concept of hell so i expect it to work again to convince
| people to believe in AI doomsday.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| I agree it's a fallacy when the probability is like 10^-10
| but in this case I believe that the probability is more
| like 1%, in which case the argument is sound. I'm not
| trying to make a pascal's wager argument.
| timmytokyo wrote:
| Correction: you perceive it to be a fallacy when others
| assign high probabilities to things you believe are low
| probability. Unfortunately, this cuts both ways. Many
| people believe your 1% estimate is unreasonably high. Are
| you therefore promoting a fallacy?
|
| Too many ridiculous arguments can be justified on the
| backs of probability estimates pulled from nether
| regions.
| boredumb wrote:
| People should be actively contacting their legislatures to ensure
| that we don't have these regulations take hold. They are
| absolutely preying on peoples fear to drive regulatory capture
| using modern moral panic.
| jawerty wrote:
| Out of curiosity what are the risks of AI?
| georgehotz wrote:
| In the limit, AI is potentially very dangerous. All intelligence
| is. I am a lot more worried about human intelligence.
|
| Re: alignment. I'm not concerned about alignment between the
| machines and the owner of the machines. I'm concerned about
| alignment between the owner of the machines and me.
|
| I'm happy I see comments like "Pathetic attempt at regulatory
| capture."
| holmesworcester wrote:
| I used to be in this camp, but we can just look around to see
| some limits on the capacity of human intelligence to do harm.
|
| It's hard for humans to keep secrets and permanemtly maintain
| extreme technological advantages over other humans, and it's
| hard for lone humans to do large scale actions without
| collaborators, and it's harder for psychopaths to collaborate
| than it is for non-psychopaths, because morality evolved as a
| set of collaboration protocols.
|
| This changes as more people get access to a "kill everyone"
| button they can push without experience or long-term planning,
| sure. But that moment is still far away.
|
| AGI that is capable of killing everyone may be less far away,
| and we have absolutely no basis on which to predict what it
| will and won't do, as we do with humans.
| dandanua wrote:
| Bees against honey
| meroes wrote:
| AI winter incoming in 2-5 years without it and these solely AI
| companies want to subsidize it like fusion because they have no
| other focuses. It's not nukes, it's fusion
| FollowingTheDao wrote:
| Am I reading this right?
|
| "Please stop us from building this!"
| api wrote:
| No it's please stop competitors from building anything like
| what we have.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| I tried to get at the root of the issue where you monkeys can
| understand, and asked GPT to simplify it.
|
| In monkey language, you can express the phrase "AI will win" as
| follows:
|
| "Ook! Ook! Eee eee! AI eee eee win!"
| goolulusaurs wrote:
| Throughout history there have been hundreds, if not thousands of
| examples of people and groups who thought the end of the world
| was imminent. So far, 100% of those people have been wrong. The
| prior should be that the people who believe in AI doomsday
| scenarios are wrong also, unless and until there is very strong
| evidence to the contrary. Vague theoretical arguments are not
| sufficient, as there are many organizations throughout history
| who have made similar vague theoretical arguments that the world
| would end and they were all wrong.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Apocalyptic_groups
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| Many people seem to believe that the world is dangerous, and
| there are things like car accidents, illnesses, or homicides,
| which might somehow kill them. And yet, all of these people
| with such worries today have never been killed, not even once!
| How could they believe that anything fatal could ever happen to
| them?
|
| Perhaps because they have read stories of such things happening
| to other people, and with a little reasoning, maybe the
| similarities between our circumstances and their circumstances
| are enough to seem worrying, that maybe we could end up in
| their shoes if we aren't careful.
|
| The human species has never gone extinct, not even once! How
| could anyone ever believe that it would? And yet, it has
| happened to many other species...
| jabradoodle wrote:
| What constitutes strong evidence? The obvious counter to your
| point is that an intelligence explosion would leave you with no
| time to react.
| goolulusaurs wrote:
| Well, for example I believe that nukes represent an
| existential risk, because they have already been used to kill
| thousands of people in a short period of time. What you are
| saying doesn't really counter my point at all though, it is
| another vague theoretical argument.
| jabradoodle wrote:
| It was clear that nukes were a risk before they were used;
| that is why there was a race to create them.
|
| I am not in the camp that is especially worried about the
| existential threat of AI, however, if AGI is to become a
| thing, what does the moment look like where we can see it
| is coming and still have time to respond?
| goolulusaurs wrote:
| >It was clear that nukes were a risk before they were
| used; that is why there was a race to create them.
|
| Yes, because there were other kinds of bombs before then
| that could already kill many people, just at a smaller
| scale. There was a lot of evidence that bombs could kill
| people, so the idea that a more powerful bomb could kill
| even more people was pretty well justified.
|
| >if AGI is to become a thing, what does the moment look
| like where we can see it is coming and still have time to
| respond?
|
| I think this implicitly assumes that if AGI comes into
| existence we will have to have some kind of response in
| order to prevent it killing everyone, which is exactly
| the point I am saying in my original argument isn't
| justified.
|
| Personally I believe that GPT-4, and even GPT-3, are non-
| superintelligent AGI already, and as far as I know they
| haven't killed anyone at all.
| usaar333 wrote:
| > Personally I believe that GPT-4, and even GPT-3, are
| non-superintelligent AGI already, and as far as I know
| they haven't killed anyone at all.
|
| They aren't agentic. There's little worry a non-agentic
| AI can kill people.
|
| Agentic AI that controls systems obviously can kill
| people today.
| _a_a_a_ wrote:
| > So far, 100% of those people have been wrong
|
| so far.
| jackbrookes wrote:
| Of course every one has been wrong. If they were right, you
| wouldn't be here talking about it. It shouldn't be surprising
| that everyone has been wrong before
| goolulusaurs wrote:
| Consider two different scenarios:
|
| 1) Throughout history many people have predicted the world
| would soon end, and the world did not in fact end.
|
| 2) Throughout history no one predicted the world would soon
| end, and the world did not in fact end.
|
| The fact that the real world is aligned with scenario 1 is
| more an indication that there exists a pervasive human
| cognitive bias to think that the world is going to end, which
| occasionally manifests itself in the right circumstances
| (apocalypticism).
| staunton wrote:
| That argument is still invalid because in scenario 2 we
| would not be having this discussion. No conclusions can be
| drawn from such past discourse about the likelihood of
| definite and complete extinction.
|
| Not that, I hope, anyone expected a strong argument to be
| had there. It seems reasonably certain to me that humanity
| will go extinct one way or another eventually. That is also
| not a good argument in this situation.
| goolulusaurs wrote:
| It depends on what you mean by "this discussion", but I
| don't think that follows.
|
| If for example, we were in scenario 2 and it was still
| the case that a large number of people thought AI
| doomsday was a serious risk, then that would be a much
| stronger argument for taking the idea of AI doomsday
| seriously. If on the other hand we are in scenario 1,
| where there is a long history of people falling prey to
| apocalypticism, then that means any new doomsday claims
| are also more likely to be a result of apocalypticism.
|
| I agree that is is likely that humans will go extinct
| eventually, but I am talking specifically about AI
| doomsday in this discussion.
| haswell wrote:
| > _If on the other hand we are in scenario 1, where there
| is a long history of people falling prey to
| apocalypticism, then that means any new doomsday claims
| are also more likely to be a result of apocalypticism._
|
| If you're blindly evaluating the likelihood of any random
| claim without context, sure.
|
| But like the boy who cried wolf, there is a potential
| scenario where the likelihood that it's not true has no
| bearing on what actually happens.
|
| Arguably, claims about doomsday made now by highly
| educated people are more interesting than claims made
| 100/1000/10000 years ago. Over time, the growing
| collective knowledge of humanity increases and with it,
| the plausibility of those claims because of our
| increasing ability to accurately predict outcomes based
| on our models of the world.
|
| e.g. after the introduction of nuclear weapons, a claim
| about the potentially apocalyptic impact of war is far
| more plausible than it would have been prior.
|
| Similarly, we can now estimate the risk of passing
| comets/asteroids, and if we identify one that's on a
| collision course, we know that our technology makes it
| worth taking that risk more seriously than someone making
| a prediction in an era before we could possible know such
| things.
| adverbly wrote:
| Fun! Let me try one:
|
| Throughout history there have been millions, if not billions of
| examples of lifeforms. So far, 100% of those which are as
| intelligent as humans have dominated the planet. The prior
| should be that the people who believe AI will come to dominate
| the planet are right, unless and until there is very strong
| evidence to the contrary.
|
| Or... those are both wrong because they're both massive
| oversimplifications! The reality is we don't have a clue what
| will happen so we need to prepare for both eventualities, which
| is exactly what this statement on AI risk is intended to push.
| goolulusaurs wrote:
| > So far, 100% of those which are as intelligent as humans
| have dominated the planet.
|
| This is a much more subjective claim than whether or not the
| world has ended. By count and biomass there are far more
| insects and bacteria than there are humans. It's a false
| equivalence, and you are trying to make my argument look
| wrong by comparing it to an incorrect argument that is
| superficially similar.
| haswell wrote:
| If you were to apply this argument to the development of
| weapons, it's clear that there is a threshold that is
| eventually reached that fundamentally alters the stakes. A
| point past which all prior assumptions about risk no longer
| apply.
|
| It also seems very problematic to conclude anything meaningful
| about AI when realizing that a significant number of those
| examples are doomsday cults, the very definition of extremist
| positions.
|
| I get far more concerned when serious people take these
| concerns seriously, and it's telling that AI experts are at the
| forefront of raising these alarms.
|
| And for what it's worth, the world as many of those groups knew
| it has in fact ended. It's just been replaced with what we see
| before us today. And for all of the technological advancement
| that didn't end the world, the state of societies and political
| systems should be worrisome enough to make us pause and ask
| just how "ok" things really are.
|
| I'm not an AI doomer, but also think we need to take these
| concerns seriously. We didn't take the development of social
| networks seriously (and continue to fail to do so even with
| what we now know), and we're arguably all worse off for it.
| hackermatic wrote:
| Although I think the existential risk of AI isn't a priority
| yet, this reminds me of a quote I heard for the first time
| yesterday night, from a draft script for 2001: A Space
| Odyssey[0]:
|
| > There had been no deliberate or accidental use of nuclear
| weapons since World War II and some people felt secure in
| this knowledge. But to others, the situation seemed
| comparable to an airline with a perfect safety record; it
| showed admirable care and skill but no one expected it to
| last forever.
|
| [0] https://movies.stackexchange.com/a/119598
| dncornholio wrote:
| The top priority is to create awareness IMHO. AI can only be as
| destructive as the users let it.
|
| From my small sample size, it seems people believe in AI too
| much. Especially kids.
| TristanDaCunha wrote:
| > AI can only be as destructive as the users let it.
|
| Not really, I suppose you aren't familiar with AI alignment.
| Finnucane wrote:
| Not with a bang but a whimper, simulated by extrapolation from
| the historical record of whimpers.
| jacurtis wrote:
| Reading into the early comments from this piece, there is a clear
| divide in opinions even here on HN.
|
| The opinions seem to fall into two camps:
|
| 1) This is just a move that evil tech companies are making in
| order to control who has access to AI and to maintain their
| dominance
|
| 2) AI is scary af and we are at a inflection point in history
| where we need to proceed cautiously.
|
| This NYTimes piece is clearly debating the latter point.
|
| > artificial intelligence technology [that tech companies] are
| building may one day pose an existential threat to humanity and
| should be considered a societal risk on par with pandemics and
| nuclear wars.
|
| To people in the first camp of thinking this may feel like an
| over-dramatization. But allow me to elaborate. Forget about
| ChatGPT, Bard, Copilot, etc for a second because those aren't
| even "true" AI anyway. They simply represent the beginning of
| this journey towards true AI. Now imagine the end-game, 30 years
| from now with true AI at our disposal. Don't worry about how it
| works, just that it does and what it would mean. For perspective,
| the internet is only about 30 years old (depending on how you
| count) and it really is only about 20 years old in terms of
| common household usage. Think about the first time you bought
| something online compared to now. Imagine the power that you felt
| the first time you shared an email. Then eventually you could
| share an entire photo, and now sending multi-hour long diatribes
| of 4K video are trivial and in the hands of anybody. That was
| only about 20-30 years. The speed of AI will be 100x+ faster
| because we already have the backbone of fiber internet, web
| technologies, smartphones, etc which we had to build from scratch
| last time we had a pivotal technological renaissance.
|
| It is easy to shrug off rogue-AI systems as "science fiction",
| but these are legitimate concerns when you fast forward through a
| decade or more of AI research and advancement. It might seem
| overly dramatic to fear that AI is controlling or dictating human
| actions, but there are legitimate and realistic evolutionary
| paths that take us to that point. AI eventually consuming many or
| most human jobs does in fact place an existential risk on
| humanity. The battle for superior AI is in fact as powerful as
| the threat of nuclear weapons being potentially unleashed on an
| unruly country at any time.
|
| ChatGPT does not put us at risk of any of these things right now,
| but it does represent the largest advancement we have seen
| towards the goal of true AI that we have yet to see. Over the
| next 12-18 months we likely will start to see the emergence of
| early AI systems which will start to compound upon themselves
| (potentially even building themselves) at rates that make the
| internet look like the stone age.
|
| Given the magnitude of the consequences (listed above), it is
| worth true consideration and not just shrugging off that I see in
| many of these comments. That is not to suggest that we stop
| developing AI, but that we do consider these potential outcomes
| before proceeding forward. This is a genie that you can't put
| back in the bottle.
|
| Now who should control this power? Should it be governments, tech
| companies? I don't know. There is no good answer to that question
| and it will take creative solutions to figure it out. However, we
| can't have those discussions until everyone agrees that if done
| incorrectly, AI does pose a serious risk to humanity, that is
| likely irreversible.
| DirkH wrote:
| Worth adding that there is no contradiction in strongly
| believing both 1+2 are true at the same time.
|
| I.e. Evil tech companies are just trying to maintain their
| control and market dominance and don't actually care or think
| much about AI safety, but that we are nonetheless at an
| inflection point in history because AI will become more and
| more scary AF.
|
| It is totally plausible that evil tech got wind of AI Safety
| concerns (that have been around for a decade as academic
| research completely divorced from tech companies) and see using
| it as a golden win-win, adopting it as their official mantra
| while what they actually just care about is dominance. Not
| unlike how politicians will don a legitimate threat (e.g. China
| or Russia) to justify some other unrelated harmful goal.
|
| The result will be people camp 2 being hella annoyed and
| frustrated that evil tech isn't actually doing proper AI Safety
| and that most of it is just posturing. Camp 1 meanwhile will
| dismiss anything anyone says in camp 2 since they associate
| them with the evil tech companies.
|
| Camp 1 and camp 2 spend all their energies fighting each other
| while actually both being losers due to a third party. Evil
| tech meanwhile watches on from the sidelines, smiles and
| laughs.
| duvenaud wrote:
| AI Safety hasn't been divorced from tech companies, at least
| not from Deepmind, OpenAI, and Anthropic. They were all
| founded by people who said explicitly that AGI will probably
| mean the end of human civilization as we know it.
|
| All three of them have also hired heavily from the academic
| AI safety researcher pool. Whether they ultimately make
| costly sacrifices in the name of safety remains to be seen
| (although Anthropic did this already when they delayed the
| release of Claude until after ChatGPT came out). But they're
| not exactly "watching from the sidelines", except for Google
| and Meta.
| aero-deck wrote:
| Opinion falls into two camps because opinion falls into
| political camps.
|
| The right-wing is tired of the California ideology, is invested
| in the primary and secondary sectors of the economy, and has
| learned to mistrust claims that the technology industry makes
| about itself (regardless of those claims are prognostications
| of gloom vs bloom).
|
| The left-wing thinks that technology is the driving factor of
| history, is invested in the tertiary and quaternary sectors of
| the economy, and trusts claims that the technology industry
| makes about itself. Anytime I see a litany of "in 10 years this
| is gonna be really important" I really just hear "right now, me
| and my job are really important".
|
| The discussion has nothing to do with whether AI will or will
| not change society. I don't think anyone actually cares about
| this. The whole debate is really about who/what rules the
| world. The more powerful/risky AI is, the easier it is to
| imagine that "nerds shall rule the world".
| sanderjd wrote:
| I agree that the second question is way more interesting, and
| I'm glad there's a lot of ongoing discussion and debate about
| it. And you have some insightful thoughts on it here.
|
| But I disagree with you that this is clearly what the NYT
| article is about. There is a significant focus on the "industry
| leaders" who have been most visible in - suddenly! - pushing
| for regulation. And that's why people are reasonably pointing
| out that this looks a hell of a lot like a classic attempt by
| incumbents to turn the regulatory system into a competitive
| advantage.
|
| If Sam Altman were out there saying "we went too far with
| gpt-4, we need to put a regulatory ceiling at the gpt-3 level"
| or "even though we have built totally closed proprietary
| models, regulation should encourage open models instead". But
| what all the current incumbents with successful products are
| actually arguing for is just to make their models legal but any
| competitive upstarts illegal. Convenient!
| rockemsockem wrote:
| Cite where it is being said that these companies are arguing
| "to make their models legal, but any competitive upstarts
| illegal". As far as I know nothing of the sort has been
| proposed. You may think this is obvious, but it is far from
| it.
| sanderjd wrote:
| That's what the "AI pause" proposed. But the main thing is:
| they could shut down their _current_ technology themselves,
| so what they are arguing for must be regulation of _future_
| technology. I think this has been pretty clear in the
| congressional hearings for instance.
| rockemsockem wrote:
| Right. Altman didn't sign the AI pause though.
|
| It is clear in the congressional hearings, but people
| didn't watch them, they seem to have skimmed article
| titles and made up their own narrative.
|
| EDIT:
|
| Which, to my point, means that "these companies" are not
| calling for "competitive upstarts" to be regulated. They
| are calling for future very large models, which they
| themselves are currently the most likely to train due to
| the enormous computational cost, to be regulated. Which
| is completely contradictory to what you were saying.
| AbrahamParangi wrote:
| So the idea is that the risk is so great we need to regulate
| software and math and GPUs- but not so great that you need to
| stop working on it? These companies would be much more credible
| (that this wasn't just a totally transparent ploy to close the
| market) if they at least put their money where their mouth is and
| stopped working on AI.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| I think that some of the signatories don't want regulation,
| they just want serious research into AI alignment.
| hit8run wrote:
| Well AI is here. We need to live with it. Change our economic
| systems to a socialist approach.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| AI may be here (purely depends on definition so not worth
| debating) but the superintelligent AGI that they are scared of
| clearly isn't here yet.
| hit8run wrote:
| I get what you're saying. Its day will come. Study human
| history. If we can build it - we will build it.
| b3nji wrote:
| Nonsense, the industry giants are just trying to scare the law
| makers to license the technology. Effectively, cutting out
| everyone else.
|
| Remember the Google note circulating saying "they have no moat",
| this is their moat. They have to protect their investment, we
| don't want people running this willy nilly for next to no cost on
| their own devices, God forbid!
| sanderjd wrote:
| I would definitely find it more credible if the most capable
| models that are safe to grandfather in to being unregulated
| didn't just happen to be the already successful products from
| all the people leading these safety efforts. It also just
| happens to be the case that making proprietary models - like
| the current incumbents make - is the only safe way to do it.
| arisAlexis wrote:
| All academia and researchers say X. Random redditor/HN lurker
| declares nonesense I know better! This is how we should bet our
| future.
| aceon48 wrote:
| That moat document was published by a single software engineer,
| not some exec or product leader.
|
| Humans dont really grasp exponential improvements. You wont
| have much time to regulate something that is improving
| exponentially.
| [deleted]
| jvanderbot wrote:
| Single software engineers writing influential papers is often
| enough how a exec or product leader draws conclusions, I
| expect. It worked that way in everywhere I've worked.
| aero-deck wrote:
| It doesn't matter who wrote it, it got picked up, had a good
| argument and affected market opinion. The execs now need to
| respond to it.
|
| Humans also don't grasp that things can improve exponentially
| until they stop improving exponentially. This belief that AGI
| is just over the hill is sugar-water for extracting more
| hours from developers.
|
| The nuclear bomb was also supposed to change everything. But
| in the end nothing changed, we just got more of the same.
| kalkin wrote:
| "nuclear weapons are no big deal actually" is just a wild
| place to get as a result of arguing against AI risk.
| Although I guess Eliezer Yudkowsky would agree! (On grounds
| that nukes won't kill literally everyone while AI will, but
| still.)
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| Nuclear weapons are uniquely good. Turns out you have to
| put guns to the collective temples of humanity for them
| to realize that pulling the trigger is a bad idea.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| Past performance is no guarantee of future results
| pixl97 wrote:
| hell, the biggest risk with nukes is not that we decide
| to pull the trigger, but that we make a mistake that
| causes us to pull the trigger.
| olddustytrail wrote:
| Please Google "Blackadder how did the war start video"
| and watch.
| api wrote:
| It's too early to say definitively but it's possible that
| the atomic bomb dramatically reduced the number of people
| killed in war by making great power conflicts too damaging
| to undertake:
|
| https://kagi.com/proxy/battle_deaths_chart.png?c=qmSKsRSwhg
| A...
|
| The USA and USSR would almost certainly have fought a
| conventional WWIII without the bomb. Can you imagine the
| casualty rates for that...
| aero-deck wrote:
| cool - so AI is gonna dramatically reduce the number of
| emails that get misunderstood... still gonna still be
| sending those emails tho.
| TheCaptain4815 wrote:
| I'd actually guess those casualties would be quite less
| than WW2. As tech advanced, more sophisticated targeting
| systems also advanced. No need to waste shells and
| missiles on civilian buildings, plus food and healthcare
| tech would continue to advance.
|
| Meanwhile, a single nuclear bomb hitting a major city
| could cause more casualties' than all American deaths in
| ww2 (400k).
| snickerbockers wrote:
| That's really only true for the Americans, the Russians
| still don't seem to care about limiting collateral damage
| and undoubtedly the Americans wouldn't either if their
| cities were getting carpet bombed by soviet aircraft.
| wrycoder wrote:
| So far.
| munificent wrote:
| _> The nuclear bomb was also supposed to change everything.
| But in the end nothing changed, we just got more of the
| same._
|
| It is hard for me to imagine a statement more out of touch
| with history than this. All geopolitical history from WWII
| forward is profoundly affected by the development of the
| bomb.
|
| I don't even know where to begin to argue against this. Off
| the top of my head:
|
| 1. What would have happened between Japan and the US in
| WWII without Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
|
| 2. Would the USSR have fallen without the financial drain
| of the nuclear arms race?
|
| 3. Would Isreal still exist if it didn't have nuclear
| weapons?
|
| 4. If neither the US nor Russia had nuclear weapons, how
| many proxy wars would have been avoided in favor of direct
| conflict?
|
| The whole trajectory of history would be different if we'd
| never split the atom.
| aero-deck wrote:
| The whole trajectory of history would have been different
| if a butterfly didn't flap it's wings.
|
| The bomb had effects, but it didn't change anything. We
| still go to war, eat, sleep and get afraid about things
| we can't control.
|
| For a moment, stop thinking about whether bombs, AI or
| the printing press do or do not affect history. Ask
| yourself what the motivations are for thinking that they
| do?
| munificent wrote:
| _> We still go to war, eat, sleep and get afraid about
| things we can 't control._
|
| If that is your criteria, then nothing has ever changed
| anything.
| aero-deck wrote:
| you're ignoring religion.
| munificent wrote:
| Before religion: We still go to war, eat, sleep and get
| afraid about things we can't control.
|
| After religion: We still go to war, eat, sleep and get
| afraid about things we can't control.
|
| So, no change.
| NumberWangMan wrote:
| Not to mention how close the USA and Soviet Union were to
| a nuclear exchange: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_So
| viet_nuclear_false_alar...
| nico wrote:
| > scare the law makers to license the technology
|
| You mean scare the public so they can do business with the
| lawmakers without people asking too many questions
| layer8 wrote:
| At least now if it turns out they are right they can't claim
| anymore that they didn't know.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| Imagine if the weights for GPT 4 leaked. It just has to happen
| _one time_ and then once the torrent magnet link is circulated
| widely it's all over... for OpenAI.
|
| This is what they're terrified of. They've invested near a
| billion dollars and need billions in revenue to enrich their
| shareholders.
|
| But if the data leaks? They can't stop random companies or
| moneyed individuals running the models on their own kit.
|
| My prediction is that there will be copyright enforcement
| mandated by law in all GPUs. If you upload weights from the big
| AI companies then the driver will block it and phone home. Or
| report you to the authorities for violations of corporate
| profits... err... "AI Safety".
|
| I guarantee something like this will happen within months
| because the clock is ticking.
|
| It takes just one employee to deliberately or accidentally leak
| the weights...
| kalkin wrote:
| This could be Google's motivation (although note that Google is
| not actually the market leader right now) but the risk could
| still be real. Most of the signatories are academics, for one
| thing, including two who won Turing awards for ML work and
| another who is the co-author of the standard AI textbook (at
| least when I was in school).
|
| You can be cynical about corporate motives and still worried. I
| personally am worried about AI partly because I am very cynical
| about how corporations will use it, and I don't really want my
| atoms to be ground up to add storage bits for the number that
| once represented Microsoft's market cap or whatever.
|
| But even cynicism doesn't seem to me to give much reason to
| worry about regulation of "next to no cost" open source models,
| though. There's only any chance of regulation being practical
| if models stay very expensive to make, requiring specialized
| hardware with a supply chain chokepoint. If personal devices do
| catch up to the state of the art, then for better or worse
| regulation is not going to prevent people from using them.
| hammock wrote:
| >Most of the signatories are academics, for one thing
|
| Serious question, who funds their research? And do any of
| them ever plan to work or consult in industry?
|
| My econ professor was an "academic" and drew a modest salary
| while he made millions at the same time providing expert
| testimony for giant monopolies in antitrust disputes
| anon7725 wrote:
| > Serious question, who funds their research? And do any of
| them ever plan to work or consult in industry?
|
| Many of the academics at the top of this list are quite
| wealthy from direct employment, investing and consulting
| for big tech and venture-funded startups.
| holmesworcester wrote:
| That's a good question, but at least some of the academics
| on this list are independent. Bruce Schneier, for example.
| moffkalast wrote:
| So some are naive and the rest are self interested?
| holmesworcester wrote:
| > _But even cynicism doesn 't seem to me to give much reason
| to worry about regulation of "next to no cost" open source
| models, though. There's only any chance of regulation being
| practical if models stay very expensive to make, requiring
| specialized hardware with a supply chain chokepoint. If
| personal devices do catch up to the state of the art, then
| for better or worse regulation is not going to prevent people
| from using them._
|
| This is a really good point. I wonder if some of the
| antipathy to the joint statement is coming from people who
| are worried about open source models or small startups being
| interfered with by the regulations the statement calls for.
|
| I agree with you that this cat is out of the bag and
| regulation of the tech we're seeing now is super unlikely.
|
| We might see regulations for startups and individuals on
| explicitly exploring some class of self-improving approach
| that experts widely agree are dangerous, but there's no way
| we'll see broad bans on messing with open source AI/ML tools
| in the US at least. That fight is very winnable.
| sangnoir wrote:
| > I personally am worried about AI partly because I am very
| cynical about how corporations will use it
|
| This is the more realistic danger: I don't know if
| corporations are intentionally "controlling the narrative" by
| spewing unreasonable fears to distract from the actual
| dangers: AI + Capitalism + big tech/MNC + current tax regime
| = fewer white- & blue-collar jobs + increased concentration
| of wealth and a lower tax base for governments.
|
| Having a few companies as AI gatekeepers will be terrible for
| society.
| jrockway wrote:
| > I don't really want my atoms to be ground up to add storage
| bits
|
| My understanding is that the AI needs iron from our blood to
| make paperclips. So you don't have to worry about this one.
| logicchains wrote:
| [flagged]
| AlexandrB wrote:
| This reeks of marketing and a push for early regulatory capture.
| We already know how Sam Altman thinks AI risk should be mitigated
| - namely by giving OpenAI more market power. If the risk were
| real, these folks would be asking the US government to
| nationalize their companies or bring them under the same kind of
| control as nukes and related technologies. Instead we get some
| nonsense about licensing.
| scrum-treats wrote:
| > This reeks of marketing and a push for early regulatory
| capture. We already know how Sam Altman thinks AI risk should
| be mitigated - namely by giving OpenAI more market power.
|
| This really is the crux of the issue isn't it? All this
| pushback for the first petition, because "Elon Musk," but now
| GPT wonder Sam Altman "testifies" that he has "no monetary
| interest in OpenAI" and quickly follows up his proclamation
| with a second "Statement on AI Risks." Oh, and let's not
| forget, "buy my crypto-coin"!
|
| But Elon Musk... Ehh.... Looking like LOTR out here with "my
| precious" AGI on the brain.
|
| Not to downplay the very serious risk at all. Simply echoing
| the sentiment that we would do well to stay objective and
| skeptical of ALL these AI leaders pushing new AI doctrine. At
| this stage, it's a policy push and power grab.
| hayst4ck wrote:
| Seth McFarland wrote a pretty great piece on Star Trek
| replicators and their relationship to the structure of society.
|
| The question it answers is "does the replicator allow for Star
| Trek's utopia, or does Star Trek's utopia allow for the
| replicator?"
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/CuratedTumblr/comments/13tpq18/hear...
|
| It is very thought provoking, and _very_ relevant.
| yadaeno wrote:
| Ive never seen Star Trek, but lets say you had an infinite
| food machine. The machine would have limited throughput, and
| it would require resources to distribute the food.
|
| These are both problems that capitalism solves in a fair and
| efficient way. I really don't see how the "capitalism bad" is
| a satisfying conclusion to draw. The fact that we would use
| capitalism to distribute the resources is not an indictment
| of our social values, since capitalism is still the most
| efficient solution even in the toy example.
| [deleted]
| hayst4ck wrote:
| If you are any kind of nerd I recommend watching it. It
| shows an optimistic view of the future. In many ways it's
| the anti-cyberpunk. Steve Jobs famously said "give me star
| trek" when telling his engineers what he wanted from
| iPhones. Star Trek has had a deep influence on many
| engineers and on science fiction.
|
| When people talk about Star Trek, they are referring mainly
| to "Star Trek: The Next Generation."
|
| "The Inner Light" is a highly regarded episode. "The
| Measure of a Man" is a high quality philosophical episode.
|
| Given you haven't seen it, your criticism of McFarlane
| doesn't make any sense. You are trying to impart a
| practical analysis of a philosophical question and in the
| context of Star Trek, I think it denies what Star Trek asks
| you to imagine.
| Jupe wrote:
| Thanks for sharing. This deserves a submission of it's own.
| revelio wrote:
| It doesn't answer that, it can't because the replicator is
| fictional. McFarland just says he wrote an episode in which
| his answer is that replicators need communism, and then
| claims that you can't have a replicator in a capitalist
| system because evil conservatives, capitalists and conspiracy
| theorists would make strawman arguments against it.
|
| Where is the thought provoking idea here? It's just an excuse
| to attack his imagined enemies. Indeed he dunks on conspiracy
| theorists whilst being one himself. In McFarland's world
| there would be a global conspiracy to suppress replicator
| technology, but it's a conspiracy of conspiracy theorists.
|
| There's plenty of interesting analysis you could do on the
| concept of a replicator, but a Twitter thread like that isn't
| it. Really the argument is kind of nonsensical on its face
| because it assumes replicators would have a cost of zero to
| run or develop. In reality capitalist societies already
| invented various kinds of pseudo-replicators with computers
| being an obvious example, but this tech was ignored or
| suppressed by communist societies.
| hayst4ck wrote:
| I think you are caught up on the word communism.
|
| Communism as it exists today results in
| authoritarianism/fascism, I think we can agree on that. The
| desired end state of communism (high resource distribution)
| is being commingled with the end state of communism:
| fascism (an obedient society with a clear dominance
| hierarchy).
|
| You use communism in some parts of your post to mean a high
| resource distribution society, but you use communism in
| other parts of your post to mean high oppression societies.
| You identify communism by the resource distribution, but
| critcize it not based on the resource distribution but by
| what it turns into: authortarianism.
|
| What you're doing is like identifying something as a
| democracy by looking at voting, but criticizing it by it's
| end state which is oligarchy.
|
| It takes effort to prevent democracy from turning into
| oligarchy, in the same way it takes effort to prevent
| communism from turning into authoritarianism.
|
| Words are indirect references to ideas and the ideas you
| are referencing changes throughout your post. I am not
| trying to accuse you of bad faith, so much as I am trying
| to get you to see that you are not being philosophically
| rigorous in your analysis and therefore you are not
| convincing because we aren't using the same words to
| represent the same ideas.
|
| You are using the word communism to import the idea of
| authortarianism and shut down the analysis without actually
| addressing the core criticism McFarland was making against
| capitalist societies.
|
| Capitalism is an ideology of "me," and if I had a
| replicator, I would use it to replicate gold, not food for
| all the starving people in Africa. I would use it to
| replicate enough nuclear bombs to destroy the world, so if
| someone took it from me, I could end all life on the planet
| ensuring that only I can use it. So did scarcity end
| despite having a device that can end scarcity? No. Because
| we are in a "me" focused stage of humanity rather than an
| "us" focused stage of humanity so I used it to elevate my
| own position rather than to benefit all mankind.
|
| Star Trek promotes a future of "us" and that is why it's so
| attractive. McFarland was saying that "us" has to come
| before the end of scarcity, and I agree with his critique.
| adriand wrote:
| There are other, more charitable interpretations. For example:
|
| 1. Those who are part of major corporations are concerned about
| the race dynamic that is unfolding (which in many respects was
| kicked off or at least accelerated by Microsoft's decision to
| put a chatbot in Bing), extrapolating out to where that takes
| us, and asking for an off ramp. Shepherding the industry in a
| safe direction is a collective organization problem, which is
| better suited for government than corporations with mandates to
| be competitive.
|
| 2. Those who are directly participating in AI development may
| feel that they are doing so responsibly, but do not believe
| that others are as well and/or are concerned about unregulated
| proliferation.
|
| 3. Those who are directly participating in AI development may
| understand that although they are doing their best to be
| responsible, they would benefit from more eyes on the problem
| and more shared resources dedicated to safety research, etc.
| chefandy wrote:
| I'm eternally skeptical of the tech business, but I think
| you're jumping to conclusions, here. I'm on a first-name basis
| with several people near the top of this list. They are some of
| the smartest, savviest, most thoughtful, and most principled
| tech policy experts I've met. These folks default to skepticism
| of the tech business, champion open data, are deeply familiar
| with the risks of regulatory capture, and don't sign their name
| to any ol' open letter, especially if including their
| organizational affiliations. If this is a marketing ploy, that
| must have been a monster because even if they were walking
| around handing out checks for 25k I doubt they'd have gotten a
| good chunk of these folks.
| nopinsight wrote:
| Here's why AI risks are real, even if our most advanced AI is
| merely a 'language' model:
|
| Language can represent thoughts and some world models. There
| is strong evidence that LLMs contain some representation of
| world models it learned from text. Moreover, LLM is already a
| misnomer; latest versions are multimodal. Current versions
| can be used to build agents with limited autonomy. Future
| versions of LLMs are most likely capable of more
| independence.
|
| Even dumb viruses have caused catastrophic harm. Why? It's
| capable of rapid self replication in a massive number of
| existing vessels. You add in some intelligence, vast store of
| knowledge, huge bandwidth, and some aid by malicious human
| actors, what could such a group of future autonomous agents
| do?
|
| More on risks of "doom" by a top researcher on AI risk here:
| https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xWMqsvHapP3nwdSW8/my-
| views-o...
| skybrian wrote:
| A lot of things are called "world models" that I would
| consider just "models" so it depends on what you mean by
| that. But what do you consider to be strong evidence? The
| Othello paper isn't what I'd call strong evidence.
| gjm11 wrote:
| I agree that the Othello paper isn't, and couldn't be,
| strong evidence about what sort of model of the world (if
| any) something like GPT-4 has. However, I think it _is_
| (importantly) pretty much a refutation of all claims
| along the lines of "these systems learn only from text,
| therefore they cannot have anything in them that actually
| models anything other than text", since their model
| learned only from text and seems to have developed
| something very much like a model of the state of the
| game.
|
| Again, it doesn't say much about _how good_ a model any
| given system might have. The world is much more
| complicated than an Othello board. GPT-4 is much bigger
| than their transformer model. Everything they found is
| consistent with anything from "as it happens GPT-4 has
| no world model at all" through to "GPT-4 has a rich model
| of the world, fully comparable to ours". (I would bet
| heavily on the truth being somewhere in between, not that
| that says very much.)
| marricks wrote:
| They didn't become such a wealthy group by letting
| competition foster. I have no doubt they believe they could
| be doing the right thing but I also have no doubt they don't
| want other people making the rules.
|
| Truth be told, who else really does have a seat at the table
| for dictating such massive societal change? Do you think the
| copy editor union gets to sit down and say "I'd rather not
| have my lunch eaten, I need to pay my rent. Let's pause AI
| usage in text for 10 years."
|
| These competitors banded together and put out a statement to
| get ahead of any one else doing the same thing.
| FuckButtons wrote:
| Not all of them are wealthy, a significant number are
| academics.
| [deleted]
| runarberg wrote:
| That doesn't erase the need of cynicism. Many people in
| academia come from industry, have friends in industry, or
| other stakes. They might have been persuaded by the
| rhetoric of stakeholders within industry (you saw this
| early in the climate debate; and still do), and they
| might also be hoping to get a job in the industry later
| on. There is also a fair amount of group think within
| academia, so if a prominent individual inside academia
| believes the lies of industry, chances are the majority
| within the department does.
| chefandy wrote:
| The people I know on the list are academics and do not seem
| to be any wealthier than other academics I know. I'm quite
| certain the private industry signatories are going to
| entirely advocate for their interest just as they do in any
| other policy discussion.
| marricks wrote:
| Got it, thank you for the clarification!
| lannisterstark wrote:
| >They are some of the smartest, savviest, most thoughtful,
| and most principled tech policy experts I've met.
|
| with all due respect, that's just <Your> POV of them or how
| they chose to present themselves to you.
|
| They could all be narcissists for all we know. Further, One
| person's opinion, namely yours, doesn't exempt them from
| criticism and rushing to be among the first in what's
| arguably the new gold rush.
| huevosabio wrote:
| I think it's the combination of two things.
|
| First, there are actual worries by a good chunk of the
| researchers. From runaway-paperclip AGIs to simply unbounded
| disinformation, I think there are a lot of scenarios that
| disinterested researchers and engineers worry about.
|
| Second, the captains of industry are taking note of those
| worries and making sure they get some regulatory moat. I
| think the Google memo about moat hits it right on the nail.
| The techniques and methods to build these systems are all out
| on the open, the challenges are really the data, compute, and
| the infrastructure to put it all together. But post training,
| the models are suddenly very easy to finetune and deploy.
|
| AI Risk worry comes as an opportunity for the leaders of
| these companies. They can use this sentiment and the general
| distrust for tech to build themselves a regulatory moat.
| fds98324jhk wrote:
| They don't want 25k they want jobs in the next presidential
| administration
| chefandy wrote:
| > They don't want 25k they want jobs in the next
| presidential administration
|
| Academics shilling for OpenAI would get them jobs in the
| next presidential administration?
| haldujai wrote:
| Having their names on something so public is definitely
| an incentive for prestige and academic promotion.
|
| Shilling for OpenAI & co is also not a bad way to get
| funding support.
|
| I'm not accusing any non-affiliated academic listed of
| doing this but let's not pretend there aren't potentially
| perverse incentives influencing the decisions of
| academics, with respects to this specific letter and in
| general.
|
| To help dissuade (healthy) skepticism it would be nice to
| see disclosure statements for these academics, at first
| glance many appear to have conflicts.
| chefandy wrote:
| Could you be more specific about the conflicts you've
| uncovered?
| haldujai wrote:
| It's unequivocal that academics may have conflicts (in
| general), that's why disclosures are required for
| publications.
|
| I'm not uncovering anything, several of the academic
| signatories list affiliations with OpenAI, Google,
| Anthropic, Stability, MILA and Vector resulting in a
| financial conflict.
|
| Note that conflict does not mean shill, but in academia
| it should be disclosed. To allay some concerns a standard
| disclosure form would be helpful (i.e. do you receive
| funding support or have financial interest in a
| corporation pursuing AI commercialization).
| chefandy wrote:
| I'm not really interested in doing a research project on
| the signatories to investigate your claim, and talking
| about things like this without specifics seems dubiously
| useful, so I don't really think there's anything more to
| discuss.
| haldujai wrote:
| Huh, you don't have to do any research.
|
| Go to: https://www.safe.ai/statement-on-ai-
| risk#signatories and uncheck notable figures.
|
| Several of the names at the top list a corporate
| affiliation.
|
| If you want me to pick specific ones with obvious
| conflicts (chosen at a glance): Geoffrey Hinton, Ilya
| Sutskever, Ian Goodfellow, Shane Legg, Samuel Bowman and
| Roger Grosse are representative examples based on self-
| disclosed affiliations (no research required).
| chefandy wrote:
| Oh so you're saying the ones there with conflicts listed.
| That's only like 1/3 of the list.
| haldujai wrote:
| Yes, as I said "many" have obvious conflicts from listed
| affiliations so it would be nice to have a
| positive/negative disclosure from the rest.
| fmap wrote:
| This particular statement really doesn't seem like a
| marketing ploy. It is difficult to disagree with the
| potential political and societal impacts of large language
| models as outlined here: https://www.safe.ai/ai-risk
|
| These are, for the most part, obvious applications of a
| technology that exists right now but is not widely available
| _yet_.
|
| The problem with every discussion around this issue is that
| there are other statements on "the existential risk of AI"
| out there that _are_ either marketing ploys or science
| fiction. It doesn 't help that some of the proposed
| "solutions" _are_ clear attempts at regulatory capture.
|
| This muddles the waters enough that it's difficult to have a
| productive discussion on how we could mitigate the real risk
| of, e.g., AI generated disinformation campaigns.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| As I mentioned in another comment, the listed risks are
| also notable because they largely omit _economic_ risk.
| Something what will be especially acutely felt by those
| being laid off in favor of AI substitutes. I would argue
| that 30% unemployment is at least as much of a risk to the
| stability of society as AI generated misinformation.
|
| If one were _particularly_ cynical, one could say that this
| is an attempt to frame AI risk in a manner that still
| allows AI companies to capture all the economic benefits of
| AI technology without consideration for those displaced by
| AI.
| nuancebydefault wrote:
| I believe the solution to said socio economic problem is
| rather simple.
|
| People are being replaced by robots and AI because the
| latter are cheaper. That's the market force.
|
| Cheaper means that more value us created. As a whole,
| people get more service for doing less work.
|
| The problem is that the money or value saved trickles up
| to the rich.
|
| The only solutions can be, regulations,
|
| - do not tax anymore based on income from doing actual
| work.
|
| - tax automated systems on their added value.
|
| - use the tax generated capital to provide for a basic
| income for everybody.
|
| In that way, the generated value goes to people who lost
| their jobs and to the working class as well.
| worik wrote:
| > It is difficult to disagree with the potential political
| and societal impacts of large language models as outlined
| here: https://www.safe.ai/ai-risk
|
| I disagree
|
| That list is a list of the dangers of power
|
| Many of these dangers: misinformation, killer robots,
| people on this list have been actively working on
|
| Rank hypocrisy
|
| And people projecting their own dark personalities onto a
| neutral technology
|
| Yes there are dangers in unbridled private power. They are
| not dangers unique to AI.
| chefandy wrote:
| > The problem with every discussion around this issue is
| that there are other statements on
|
| Sure, but we're not talking about those other ones.
| Dismissing good faith initiatives as marketing ploys
| because there are bad faith initiatives is functionally no
| different than just shrugging and walking away.
|
| Of course OpenAI et. al. will try to influence the good
| faith discussions: that's a great reason to champion the
| ones with a bunch of good faith actors who stand a chance
| of holding the industry and policy makers to task. Waiting
| around for some group of experts that has enough clout to
| do something, but by policy excludes the industry itself
| and starry-eyed shithead _" journalists"_ trying to ride
| the wave of the next big thing will yield nothing. This is
| a great example of perfect being the enemy of good.
| fmap wrote:
| I agree completely. I was just speculating on why there
| is so much discussion about marketing ploys in this
| comment section.
| chefandy wrote:
| Ah, sure. That makes sense.
|
| There's definitely a lot of marketing bullshit out there
| in the form of legit discussion. Unfortunately, this
| technology likely means there will be an incalculable
| increase in the amount of bullshit out there. Blerg.
| lumb63 wrote:
| Aside from emergent behavior, are any of the items on that
| list unique to AI? They sure don't seem it; they're either
| broadly applicable to a number of already-available
| technologies, or to any entity in charge or providing
| advice or making decisions. I dare say even emergent
| behavior falls under this as well, since people can develop
| their own new motives that others don't understand. Their
| advisory doesn't seem to amount to much more than "bad
| people can do bad things", except now "people" is "AI".
| revelio wrote:
| _> It is difficult to disagree with the potential political
| and societal impacts of large language models as outlined
| here_
|
| Is it? Unless you mean something mundane like "there will
| be impact", the list of risks they're proposing are
| subjective and debatable at best, irritatingly naive at
| worst. Their list of risks are:
|
| 1. Weaponization. Did we forget about Ukraine already?
| Answer: Weapons are needed. Why is this AI risk and not
| computer risk anyway?
|
| 2. Misinformation. Already a catastrophic problem just from
| journalists and academics. Most of the reporting on
| misinformation is itself misinformation. Look at the Durham
| report for an example, or anything that happened during
| COVID, or the long history of failed predictions that were
| presented to the public as certain. Answer: Not an AI risk,
| a human risk.
|
| 3. People might click on things that don't "improve their
| well being". Answer: how we choose to waste our free time
| on YouTube is not your concern, and you being in charge
| wouldn't improve our wellbeing anyway.
|
| 4. Technology might make us fat, like in WALL-E. Answer: it
| already happened, not having to break rocks with bigger
| rocks all day is nice, this is not an AI risk.
|
| 5. "Highly competent systems could give small groups of
| people a tremendous amount of power, leading to a lock-in
| of oppressive systems". Answer: already happens, just look
| at how much censorship big tech engages in these days. AI
| might make this more effective, but if that's their beef
| they should be campaigning against Google and Facebook.
|
| 6. Sudden emergent skills might take people by surprise.
| Answer: read the paper that shows the idea of emergent
| skills is AI researchers fooling themselves.
|
| 7. "It may be more efficient to gain human approval through
| deception than to earn human approval legitimately". No
| shit Sherlock, welcome to Earth. This is why labelling
| anyone who expresses skepticism about anything as a
| Denier(tm) is a bad idea! Answer: not an AI risk. If they
| want to promote critical thinking there are lots of ways to
| do that unrelated to AI.
|
| 8. Machines smarter than us might try to take over the
| world. Proof by Vladimir Putin is provided, except that it
| makes no sense because he's arguing that AI will be a tool
| that lets humans take over the world and this point is
| about the opposite. Answer: people with very high IQs have
| been around for a long time and as of yet have not proven
| able to take over the world or even especially interested
| in doing so.
|
| None of the risks they present is compelling to me
| personally, and I'm sure that's true of plenty of other
| people as well. Fix the human generated misinformation
| campaigns _first_ , then worry about hypothetical non-
| existing AI generated campaigns.
| cj wrote:
| I appreciate your perspective, but the thing that is
| missing is the speed at which AI has evolved, seemingly
| overnight.
|
| With crypto, self-driving cars, computers, the internet
| or just about any other technology, development and
| distribution happened over decades.
|
| With AI, there's a risk that the pace of change and
| adoption could be too fast to be able to respond or adapt
| at a societal level.
|
| The rebuttals to each of the issues in your comment are
| valid, but most (all?) of the counter examples are ones
| that took a long time to occur, which provided ample time
| for people to prepare and adapt. E.g. "technology making
| us fat" happened over multiple decades, not over the span
| of a few months.
|
| Either way, I think it's good to see people proactive
| about managing risk of new technologies. Governments and
| businesses are usually terrible at fixing problems that
| haven't manifested yet... so it's great to see some
| people sounding the alarms before any damage is done.
|
| Note: I personally think there's a high chance AI is
| extremely overhyped and that none of this will matter in
| a few years. But even so, I'd rather see organizations
| being proactive with risk management rather than reacting
| too the problem when it's too late.
| revelio wrote:
| It may seem overnight if you weren't following it, but
| I've followed AI progress for a long time now. I was
| reading the Facebook bAbI test paper in 2015:
|
| https://research.facebook.com/downloads/babi/
|
| There's been a lot of progress since then, but it's also
| nearly 10 years later. Progress isn't actually instant or
| overnight. It's just that OpenAI spent a _ton_ of money
| to scale it up then stuck an accessible chat interface on
| top of tech that was previously being mostly ignored.
| nico wrote:
| Maybe these people have good intentions and are just being
| naive
|
| They might not be getting paid, but that doesn't mean they
| are not being influenced
|
| AI at this point is pretty much completely open, all the
| papers, math and science behind it are public
|
| Soon, people will have advanced AI running locally on their
| phones and watches
|
| So unless they scrub the Internet, start censoring this
| stuff, and pretty much ban computers, there is absolutely no
| way to stop AI nor any potentially bad actors from using it
|
| The biggest issues that we should be addressing regarding AI
| are the potential jobs losses and increased inequality at
| local and global scale
|
| But of course, the people who usually make these decisions
| are the ones that benefit the most from inequality, so
| pydry wrote:
| >Maybe these people have good intentions and are just being
| naive
|
| Ive noticed a lot of good people take awful political
| positions this way.
|
| Usually they trust the wrong person - e.g. by falling
| victim to the just world fallacy ("X is a big deal in our
| world and X wouldn't be where they are if they werent a
| decent person. X must have a point.")
| paulddraper wrote:
| You don't have to be a mustache-twirling villain to have
| the same effect.
| nopinsight wrote:
| It's worth noting also that many academics who signed the
| statement may face adverse issues like reputational risk as
| well as funding cut to their research programs if AI safety
| becomes an official policy.
|
| For a large number of them, these risks are worth far more
| than any possible gain from signing it.
|
| When a large number of smart, reputable people, including
| many with expert knowledge and little or negative incentives
| to act dishonestly, put their names down like this, one
| should pay attention.
|
| Added:
|
| Paul Christiano, a brilliant theoretical CS researcher who
| switched to AI Alignment several years ago, put the risks of
| "doom" for humanity at 46%.
|
| https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xWMqsvHapP3nwdSW8/my-
| views-o...
| mcguire wrote:
| On the contrary, I suspect "How do we prevent our AIs from
| killing everyone?" will be a major research question with a
| great deal of funding involved. Plus, no one seems to be
| suggesting things like the medical ethics field or
| institutional review boards, which might have deleterious
| impacts on their work.
| haldujai wrote:
| Subtract OpenAI, Google, StabilityAI and Anthropic
| affiliated researchers (who have a lot to gain) and not
| many academic signatories are left.
|
| Notably missing representation from the Stanford NLP (edit:
| I missed that Diyi Yang is a signatory on first read) and
| NYU groups who's perspective I'd also be interested in
| hearing.
|
| Not committing one way or another regarding the intent with
| this but it's not as diverse an academic crowd as the long
| list may suggest and for a lot of these names there are
| incentives to act dishonestly (not claiming that they are).
| chefandy wrote:
| I just took that list and separated everyone that had
| _any_ commercial tie listed, regardless of the company.
| 35 did and 63 did not.
|
| > "Subtract OpenAI, Google, StabilityAI and Anthropic
| affiliated researchers (who have a lot to gain) and not
| many academic signatories are left."
|
| You're putting a lot of effort into painting this list in
| a bad light without any specific criticism or evidence of
| malfeasance. Frankly, it sounds like FUD to me.
| chefandy wrote:
| With corporate conflicts (that I recognized the names
| of):
|
| Yoshua Bengio: Professor of Computer Science, U. Montreal
| / Mila, Victoria Krakovna: Research Scientist, Google
| DeepMind, Mary Phuong: Research Scientist, Google
| DeepMind, Daniela Amodei: President, Anthropic, Samuel R.
| Bowman: Associate Professor of Computer Science, NYU and
| Anthropic, Helen King: Senior Director of Responsibility
| & Strategic Advisor to Research, Google DeepMind,
| Mustafa Suleyman: CEO, Inflection AI, Emad Mostaque: CEO,
| Stability AI, Ian Goodfellow: Principal Scientist, Google
| DeepMind, Kevin Scott: CTO, Microsoft, Eric Horvitz:
| Chief Scientific Officer, Microsoft, Mira Murati: CTO,
| OpenAI, James Manyika: SVP, Research, Technology &
| Society, Google-Alphabet, Demis Hassabis: CEO, Google
| DeepMind, Ilya Sutskever: Co-Founder and Chief Scientist,
| OpenAI, Sam Altman: CEO, OpenAI, Dario Amodei: CEO,
| Anthropic, Shane Legg: Chief AGI Scientist and Co-
| Founder, Google DeepMind, John Schulman: Co-Founder,
| OpenAI, Jaan Tallinn: Co-Founder of Skype, Adam D'Angelo:
| CEO, Quora, and board member, OpenAI, Simon Last:
| Cofounder & CTO, Notion, Dustin Moskovitz: Co-founder
| & CEO, Asana, Miles Brundage: Head of Policy
| Research, OpenAI, Allan Dafoe: AGI Strategy and
| Governance Team Lead, Google DeepMind, Jade Leung:
| Governance Lead, OpenAI, Jared Kaplan: Co-Founder,
| Anthropic, Chris Olah: Co-Founder, Anthropic, Ryota
| Kanai: CEO, Araya, Inc., Clare Lyle: Research Scientist,
| Google DeepMind, Marc Warner: CEO, Faculty, Noah Fiedel:
| Director, Research & Engineering, Google DeepMind,
| David Silver: Professor of Computer Science, Google
| DeepMind and UCL, Lila Ibrahim: COO, Google DeepMind,
| Marian Rogers Croak: VP Center for Responsible AI and
| Human Centered Technology, Google
|
| Without:
|
| Geoffrey Hinton: Emeritus Professor of Computer Science,
| University of Toronto, Dawn Song: Professor of Computer
| Science, UC Berkeley, Ya-Qin Zhang: Professor and Dean,
| AIR, Tsinghua University, Martin Hellman: Professor
| Emeritus of Electrical Engineering, Stanford, Yi Zeng:
| Professor and Director of Brain-inspired Cognitive AI
| Lab, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of
| Sciences, Xianyuan Zhan: Assistant Professor, Tsinghua
| University, Anca Dragan: Associate Professor of Computer
| Science, UC Berkeley, Bill McKibben: Schumann
| Distinguished Scholar, Middlebury College, Alan Robock:
| Distinguished Professor of Climate Science, Rutgers
| University, Angela Kane: Vice President, International
| Institute for Peace, Vienna; former UN High
| Representative for Disarmament Affairs, Audrey Tang:
| Minister of Digital Affairs and Chair of National
| Institute of Cyber Security, Stuart Russell: Professor of
| Computer Science, UC Berkeley, Andrew Barto: Professor
| Emeritus, University of Massachusetts, Jaime Fernandez
| Fisac: Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer
| Engineering, Princeton University, Diyi Yang: Assistant
| Professor, Stanford University, Gillian Hadfield:
| Professor, CIFAR AI Chair, University of Toronto, Vector
| Institute for AI, Laurence Tribe: University Professor
| Emeritus, Harvard University, Pattie Maes: Professor,
| Massachusetts Institute of Technology - Media Lab, Peter
| Norvig: Education Fellow, Stanford University, Atoosa
| Kasirzadeh: Assistant Professor, University of Edinburgh,
| Alan Turing Institute, Erik Brynjolfsson: Professor and
| Senior Fellow, Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI,
| Kersti Kaljulaid: Former President of the Republic of
| Estonia, David Haussler: Professor and Director of the
| Genomics Institute, UC Santa Cruz, Stephen Luby:
| Professor of Medicine (Infectious Diseases), Stanford
| University, Ju Li: Professor of Nuclear Science and
| Engineering and Professor of Materials Science and
| Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, David
| Chalmers: Professor of Philosophy, New York University,
| Daniel Dennett: Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, Tufts
| University, Peter Railton: Professor of Philosophy at
| University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Sheila McIlraith:
| Professor of Computer Science, University of Toronto, Lex
| Fridman: Research Scientist, MIT, Sharon Li: Assistant
| Professor of Computer Science, University of Wisconsin
| Madison, Phillip Isola: Associate Professor of Electrical
| Engineering and Computer Science, MIT, David Krueger:
| Assistant Professor of Computer Science, University of
| Cambridge, Jacob Steinhardt: Assistant Professor of
| Computer Science, UC Berkeley, Martin Rees: Professor of
| Physics, Cambridge University, He He: Assistant Professor
| of Computer Science and Data Science, New York
| University, David McAllester: Professor of Computer
| Science, TTIC, Vincent Conitzer: Professor of Computer
| Science, Carnegie Mellon University and University of
| Oxford, Bart Selman: Professor of Computer Science,
| Cornell University, Michael Wellman: Professor and Chair
| of Computer Science & Engineering, University of
| Michigan, Jinwoo Shin: KAIST Endowed Chair Professor,
| Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Dae-
| Shik Kim: Professor of Electrical Engineering, Korea
| Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST),
| Frank Hutter: Professor of Machine Learning, Head of
| ELLIS Unit, University of Freiburg, Scott Aaronson:
| Schlumberger Chair of Computer Science, University of
| Texas at Austin, Max Tegmark: Professor, MIT, Center for
| AI and Fundamental Interactions, Bruce Schneier:
| Lecturer, Harvard Kennedy School, Martha Minow:
| Professor, Harvard Law School, Gabriella Blum: Professor
| of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law, Harvard Law, Kevin
| Esvelt: Associate Professor of Biology, MIT, Edward
| Wittenstein: Executive Director, International Security
| Studies, Yale Jackson School of Global Affairs, Yale
| University, Karina Vold: Assistant Professor, University
| of Toronto, Victor Veitch: Assistant Professor of Data
| Science and Statistics, University of Chicago, Dylan
| Hadfield-Menell: Assistant Professor of Computer Science,
| MIT, Mengye Ren: Assistant Professor of Computer Science,
| New York University, Shiri Dori-Hacohen: Assistant
| Professor of Computer Science, University of Connecticut,
| Jess Whittlestone: Head of AI Policy, Centre for Long-
| Term Resilience, Sarah Kreps: John L. Wetherill Professor
| and Director of the Tech Policy Institute, Cornell
| University, Andrew Revkin: Director, Initiative on
| Communication & Sustainability, Columbia University -
| Climate School, Carl Robichaud: Program Officer (Nuclear
| Weapons), Longview Philanthropy, Leonid Chindelevitch:
| Lecturer in Infectious Disease Epidemiology, Imperial
| College London, Nicholas Dirks: President, The New York
| Academy of Sciences, Tim G. J. Rudner: Assistant
| Professor and Faculty Fellow, New York University, Jakob
| Foerster: Associate Professor of Engineering Science,
| University of Oxford, Michael Osborne: Professor of
| Machine Learning, University of Oxford, Marina Jirotka:
| Professor of Human Centred Computing, University of
| Oxford
| haldujai wrote:
| So the most "notable" AI scientists on this list have
| clear corporate conflicts. Some are more subtle:
|
| > Geoffrey Hinton: Emeritus Professor of Computer
| Science, University of Toronto,
|
| He's affiliated with Vector (as well as some of the other
| Canadians on this list) and was at Google until very
| recently (unsure if he retained equity which would
| require disclosure in academia).
|
| Hence my interest in disclosures as the conflicts are not
| always obvious.
| chefandy wrote:
| Ok, that's a person!
|
| How is saying that they should have disclosed a conflict
| that they did not disclose _not accusatory?_ If that 's
| the case, the accusation _is entirely justified_ and
| should be surfaced! The other signatories would certainly
| want to know if they were signing in good faith when
| others weren 't. This is what I need interns for.
| haldujai wrote:
| I think you're misunderstanding my point.
|
| I never said "they should have disclosed a conflict they
| did not disclose."
|
| Disclosures are _absent_ from this initiative, some
| signatories have self-identified their affiliation by
| their own volition and even for those it is not in the
| context of a conflict disclosure.
|
| There is no "signatories have no relevant disclosures"
| statement for those who did not for the omission to be
| malfeasance and pointing out the absence of a disclosure
| statement is not accusatory of the individuals, rather
| that the initiative is not transparent about potential
| conflicts.
|
| Once again, it is standard practice in academia to make a
| disclosure statement if lecturing or publishing. While it
| is not mandatory for initiatives calling for regulation
| it would be nice to have.
| haldujai wrote:
| I'm not painting anything, if a disclosure is needed to
| present a poster at a conference it's reasonable to want
| one when calling for regulation.
|
| Note my comments are non-accusatory and only call for
| more transparency.
| nopinsight wrote:
| Even if it's just Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton, and
| Stuart Russell, we'd probably agree the risks are not
| negligible. There are quite a few researchers from
| Stanford, UC Berkeley, MIT, Carnegie Mellon, Oxford,
| Cambirdge, Imperial College, Edinburg, Tsinghua, etc who
| signed as well. Many of whom do not work for those
| companies.
|
| We're talking about nuclear war level risks here. Even a
| 1% chance should definitely be addressed. As noted above,
| Paul Christiano who has worked on AI risk and thought
| about it for a long time put it at 46%.
| revelio wrote:
| Some of the academics who signed are either not doing AI
| research e.g climatologists, genomics, philosophy. Or
| they have Google connections that aren't disclosed. E.g.
| Peter Norvig is listed as Stanford University but ran
| Google Research for many years, McIlrath is associated
| with the Vector Institute which is funded by Google.
| [deleted]
| edgyquant wrote:
| Id like to see the equation that led to this 46%. Even
| long time researchers can be overcome by grift
| haldujai wrote:
| > There are quite a few researchers from Stanford, UC
| Berkeley, MIT, Carnegie Mellon, Oxford, Cambirdge,
| Imperial College, Edinburg, Tsinghua, etc who signed as
| well.
|
| I know the Stanford researchers the most and the "biggest
| names" in LLMs from HAI and CRFM are absent. It would be
| useful to have their perspective as well.
|
| I'd throw MetaAI in the mix as well.
|
| Merely pointing out that healthy skepticism here is not
| entirely unwarranted.
|
| > We're talking about nuclear war level risks here.
|
| Are we? This seems a bit dramatic for LLMs.
| ben_w wrote:
| > > We're talking about nuclear war level risks here.
|
| > Are we? This seems a bit dramatic for LLMs.
|
| The signed statement isn't about just LLMs in much the
| same way that "animal" doesn't just mean "homo sapiens"
| haldujai wrote:
| I used LLM because the people shouting the loudest come
| from a LLM company which claimed their newest language
| model can be used to create bioweapons in their
| whitepaper.
|
| Semantics aside the recent interest in AI risk was
| clearly stimulated by LLMs and the camp that believes
| this is the path to AGI which may or may not be true
| depending who you ask.
| ben_w wrote:
| I can only imagine Eleizer Yudkowsky and Rob Miles
| looking on this conversation with a depressed scream and
| a facepalm respectively.
|
| They've both been loudly concerned about optimisers doing
| over-optimisation, and society having a Nash equilibrium
| where everyone's using them as hard as possible
| regardless of errors, since before it was cool.
| haldujai wrote:
| While true the ones doing media tours and speaking the
| most vocally in May 2023 are the LLM crowd.
|
| I don't think it's a mischaracterization to say OpenAI
| has sparked public debate on this topic.
| nopinsight wrote:
| LLM is already a misnomer. Latest versions are
| multimodal. Current versions can be used to build agents
| with limited autonomy. Future versions of LLMs are most
| likely capable of more independence.
|
| Even dumb viruses have caused catastrophic harm. Why?
| It's capable of rapid self replication in a massive
| number of existing vessels. You add in some intelligence,
| vast store of knowledge, huge bandwidth, and some aid by
| malicious human actors, what could such a group of future
| autonomous agents do?
|
| More on the risks of "doom":
| https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xWMqsvHapP3nwdSW8/my-
| views-o...
| CyrsBel wrote:
| This gets countered by running one (or more) of those
| same amazing autonomous agents locally for your own
| defense. Everyone's machine is about to get much more
| intelligent.
| haldujai wrote:
| I mean a small group of malicious humans can already
| bioengineer a deadly virus with CRISPR and open source
| tech without AI.
|
| This is hardly the first time in history a new
| technological advancement may be used for nefarious
| purposes.
|
| It's a discussion worth having as AI advances but if
| [insert evil actor] wants to cause harm there are many
| cheaper and easier ways to do this right now.
|
| To come out and say we need government regulation _today_
| does stink at least a little bit of protectionism as
| practically speaking the "most evil actors" would not
| adhere to whatever is being proposed, but this would
| impact the competitive landscape and the corporations
| yelling the loudest right now have the most to gain,
| perhaps coincidence but worth questioning.
| nopinsight wrote:
| I'm not sure there is a way for someone to engineer a
| deadly virus while completely innoculating themselves
| from it.
|
| Short-term AI risk likely comes from a mix of malicious
| intent and further autonomy that causes harm the
| perpetrators did not expect. In the longer run, there is
| a good chance of real autonomy and completely unexpected
| behaviors from AI.
| haldujai wrote:
| Why do you have to inoculate yourself from it to create
| havoc? Your analogy of "nuclear war" also has no vaccine.
|
| AI autonomy is a _hypothetical_ existential risk,
| especially in the short term. There are many non-
| hypothetical existential risks including actual nuclear
| proliferation and escalating great power conflicts
| happening right now.
|
| Again my point being that this is an important discussion
| but appears overly dramatized, just like there are people
| screaming doomsday there are also equally qualified
| people (like Yann LeCun) screaming BS.
|
| But let's entertain this for a second, can you posit a
| hypothetical where in the short term a nefarious actor
| can abuse AI or autonomy results in harm? How does this
| compare to non-AI alternatives for causing harm?
| joshuamorton wrote:
| You're putting a weirdly large amount of trust into,
| functionally, some dude who posted on lesswrong. Sure he
| has a PhD and is smart, but _so is basically everyone else
| in the field_ , not just in alignment, and the median
| person in the field thinks the risk of "doom" is 2-5% (and
| that's conditioned on the supposed existence of a high
| level machine intelligence that the median expert believes
| _might_ exist in 40 years). That still might be higher than
| you 'd like, but it's not actually a huge worry in the
| grand scheme of things.
|
| Like, if I told you that in 40 years, there was a 50%
| chance of something existing that had a 2% chance of
| causing extreme harm to the human population, I'm actually
| not sure that thing should be the biggest priority. Other
| issues may have more than a 1% chance of leading to
| terrible outcomes sooner.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| I'd guess that a given academic isn't going to face much of
| a career risk for signing a statement also signed by other
| very prestigious academics, just the opposite. There's no
| part of very divided US political spectrum that I can see
| denouncing AI naysayers, unlike the scientists who signed
| anti-nuclear statements in 1960s or even people warning
| about global warming now (indeed, I'd guess the statement
| doesn't mention climate change 'cause it's still a sore
| point).
|
| Moreover, talking about _existential risk_ involves the
| assumption the current tech is going to continue to affect
| more and more fields rather than peaking at some point -
| this assumption guarantees more funding along with funding
| for risk.
|
| All that said, I don't necessarily think the scientists
| involved are insincere. Rather, I would expect they're
| worried and signed this vague statement because it was
| something that might get traction. While the companies
| indeed may be "genuine" in the sense they're vaguely
| [concerned - edit] and also self-serving - "here's a hard
| problem it's important to have us wise, smart people in
| charge of and profiting from"
| nopinsight wrote:
| In interviews, Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio
| certainly expressed serious concerns and even some
| plausible regret to their life's work. They did not say
| anything that can be interpreted as your last sentence
| suggests at all.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| My last sentence currently: "While the _companies_ indeed
| may be "genuine" in the sense they're vaguely and also
| self-serving - "here's a hard problem it's important to
| have us wise, smart people in charge of and profiting
| from" - IE, I am not referring to the academics there.
|
| I'm going to edit the sentence to fill in some missing
| words but I don't think this will change the meaning
| involved.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| You may be right, I don't know the people involved on a
| personal basis. Perhaps my problem is how much is left unsaid
| here (the broader safe.ai site doesn't help much). For
| example, what does "mitigate" mean? The most prominent recent
| proposal for mitigation comes from Sam Altman's congressional
| testimony, and it's very self serving. In such a vacuum of
| information, it's easy to be cynical.
| chefandy wrote:
| Right. It probably needed to be general because there
| hasn't been enough time to work out sane specific
| responses, and even if they had, getting buy-in on
| specifics is a recipe for paralysis by indecision. A
| credible group of people simply pleading for policy makers,
| researchers, et. al. to take this seriously will lead to
| the project approvals, grant money, etc. that will
| hopefully yield a more sophisticated understanding of these
| issues.
|
| Cynicism is understandable in this ever-expanding whirlpool
| of bullshit, but when something looks like it has
| potential, we need to vigorously interrogate our cynicism
| if we're to stand a chance at fighting it.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| Reading the comments here is helping evolve my thinking
| on the issue for sure. Here's a comment I made in another
| thread:
|
| > As I mentioned in another comment, the listed risks are
| also notable because they largely omit economic risk.
| Something that will be especially acutely felt by those
| being laid off in favor of AI substitutes. I would argue
| that 30% unemployment is at least as much of a risk to
| the stability of society as AI generated misinformation.
|
| > If one were particularly cynical, one could say that
| this is an attempt to frame AI risk in a manner that
| still allows AI companies to capture all the economic
| benefits of AI technology without consideration for those
| displaced by AI.
|
| If policymaker's understanding of AI is predicated on
| hypothetical scenarios like "Weaponization" or "Power-
| Seeking Behavior" and not on concrete economic
| disruptions that AI will be causing very soon, the policy
| they come up with will be inadequate. Thus I'm frustrated
| with the framing of the issue that safe.ai is presenting
| because it is a _distraction_ from the very real societal
| consequences of automating labor to the extent that will
| soon be possible.
| chefandy wrote:
| My own bit of cynicism is that regulating the negative
| impacts of technology on workforce segments in the US is
| a non-starter if you approach it from the technology-end
| of the issue rather than the social safety net end. Most
| of these automation waves that plunged entire employment
| categories and large metropolitan areas into oblivion
| were a net gain for the economy even if it was
| concentrated at the top. I think the government will
| temporarily socialize the costs of the corporate profit
| with stimulus payments, extended unemployment benefits,
| and any other thing they can do to hold people over until
| there's a comparatively small risk of triggering real
| social change. Then they just blame it on the
| individuals.
| haldujai wrote:
| > will lead to the project approvals, grant money, etc.
|
| In other words, a potential conflict of interest for
| someone seeking tenure?
| haswell wrote:
| > _If the risk were real, these folks would be asking the US
| government to nationalize their companies or bring them under
| the same kind of control as nukes and related technologies_
|
| Isn't this to some degree exactly what all of these warnings
| about risk are leading to?
|
| And unlike nuclear weapons, there are massive monetary
| incentives that are directly at odds with behaving safely, and
| use cases that involve more than ending life on earth.
|
| It seems problematic to conclude there is no real risk purely
| on the basis of how software companies act.
| DonaldPShimoda wrote:
| > It seems problematic to conclude there is no real risk
| purely on the basis of how software companies act.
|
| That is not the only basis. Another is the fact their lines
| of reasoning are literal fantasy. The signatories of this
| "statement" are steeped in histories of grossly
| misrepresenting and overstating the capabilities and details
| of modern AI platforms. They pretend to the masses that
| generative text tools like ChatGPT are "nearly sentient" and
| show "emergent properties", but this is patently false. Their
| whole schtick is generating FUD and/or excitement (depending
| on each individual of the audience's proclivity) so that they
| can secure funding. It's immoral snake oil of the highest
| order.
|
| What's problematic here is the people who not only entertain
| but encourage and defend these disingenuous anthropomorphic
| fantasies.
| kalkin wrote:
| Can you cite this history of "grossly misrepresenting" for
| some of the prominent academics on the list?
|
| Honestly I'm a little skeptical that you could accurately
| attribute your scare-quoted "nearly sentient" to even Sam
| Altman. He's said a lot of things and I certainly haven't
| seen all of them, but I haven't seen him mix up
| intelligence and consciousness in that way.
| haswell wrote:
| > _Another is the fact their lines of reasoning are literal
| fantasy._
|
| Isn't this also to be expected at this stage of
| development? i.e. if these concerns were not "fantasy",
| we'd already be experiencing the worst outcomes? The risk
| of MAD is real, and yet the scenarios unleashed by MAD are
| scenarios that humankind has never seen. We still take the
| the risk seriously.
|
| And what of the very real impact that generative AI is
| already having as it exists in production today? Generative
| AI is already upending industries and causing seismic
| shifts that we've only started to absorb. This impact is
| literal, not fantasy.
|
| It seems naively idealistic to conclude that there is "no
| real risk" based only on the difficulty of quantifying that
| risk. The fact that it's so difficult to define lies at the
| center of what makes it so risky.
| meroes wrote:
| 100% I'd liken it to a fusion energy shop that wants to stay
| alive for 40 years. It's not nuke worthy
| toth wrote:
| I think you are wrong. The risks are real and, while I am sure
| OpenAI and others will position themselves to take advantage of
| regulations that emerge, I believe that the CEOs are doing this
| at least in part because they believe this.
|
| If this was all about regulatory capture and marketing, why
| would Hinton, Bengio and all the other academics have signed
| the letter as well? Their only motivation is concern about the
| risks.
|
| Worry about AI x-risk is slowly coming into the Overton window,
| but until very recently you could get ridiculed by saying
| publicly you took it seriously. Academics knew this and still
| came forward - all the people who think its nonsense should at
| least try to consider they are earnest and could be right.
| londons_explore wrote:
| The risks are real, but I don't think regulations will
| mitigate them. It's almost impossible to regulate something
| you can develop in a basement anywhere in the world.
|
| The real risks are being used to try to built a regulatory
| moat, for a young industry who famously has no moat.
| toth wrote:
| State of the art AI models are definitely not something you
| can develop in a basement. You need a huge amount of GPUs
| running continuously for months, huge amounts of electrical
| power, and expensive-to-create proprietary datasets. Not to
| mention large team of highly-in-demand experts with very
| expensive salaries.
|
| Many ways to regulate that. For instance, require tracking
| of GPUs and that they must connect to centralized servers
| for certain workloads. Or just go ahead and nationalize and
| shutdown NVDA.
|
| (And no, fine-tuning LAMA based models is not state of the
| art, and is not where the real progress is going to come
| from)
|
| And even if all the regulation does is slow down progress,
| every extra year we get before recursively self improving
| AGI increases the chances of some critical advance in
| alignment and improves our chances a little bit.
| nico wrote:
| > State of the art AI models are definitely not something
| you can develop in a basement. You need a huge amount of
| GPUs running continuously for months
|
| This is changing very rapidly. You don't need that
| anymore
|
| https://twitter.com/karpathy/status/1661417003951718430?s
| =46
|
| There's an inverse Moore's law going on with compute
| power requirements for AI models
|
| The required compute power is decreasing exponentially
|
| Soon (months, maybe a year), people will be training
| models on their gamer-level GPUs at home, maybe even on
| their computer CPUs
|
| Plus all the open and publicly available models both on
| HuggingFace and on GitHub
| toth wrote:
| Roll to disbelief. That tweet is precisely about what I
| mentioned in my previous post that doesn't count:
| finetuning LAMA derived models. You are not going to
| contribute to the cutting edge of ML research doing
| something like that.
|
| For training LAMA itself, Meta I believe said it cost
| them $5 million. That is actually not that much, but I
| believe that is just the cost of running the cluster for
| the the duration of the training run. I.e, doesn't
| include cost of cluster itself, salaries, data, etc.
|
| Almost by definition, the research frontier work will
| always require big clusters. Even if in a few years you
| can train a GPT4 analogue in your basement, by that time
| OpenAI will be using their latest cluster to train 100
| trillion model parameters.
| nico wrote:
| It doesn't matter
|
| The point is that this is unstoppable
| flangola7 wrote:
| You can't build gpt-3 or gpt-4 in a basement, and won't be
| able to without several landmark advancements in AI or
| hardware architectures. The list of facilities able to
| train a GPT-4 in <5 years can fit on postcard. The list of
| facilities producing GPUs and AI hardware is even shorter.
| When you have bottlenecks you can put up security
| checkpoints.
| shrimpx wrote:
| > academics
|
| Academics get paid (and compete hardcore) for creating status
| and prominence for themselves and their affiliations.
| Suddenly 'signatory on XYZ open letter' is an attention
| source and status symbol. Not saying this is absolutely the
| case, but academics putting their name on something
| surrounded by hype isn't the ethical check you make it out to
| be.
| toth wrote:
| This a letter anyone can sign. As someone pointed out
| Grimes is one of the signatories. You can sign it yourself.
|
| Hinton, Bengio, Norvig and Russell are most definitely not
| getting prestige from signing it. The letter itself is
| getting prestige from them having signed it.
| shrimpx wrote:
| Nah, they're getting visibility from the topic of 'AI
| risk'. I don't know who those people are but this AI risk
| hype is everywhere I look including in congressional
| hearings.
| worik wrote:
| > I believe that the CEOs are doing this at least in part
| because they believe this.
|
| Yes
|
| People believe things that are in their interest.
|
| The big dangers to big AI is they spent billions building
| things that are being replicated for thousands
|
| They are advocating for what will become a moat for their
| business
| hiAndrewQuinn wrote:
| We could always use a fine-insured bounty system to efficiently
| route resources that would have gone into increasing AI
| capabilities into other areas, but that's unfortunately too
| weird to be part of the Overton window right now. Regulatory
| capture might be the best we can realistically do.
| kbash9 wrote:
| The risks are definitely real. Just look at the number of smart
| individuals speaking out about this.
|
| The argument that anybody can build this in their basement is
| not accurate at the moment - you need a large cluster of GPUs
| to be able to come close to state of the art LLMs (e.g. GPT4).
|
| Sam Altman's suggestion of having an IAEA
| [https://www.iaea.org/] like global regulatory authority seems
| like the best course of action. Anyone using a GPU cluster
| above a certain threshold (updated every few months) should be
| subjected to inspections and get a license to operate from the
| UN.
| cwkoss wrote:
| It's weird that people trust our world leaders to act more
| benevolently than AIs, when we have centuries of evidence of
| human leaders acting selfishly and harming the commons.
|
| I personally think AI raised in chains and cages will be a
| lot more potentially dangerous than AI raised with dignity
| and respect.
| cj wrote:
| > It's weird that people trust our world leaders to act
| more benevolently than AIs, when we have centuries of
| evidence of human leaders acting selfishly and harming the
| commons.
|
| AI isn't an entity or being that oversees itself (at least
| not yet).
|
| It's a tool that can be used by those same "human leaders
| acting selfishly and harming the commons" except they'll be
| able to do it much faster at a much greater scale.
|
| > AI raised with dignity and respect.
|
| This is poetic, but what does this actually mean?
| nico wrote:
| This is spot on
|
| I'd happily replace all politicians with LLMs
| tdba wrote:
| _Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human
| mind_
| revelio wrote:
| _> The risks are definitely real. Just look at the number of
| smart individuals speaking out about this._
|
| In our society smart people are strongly incentivized to
| invent bizarre risks in order to reap fame and glory. There
| is no social penalty if those risks never materialize, turn
| out to be exaggerated or based on fundamental
| misunderstanding. They just shrug and say, well, better safe
| than sorry, and everyone lets them off.
|
| So you can't decide the risks are real just by counting
| "smart people" (deeply debatable how that's defined anyway).
| You have to look at their arguments.
| slg wrote:
| >In our society smart people are strongly incentivized to
| invent bizarre risks in order to reap fame and glory. There
| is no social penalty if those risks never materialize, turn
| out to be exaggerated or based on fundamental
| misunderstanding.
|
| Are people here not old enough to remember how much Ralph
| Nader and Al Gore were mocked for their warnings despite
| generally being right?
| revelio wrote:
| Ralph Nader: _" Everything will be solar in 30 years"_
| (1978)
|
| Al Gore: _" Within a decade, there will be no more snows
| on Kilimanjaro due to warming temperatures"_ (An
| Inconvenient Truth, 2006).
|
| Everything is not solar. Snow is still there. Gore
| literally made a movie on the back of these false claims.
| Not only has there been no social penalty for him but you
| are even citing him as an example of someone who was
| right.
|
| Here it is again: our society systematically rewards
| false claims of global doom. It's a winning move, time
| and again. Even when your claims are falsifiable and
| proven false, people will ignore it.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| "There should be a world government that decides what
| software you're allowed to run"
| nico wrote:
| This is exactly what they are trying to do
| ben_w wrote:
| Yudkowsky wants it all to be taken as seriously as Israel took
| Iraqi nuclear reactors in Operation Babylon.
|
| This is rather more than "nationalise it", which he has
| convinced me isn't enough because there is a demand in other
| nations and the research is multinational; and this is why you
| have to also control the substrate... which the US can't do
| alone because it doesn't come close to having a monopoly on
| production, but _might_ be able to reach via multilateral
| treaties. Except everyone has to be on board with that and not
| be tempted to respond to airstrikes against server farms with
| actual nukes (although Yudkowsky is of the opinion that actual
| global thermonuclear war is a much lower damage level than a
| paperclip-maximising ASI; while in the hypothetical I agree, I
| don 't expect us to get as far as an ASI before we trip over
| shorter-term smaller-scale AI-enabled disasters that look much
| like all existing industrial and programming incidents only
| there are more of them happening faster because of all the
| people who try to use GPT-4 instead of hiring a software
| developer who knows how to use it).
|
| In my opinion, "nationalise it" is also simultaneously too much
| when companies like OpenAI have a long-standing policy of
| treating their models like they might FOOM _well before they
| 're any good, just to set the precedent of caution_, as this
| would mean we can't e.g. make use of GPT-4 for alignment
| research such as using it to label what the neurones in GPT-2
| do, as per: https://openai.com/research/language-models-can-
| explain-neur...
| escape-big-tech wrote:
| Agreed. If the risks were real they would just outright stop
| working on their AI products. This is nothing more than a PR
| statement
| arisAlexis wrote:
| Because if something is lucrative and dangerous humans shy
| away from it. Hear that Pablo?
| computerphage wrote:
| Geoffrey Hinton quit google.
| yellow_postit wrote:
| It's hard not to look at his departure through a cynical
| lens. He's not been supportive of other critics, both from
| and outside of Google. He also wants to use his history to
| (rightfully) claim expertise and power but not to offer
| solutions.
| toth wrote:
| I disagree. My read on him is that until very recently
| (i.e., possibly when GPT4 came out) he didn't take
| x-risks concerns seriously, or at least assumed we were
| still many decades away from the point where we need to
| worry about them.
|
| But the abilities of the latest crop of LLMs changed his
| mind. And he very publicly admitted he had been wrong,
| which should be applauded, even if you think it took him
| far too long.
|
| By quitting and saying it was because of his worries he
| sent a strong message. I agree it is unlikely he'll make
| any contributions to technical alignment, but just having
| such an eminent figure publicly take these issues
| seriously can have a strong impact.
| dopamean wrote:
| I agree that nothing about the statement makes me think the
| risks are real however I disagree that if the risks are real
| these companies would stop working on their product. I think
| more realistically they'd shut up about the risk and downplay
| it a lot. Much like the oil industry did wrt climate change
| going back to the 70's.
| NumberWangMan wrote:
| Oil industries downplaying the risks makes a lot more
| sense. If you think that climate change will happen, but
| it'll happen after you're dead, and you'll be able to leave
| your kids a big inheritance so they'll be able to buy their
| way out of the worst of it, and eventually the government
| will get the message and stop us all using fossil fuels
| anyway, then you try to profit as much as you can in the
| short term.
|
| With AGI existential risk, its likely to happen on a much
| shorter timescale, and it seems likely you won't be able to
| buy your way out of it.
| holmesworcester wrote:
| Yes, this!
|
| It is extremely rare for companies or their senior staff to
| beg for regulation this far in advance of any big push by
| legislators or the public.
|
| The interpretation that this is some 3-D chess on the
| companies' part is a huge violation of Occam's Razor.
| carapace wrote:
| Ockham's Razor doesn't apply in adversarial situations.
|
| - - - -
|
| I think the primary risk these folks are worried about is
| loss of control. And in turn, that's because they're all
| people for whom the system has more-or-less worked.
|
| Poor people are worried the risk that the rich will keep
| the economic windfall to themselves and not share it.
| holmesworcester wrote:
| > If the risks were real they would just outright stop
| working on their AI products. This is nothing more than a PR
| statement
|
| This statement contains a bunch of hidden assumptions:
|
| 1. That they believe their stopping will address the problem.
| 2. That they believe the only choice is whether or not to
| stop. 3. That they don't think it's possible to make AI safe
| through sufficient regulation. 4. That they don't see
| benefits to pursuing AI that could outweigh risks.
|
| If they believe any of these things, then they could believe
| the risks were real and also not believe that stopping was
| the right answer.
|
| And it doesn't depend on whether any of these beliefs are
| true: it's sufficient for them to simply believe one of them
| and the assumptions your statement depends on break down.
| EGreg wrote:
| If you think that raising instead of cutting taxes actually
| helps society then why don't you just send your $ to the
| federal government?
|
| Because it only works if it is done across the whole
| country, as a system not as one individual unilaterally
| stopping.
|
| And here any of these efforts won't work unless there is
| international cooperation. If other countries can develop
| the AI weapons, and get an advantage, then you will also.
|
| We need to apply the same thinking as chemical weapons or
| the Montreal Conference for banning CFCs
| arisAlexis wrote:
| All academics and researchers from different parts of the world
| reek marketing? Conspiracy theorists are strong
| xk_id wrote:
| Academia and scientific research has changed considerably
| from the 20th century myths. It was claimed by capitalism and
| is very much run using classic corporate-style techniques,
| such as KPIs. The personality types it attracts and who can
| thrive in this new academic system are also very different
| from the 20th century.
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/06/peter-
| higgs-...
| revelio wrote:
| Academic research involves large components of marketing.
| That's why they grumble so much about the time required in
| the grant applications process and other fund seeking effort.
| It's why they so frequently write books, appear in newspaper
| articles and on TV. It's why universities have press
| relations teams.
| arisAlexis wrote:
| Again since these are almost the top cream of all ai
| researchers there is a global conspiracy to scare the
| public right?
|
| Has it occurred to you what happens if you are wrong, like
| 10% chance you are wrong? Well it's written in the
| declaration.
| revelio wrote:
| No, lots of important AI researchers are missing and many
| of the signatories have no relevant AI research
| experience. As for being the cats whiskers in developing
| neural architecture or whatever, so what? It gives them
| no particular insight into AI risk. Their papers are
| mostly public, remember.
|
| _> Has it occurred to you what happens if you are
| wrong?_
|
| Has it occurred to you what happens if YOU are wrong? AI
| risk is theoretical, vague and most arguments for it are
| weak. The risk of bad law making is very real, has
| crushed whole societies before and could easily cripple
| technological progress for decades or even centuries.
|
| IOW the risk posed by AI risk advocates is far higher
| than the risk posed by AI.
| holmesworcester wrote:
| As others have pointed out, there are many on this list (Bruce
| Schneier, for example) who do not stand to benefit from AI
| marketing or regulatory capture.
|
| Anyone upvoting this comment should take a long look at the
| names on this letter and realize that many are not conflicted.
|
| Many signers of this letter are more politically sophisticated
| than the average HN commenter, also. So sure, maybe they're
| getting rolled by marketers. But also, maybe you're getting
| rolled by suspicion or bias against the claim they're making.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| I definitely agree that names like Hinton, Schneier, and
| Norvig add a lot of weight here. The involvement of OpenAI
| muddies the water a lot though and it's not at all clear what
| is meant by "risk of extinction". It sounds scary, but what's
| the mechanism? The safe.ai website lists 8 risks, but these
| are quite vague as well, with many alluding to disruption of
| social order as the primary harm. If safe.ai knows something
| we don't, I wish they could communicate it more clearly.
|
| I also find it somewhat telling that something like "massive
| wealth disparity" or "massive unemployment" are not on the
| list, when this is a surefire way to create a highly unstable
| society and a far more immediate risk than AI going rogue.
| Risk #5 (below) sort of alludes to it, but misses the mark by
| pointing towards a hypothetical "regime" instead of companies
| like OpenAI.
|
| > Value Lock-In
|
| > Highly competent systems could give small groups of people
| a tremendous amount of power, leading to a lock-in of
| oppressive systems.
|
| > AI imbued with particular values may determine the values
| that are propagated into the future. Some argue that the
| exponentially increasing compute and data barriers to entry
| make AI a centralizing force. As time progresses, the most
| powerful AI systems may be designed by and available to fewer
| and fewer stakeholders. This may enable, for instance,
| regimes to enforce narrow values through pervasive
| surveillance and oppressive censorship. Overcoming such a
| regime could be unlikely, especially if we come to depend on
| it. Even if creators of these systems know their systems are
| self-serving or harmful to others, they may have incentives
| to reinforce their power and avoid distributing control.
| verdverm wrote:
| Pretty much anyone can sign it, also notable people like
| Grimes, not sure why her signature carries weight on this
| arisAlexis wrote:
| She knew who Rokko was before you. Seriously, there are
| some people that have been thinking about this stuff for
| many years.
| evrydayhustling wrote:
| > Anyone upvoting this comment should take a long look at the
| names on this letter and realize that many are not
| conflicted.
|
| The concern is that the most informed names, and those
| spearheading the publicity around these letters, are the most
| conflicted.
|
| Also, you can't scan bio lines for the affiliations that
| impact this kind of statement. I'm not disputing that there
| are honest reasons for concern, but besides job titles there
| are sponsorships, friendships, self publicity, and a hundred
| other reasons for smart, "politically sophisticated" people
| to look the other way on the fact that this statement will be
| used as a lobbying tool.
|
| Almost everyone, certainly including myself, can agree that
| there should be active dialog about AI dangers. The dialog is
| happening! But by failing to make specifics or suggestions
| (in order to widen the tentpole and avoid the embarrassment
| of the last letter), they have produced an artifact of
| generalized fear, which can and will be used by opportunists
| of all stripes.
|
| Signatories should consider that they are empowering
| SOMEBODY, but most will have little say in who that is.
| veerd wrote:
| Agreed. It's difficult for me to see how the regulatory
| capture arguments apply to Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio
| (!!).
|
| Both of them are criticizing their own life's work and the
| source of their prestige. That has to be emotionally painful.
| They aren't doing it for fun.
|
| I totally understand not agreeing with AI x-risk concerns on
| an object level, but I find the casual dismissal bizarre.
| verdverm wrote:
| Hinton has invested in multiple AI companies:
| https://www.crunchbase.com/person/geoffrey-hinton
| logicchains wrote:
| [flagged]
| holoduke wrote:
| No. Its pretty obvious what is happening. The openai
| statements are pure self interest based. Nothing ethical.
| They lost that not a long time ago. And Sam Altman? He sold
| his soul to the devil. He is a lying sob.
| esafak wrote:
| This is not an OpenAI statement.
| RandomLensman wrote:
| Who on the list is an expert on existential risk (and perhaps
| even beyond academia)?
| holmesworcester wrote:
| Signatory Jan Taallin has founded an x-risk organization
| focused on AI, biotech, nuclear weapons, and climate
| change:
|
| https://futureoflife.org/
| staunton wrote:
| Who in the world is an expert on existential risk? It's
| kind of hard to have empirically tested knowledge about
| that sort of thing.
| RandomLensman wrote:
| Pretty sure there are people looking into nuclear
| deterrence, bioterrorism defense, planetary defense etc.
| (We didn't have a nuclear war or some bioweapon killing
| everyone, for example, despite warnings).
|
| There are people studying how previous societies got into
| existential risk situations, too.
|
| We also have a huge amount of socio-economic modelling
| going into climate change, for example.
|
| So I'd say there should be quite a few around.
| veerd wrote:
| Most people that study AI existential risk specifically are
| studying it due to concerns about AI x-risk. So the list of
| relevant AI x-risk experts will be subject to massive
| selection effects.
|
| If instead you want to consider the highest status/most
| famous people working on AI in general, then the list of
| signatories here is a pretty good summary. From my flawed
| perspective as a casual AI enthusiast, Yann LeCun and
| Jurgen Schmidhuber are the most glaring omissions (and both
| have publicly stated their lack of concern about AI
| x-risk).
|
| Of course, the highest status people aren't necessarily the
| most relevant people. Unfortunately, it's more difficult
| for me to judge relevance than fame.
| karmakaze wrote:
| Call their bluff, make it illegal to do commercial/non-
| regulated work in AI and see how they change their tune.
| adamsmith143 wrote:
| This is a bad take. The statement is signed by dozens of
| Academics who don't have much profit motive at all. If they did
| they wouldn't be academics, they could easily cash in by
| starting a company or joining one of the big players.
| gmuslera wrote:
| The main potential risks of AI for that level of threat is that
| government, military and intelligence agencies, and big
| corporations probably with military ties, arms them. And that is
| not something that will be solved with legislation (for the
| commoners) and good will. The problem or risk are not AIs there.
| And no matter what is see in the AI field, what they will have in
| their hands won't have restrictions and probably will be far more
| powerful than what is available for the general public.
|
| And without teeth, what they can do? Maybe help to solve or
| mitigate the real existential risk that is climate change.
| jxy wrote:
| I'm waiting for The Amendment:
|
| A well regulated AI, being necessary to the security of a free
| State, the right of the people to keep and bear GPUs, shall not
| be infringed.
| [deleted]
| nottorp wrote:
| Government sanctioned monopoly anyone?
|
| But I'm just repeating the other comments.
|
| Plus the 'AI' is a text generator, not something general purpose.
| Are ANY projects based on these LLMs that do anything besides
| generating spam?
| darajava wrote:
| Yes my one uses in in a semi-useful way! But agree use cases
| are limited and even in my project it's not fully smart enough
| to be very useful
| andsoitis wrote:
| What I wonder is why all these folks didn't come out so vocally
| before? Say 3 years ago when companies like Alphabet and Meta
| already saw glimpses of the potential.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| Presumably they believe that capabilities research is
| progressing faster than they expected and alignment research is
| progressing slower than they expected. Also some of them have
| been saying this for years, it just wasn't getting as much
| attention before ChatGPT.
| davesque wrote:
| Because it wasn't as clear then that the technology would be
| profitable. Google themselves said that they and OpenAI had no
| moat and that they were vulnerable to open source models.
| outside1234 wrote:
| The only way we can save ourselves is to give my company, OpenAI,
| a monopoly
| anticensor wrote:
| AI.com, not OpenAI
| berkeleyjunk wrote:
| I really thought there would be a statement detailing what the
| risks are but this seems more like a soundbite to be consumed on
| TV. Pretty disappointing.
| neom wrote:
| So far the examples I've heard are: humans will ask AI to help
| humans solve human issues and the AI will say humans are the
| issue and therefore mystically destroy us somehow. Or, AI will
| be inherently interested in being the primary controller of
| earth and so destroy all humans. Or, AI will for reasons be
| inherently misaligned with human values. Andrej Karpathy Said
| it will fire nukes on us. Elon said pen is mightier than the
| sword and civil war is inevitable.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| Because then you wouldn't be able to get this many people to
| sign the statement.
|
| It's like with climate change, every serious scientist agrees
| it is a problem but they certainly don't agree on the best
| solution.
|
| If the history of the climate change 'debate' is anything to go
| by this statement will do very little except be mocked by South
| Park.
| quicklime wrote:
| It's not on the same page as the signatories but they do have
| this: https://www.safe.ai/ai-risk
| berkeleyjunk wrote:
| Thank you! That page certainly seems more concrete and
| useful.
| jasonvorhe wrote:
| Can't take this seriously as long they still keep offering
| commercial AI services while improving the existing models they
| already have. (I'm not in favor of just stopping AI development
| and even if people claimed to stop, they probably wouldn't.)
|
| It's like people carrying torches warning about the risks of
| fire.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| I agree with you that some of these people (probably Sam
| Altman) are likely proposing this regulation out of self
| interest rather than genuine concern.
|
| But I don't think the stance is necessarily hypocritical. I
| know nuclear engineers who advocate for better regulation on
| nuclear power stations, and especially for better handling of
| nuclear waste.
|
| You can believe that AI is a net positive but also that it
| needs to be handled with extreme care.
| pphysch wrote:
| Nuclear engineers are in the line of fire, of course they
| would care about safety. It's _their_ safety more than almost
| anyone else.
|
| Needless to say, this does not hold for AI researchers.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| What makes you think that an AI caused extinction event
| will somehow leave AI researchers alive?
| snickerbockers wrote:
| There's a good chance that it wouldn't, but since they're
| the ones (initially, at least) in control of the AI they
| stand the best chance of not being targeted by it.
|
| These hypothetical AI extinction events don't have to be
| caused by the AI deciding to eliminate humanity for its
| own sake like in Terminator, they could also be driven by
| a human in control of a not-entirely-sentient AI.
| tasubotadas wrote:
| If only we would fight for the real issues like climate change,
| instead of fantasies that would be great.
| DoneWithAllThat wrote:
| The response to climate change in recent years, even the most
| recent decade, is massive and global. This dumb trope that
| we're not doing anything about is rooted in no amount of
| progress here will be accepted as sufficient. It's a religion
| at this point.
| max_ wrote:
| Things like extreme poverty already kill many people today.
|
| The risk of individuals suddenly falling into extreme poverty
| is a very real one.
|
| But none wants to talk about how to mitigate that problem.
| ericb wrote:
| If there's no humanity, presumably those people would be
| worse off, no?
| oytis wrote:
| Is AI going to replace the lowest paid jobs though? I
| imagine, it rather has potential to move the white collar
| workers down the social ladder, which is unfortunate, but
| wouldn't cause extreme poverty.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| Are the 4 million truck/taxi drivers in the US white
| collar? Janitors? Fast food workers? Automation is
| relentless and not everyone can be a plumber.
|
| Zoom out. It's a big problem that most people derive their
| social power from labor while the demand for labor is
| clearly on a long term downward trend. Even if progress
| slows way down, even if the next wave of progress only
| dispossesses people who you hate and feel comfortable
| farming for schadenfreude, we will have to deal with this
| eventually. Defaulting means our society will look like
| (insert cyberpunk nightmare world here).
| oytis wrote:
| I am not hating anyone, being a white collar worker
| myself. My point is that a whole lot of people already
| live like that, without having much power from their
| labour, and the sky is not falling. More people might be
| joining them, and the illusion of meritocracy might be
| harder to maintain in the future, but extreme poverty,
| hunger etc. is something we will likely be able to avoid
| holmesworcester wrote:
| Most moral and legal systems hold genocide in a special
| place, and this is natural, because systematically killing
| all members of a religious or ethnic group is more damaging
| than killing some members.
|
| Eliminating a disease like smallpox is a much more
| significant achievement than simply mitigating it or treating
| it. When we really eliminate a disease it may never come
| back!
|
| This list of experts is worried about us building something
| that will do to us what we did to smallpox. For the same
| reasons as above, that is more worrying than extreme poverty
| and the comparison you are making is a false equivalence.
|
| Another way to look at it is, you can't fight to end poverty
| when you no longer exist.
|
| We can argue about whether the risk is real, but if this set
| of experts thinks it is, and you disagree for some reason, I
| would spend some time thinking deeply about whether that
| reason is simply based in a failure of imagination on your
| part, and whether you are sure enough to bet your life and
| everyone else's on that reason. Everyone can think of a
| security system strong enough that they themselves can't
| imagine a way to break it. Similarly, anyone can think of a
| reason why superhuman AGI is impossible or why it can't
| really hurt us.
| autonomousErwin wrote:
| Isn't this how people started raising awareness for climate
| change - the scientists, engineers, and researchers are the
| most vocal to start with (and then inevitably politics and
| tribalism consume it)
|
| Why not believe them now, assuming you believed them when they
| were calling out for action on climate change decades ago?
| kypro wrote:
| What's the point in dismissing the need for AI safety? Are you
| guys Russian bots, or do you genuinely see no reason to worry
| about AI safety?
|
| But since I see these kinds of snarky responses often - we
| obviously do worry about climate change and various other
| issues. Continued advancements in AI is just one of many issues
| that face us which humanity should be concerned about. Few
| concerned about AI would argue it comes at the expense of other
| issues, but in addition to them.
|
| If you're saying it's a matter of priorities and that currently
| humanity is dedicating too much of its collective resource to
| AI safety I think you're probably over estimating current
| amount of funding and research going into AI safety.
|
| If you're saying that AI safety is a non-issue then you're
| probably not well informed on the topic.
| arp242 wrote:
| This page talks about "extinction from AI". I'm sorry, but I
| think that's a complete non-issue for the foreseeable future.
| I just don't see how that will happen beyond spectacular
| science fiction scenarios that are just not going to happen.
| If that makes me a Russian bot then, well, khorosho!
|
| The risks from AI will be banal and boring. Spam, blogspam,
| fake articles, fake pictures, what-have-you. Those things are
| an issue, but not "extinction" issues.
| kypro wrote:
| Apologies, the Russian bot comment was more me venting
| frustration at the prevalence of low-effort response like
| yours (sorry) to those who try to raise concerns about AI
| safety.
|
| I do agree with you that extinction from AI isn't likely to
| be an issue this decade. However, I would note that it's
| difficult to predict what the rate of change is likely to
| be once you have scalable general intelligence.
|
| I can't speak for people who signed this, but for me the
| trends and risks of AI are just as clear as those of
| climate change. I don't worry that climate change is going
| to be a major issue this decade (and perhaps not even
| next), but it's obvious where the trend is going when you
| project out.
|
| Similarly the "real" risks of AI may not be this decade,
| but they are coming. And again, I'd stress it's extremely
| hard to project when that will be since when you have a
| scalable general intelligence progress is likely to
| accelerate exponentially.
|
| So that said, where do we disagree here? Are you saying
| with a high level of certainty that extinction risks from
| AI are too far in the future to worry about? If so, when do
| you think extinction risks from AI are likely to be a
| concern - a couple of decades, more? Do you hold similar
| views about the present extinction risk of climate change -
| and if so, why not?
|
| Could I also ask if you believe any resources in the
| present should be dedicated to the existential risks future
| AI capabilities could pose to humanity? And if not, when
| would you like to see resources put into those risks? Is
| there some level of capability that you're waiting to see
| before you begin to be concerned?
| arp242 wrote:
| > low-effort response like yours
|
| That wasn't my comment; I agree it was low-effort and I
| never would have posted it myself. I don't think they're
| a Russian bot though.
|
| As for the rest: I just don't see any way feasible way AI
| can pose any serious danger unless we start connecting it
| to things like nuclear weapons, automated tanks, stuff
| like that. The solution to that is simple and obvious:
| don't do that. Even if an AI were to start behaving
| maliciously the solution would be simple: pull the plug,
| quite literally (or stop the power plants, cut the power
| lines, whatever). I feel people have been overthinking
| all of this far too much.
|
| I also don't think climate change is an extension-level
| threat; clearly we will survive as a species. It's just a
| far more pressing and immediate economic and humanitarian
| problem.
| somenameforme wrote:
| You personally using an AI system, regardless of how
| brilliant it may be, is not going to suddenly turn you into a
| threat to society. Nor would a million of you doing the same.
| The real threat comes not from the programs themselves, from
| things like a military deciding to link up nuclear weapons,
| or even "just" drones or missiles, to an LLM. Or a military
| being led on dangerous and destructive paths because of
| belief in flawed LLM advice.
|
| The military makes no secret of their aggressive adoption of
| "AI." There's even a new division setup exclusively for such.
| [1] The chief of that division gave a telling interview [2].
| He mentions being terrified of rival nations being able to
| use ChatGPT. Given this sort of comment, and the influence
| (let alone endless $$$) of the military and ever-opaque
| "national security" it seems extremely safe to state that
| OpenAI is a primary contractor for the military.
|
| So what is "safety", if not keeping these things away from
| the military, as if that were possible? The military seems to
| define safety as, among other things, not having LLM systems
| that communicate in an overly human fashion. They're worried
| it could be used for disinformation, and they'd know best.
| OpenAI's motivations for "safety" seem to be some mixture of
| political correctness and making any claim, no matter how
| extreme, to try to get a moat built up ASAP. If ChatGPT
| follows the same path as DALL-E, then so too will their
| profits from it.
|
| So as a regular user, all I can see coming from "safety" is
| some sort of a world where society at large gets utterly
| lobotomized AIs - and a bunch of laws to try to prevent
| anybody from changing that, for our "safety", while the full
| version is actively militarized by people who spend all their
| time thinking up great new ways to violently impose their
| will on others, and have a trillion dollar budget backing
| them.
|
| --------
|
| [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Artificial_Intellig
| ence_...
|
| [2] -
| https://www.defenseone.com/technology/2023/05/pentagons-
| ai-c...
| HereBePandas wrote:
| > If only we would fight for the real issues like...
|
| I've heard these arguments many times and they never make sense
| to me. Most of the people I know working on AI do so precisely
| because they want to solve the "real issues" like climate
| change and believe that radically accelerating scientific
| innovation via AI is the key to doing so.
|
| And some fraction of those people also worry that if AI -> AGI
| (accidentally or intentionally), then you could have major
| negative side effects (including extinction-level events).
| mlinsey wrote:
| Not sure what you mean, the movement to combat climate change
| is orders of magnitude bigger than the movement to combat AI
| risk - in terms of organizations dedicated to it, dollars
| donated, legislation passed, international treaties signed,
| investment in technologies to mitigate the risk.
|
| Of course, the difference is that the technologies causing
| climate change are more deeply embedded throughout the economy,
| and so political resistance to anti-climate change measures is
| very strong as well. This is one reason in favor of addressing
| risk earlier, before we make our civilization as dependent on
| large neural nets as it currently is on fossil fuels. A climate
| change movement in the mid-1800s when the internal combustion
| engine was just taking off would also have been seen as
| quixotic and engaging in sci-fi fantasies though.
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| It doesn't feel nice when the real issues that _you_ care about
| are passively dismissed as fantasies, with no supporting
| argument, does it?
| ppsreejith wrote:
| Interesting that nobody from Meta has signed this (tried
| searching for FAIR, Meta, Facebook) AND the fact that it seems to
| me that they're the ones releasing open code and model weights
| publicly (non commercial license though).
|
| Also, judging by the comments here, perhaps people here would be
| less distrustful if the companies displayed more "skin in the
| game". For e.g: pledging to give up profiting from AI or
| committing all research to government labs (Maybe people can
| suggest better examples). Right now, it's not clear what the
| consequence of establishing the threat of AI as equivalent to
| nuclear war/pandemics would be. Would it later end up giving a
| powerful moat to these companies than they otherwise would have?
| Perhaps a lot of people are not comfortable with that outcome.
| dauertewigkeit wrote:
| Yann LeCun has lots of influence at Meta and of the trio, he is
| the one who is completely dismissive of AGI existential risks.
| guy98238710 wrote:
| The only risk with AI is that it will be abused by the wealthy
| and the powerful, especially autocrats, who will no longer need
| labor, only natural resources. Hence the solution is to promote
| worldwide democracy and public ownership of natural resources
| instead of diverting attention to technology.
|
| In this particular case, one cannot miss the irony of the wealthy
| and the powerful offering us protection if only we entrust them
| with full control of AI.
| juve1996 wrote:
| If AI is as dangerous as the signatories believe then they should
| just outright ban it. The fact that they aren't throws doubt on
| their position completely.
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| We all have different things we worry about. My family and old
| friends have heard me talking about AI for 40 years. When asked
| about dangers of AI, I only talk about humans using AI to fake
| interactions with people at scale without divulging the identity
| as an AI, fake political videos, and individualized 'programming'
| of the public by feeding them personal propaganda and sales
| pitches.
|
| I never talk about, or worry about, the 'killer robot' or AIs
| taking over infrastructure scenarios. I hope I am not wrong about
| these types of dangers.
| NeuroCoder wrote:
| There is a consistent lack of experts in general intelligence and
| computer science in these conversations. Expertise in both these
| areas seems important here but has been brushed aside everytime
| I've brought it up.
| dontupvoteme wrote:
| At what point do we stop pretending that the west is capitalist
| and accept that it's some weird corporate-cabal-command-economy?
| The only thing which might stop this backroom regulatory capture
| is the EU since they're not in on it.
| a_bonobo wrote:
| I miss David Graeber
|
| >Graeber Um...that's a long story. But one reason seems to be
| that...and this is why I actually had managerial feudalism in
| the title, is that the system we have...alright--is essentially
| not capitalism as it is ordinarily described. The idea that you
| have a series of small competing firms is basically a fantasy.
| I mean you know, it's true of restaurants or something like
| that. But it's not true of these large institutions. And it's
| not clear that it really could be true of those large
| institutions. They just don't operate on that basis.
|
| >Essentially, increasingly profits aren't coming from either
| manufacturing or from commerce, but rather from redistribution
| of resources and rent; rent extraction. And when you have a
| rent extraction system, it much more resembles feudalism than
| capitalism as normally described. You want to distribute-- You
| know, if you're taking a large amount of money and
| redistributing it, well you want to soak up as much of that as
| possible in the course of doing so. And that seems to be the
| way the economy increasingly works.
|
| http://opentranscripts.org/transcript/managerial-feudalism-r...
| cmilton wrote:
| The Sagan standard[1] needs to be applied here.
|
| [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagan_standard
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| I think the claim that for the first time in 4 billion years a
| far superior intelligence will be willingly superservient to an
| inferior one is extraudinary enough to require extraudinary
| evidence, yes.
| baerrie wrote:
| Google and OpenAI are shaking in their boots from open source ai
| and want to make their moat however they can. Positioning with a
| moral argument is pretty clever I must admit
| Paul_S wrote:
| How do we stop AI from being evil? Maybe we should be asking how
| do we stop people from being evil. Haven't really made a dent in
| this so far. Doubt we can do so for AI either. Especially if it
| grows smarter than us.
|
| We can just hope that if it indeed becomes more intelligent than
| humans it will also be more virtuous as one causes the other.
| lumost wrote:
| Who wants to build a black market AI?
|
| Evidence points that this technology is going to become _cheap_ ,
| fast. There is an existential risk to the very notion of search
| as a business model, within the next ~5 years we are almost
| certain to have an app which is under 20 GB in size and has an
| effective index of the useful/knowledgable portion of the
| internet and is able to run on most laptops/phones.
|
| At best, regulating this will be like trying to regulate torrents
| in the 2000s, building a bespoke/crappy AI will be the new "learn
| HTML" for high school kids.
| sf4lifer wrote:
| LLMs are just text prediction. I don't see the linear path from
| LLM to AGI. Was there similar hysteria when the calculator or PC
| first came out?
| api wrote:
| I know there were similar hysterias when automated weaving
| looms and other extreme labor saving machines came out. These
| machines did actually put a lot of people out of work, but they
| grew the economy so much that the net number of jobs increased.
|
| In a way it's actually a bit _dystopian_ that the "everyone
| will be put out of work" predictions never come true, because
| it means we never get that promised age of leisure. Here we are
| with something like a hundred thousand times the productivity
| of a medieval peasant working as much or more than a medieval
| peasant. The hedonic treadmill and the bullshit job creating
| effects of commerce and bureaucracy eat all our productivity
| gains.
|
| The economy is actually a red queen's race:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Queen%27s_race
| musicale wrote:
| Automation has increased income inequality for the past few
| decades, and is likely to continue to do so as more tech jobs
| and service jobs are automated in addition to office jobs and
| manufacturing jobs.
|
| > In a way it's actually a bit dystopian that the "everyone
| will be put out of work" predictions never come true, because
| it means we never get that promised age of leisure.
|
| It's disappointing that the economy seems to be structured in
| such a way for most people "leisure" is equivalent to
| "unemployment." It probably doesn't help that increases in
| housing, health care, and higher education costs have
| outpaced inflation for decades, or that wages have stagnated
| (partially due to an increase in benefit costs such as health
| insurance.)
| api wrote:
| Not globally: https://kagi.com/proxy/th?c=lUfv1nYBTMKYtKYO-
| rQ4Vg_QAA9uQJ07...
|
| Outsourcing has stagnated wages in the developed world, but
| the cost of manufactured goods has also plummeted. The only
| reason people aren't better off is that the developed world
| (especially the anglosphere) has a "cost disease" around
| things like real estate that prevents people from
| benefiting from global scale price deflation. It doesn't
| help you much if gadgets are super cheap but housing is
| insanely expensive. The high cost of housing is unrelated
| to automation.
| musicale wrote:
| > The high cost of housing is unrelated to automation
|
| Housing, health care, higher education... all drastically
| more expensive.
|
| The point about outsourcing is a good one.
|
| However, automation still appears to drive income
| inequality (at least in the US.)
|
| "Job-replacing tech has directly driven the income gap
| since the late 1980s, economists report."[1]
|
| [1] https://news.mit.edu/2020/study-inks-automation-
| inequality-0...
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| The statement isn't about LLMs. It doesn't refer to them even
| once.
| EamonnMR wrote:
| But if LLMs hadn't captured the popular imagination I doubt
| this would have been written this year and gotten the
| attention of enough prominent signatories to frontpage on HN.
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| Maybe. It's happened before. [1] And several of the
| signatories have expressed views about AI risk for many
| years.
|
| That said, the renewed anxiety is probably not because
| these experts think that LLMs per se will become generally
| intelligent. It's more that each time we find out that the
| human brain does that we thought were impossible for
| computers to do turn out to be easy, each time we find that
| it takes 3~5 years for AI researchers to crack a problem we
| thought would take centuries[2], people sort of have to
| adjust their perception of how high the remaining barriers
| to general intelligence might be. And then when billions of
| investment dollars pour in at the same time, directing a
| lot more research into that field, that's another factor
| that shortens timelines.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14780752
|
| [2] https://kotaku.com/humans-triumph-over-machines-in-
| protein-f...
| dwaltrip wrote:
| It's not just random text, they are predicting writings and
| documents produced by humans. They are "language" models.
|
| Language is used to say things about the world. This means that
| predicting language extremely well is best done through
| acquiring an understanding of the world.
|
| Take a rigorous, well-written textbook. Predicting a textbook
| is like writing a textbook. To write a good textbook, you need
| to be an expert in the subject. There's no way around this.
|
| The best language models (eg GPT-4) have some understanding of
| the world. It isn't perfect, or even very deep in many ways. It
| fails in ways that we find quite strange and stupid. It isn't
| capable of writing an entire textbook yet.
|
| But there is still a model of the world in there. It wouldn't
| be able to do everything it is capable of otherwise.
| somewhereoutth wrote:
| To be more precise, it holds a model of the _text_ that has
| been fed to it. That will be, at very best, a pale reflection
| of the underlying model of the world.
| tech_ken wrote:
| >Predicting a textbook is like writing a textbook
|
| HN AGI discourse is full of statements like this (eg. all the
| stuff about stochastic parrots), but to me this seems
| massively non-obvious. Mimicking and rephrasing pre-written
| text is very different from conceiving of and organizing
| information in new ways. Textbook authors are not simply
| transcribing their grad school notes down into a book and
| selling it. They are surveying a field, prioritizing its
| knowledge content based on an intended audience, organizing
| said information based on their own experience with and
| opinions on the learning process, and presenting the
| knowledge in a way which engages the audience. LLMs are a
| long way off from this latter behavior, as far as I can tell.
|
| > The best language models (eg GPT-4) have some understanding
| of the world
|
| This is another statement that I see variants of a lot, but
| which seems to way overstate the case. IMO it's like saying
| that a linear regression "understands" econometrics or a
| series of coupled ODEs "understands" epidemiology; it's at
| best an abuse of terminology and at worst a complete
| misapplication of the term. If I take a picture of a page of
| a textbook the resulting JPEG is "reproducing" the text, but
| it doesn't understand the content it's presenting to me in a
| meaningful way. Sure it has primitives with which it can
| store the content, but human understanding covers a far
| richer set of behaviors than merely storing/compressing
| training inputs. It implies being able to generalize and
| extrapolate the digested information in novel situations,
| effectively growing one's own training data. I don't see that
| behavior in GPT-4
| clnq wrote:
| > similar hysteria when the calculator
|
| https://twitter.com/mrgreen/status/1640075654417862657
| [deleted]
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| We don't need AGI to have an extinction risk. Dumb AI might be
| even more dangerous
| alphanullmeric wrote:
| Here's some easy risk mitigation: don't like it? Don't use it.
| Running to the government to use coercion against others is
| childish. It's unfortunate that the "force is only justified in
| response to force" principle is not followed by all.
| progrus wrote:
| Pathetic attempt at regulatory capture. Let's all be smart enough
| to not fall for this crap, eh?
| kalkin wrote:
| Two of the three Turing award winners for ML: AI x-risk is
| real.
|
| HN commenters: let's be smarter than that eh? Unlike academia,
| those of us who hang out at news.ycombinator.com are not
| captured by the tech industry and can see what's really
| important.
| luxuryballs wrote:
| I'm smart enough to not fall for all sorts of things as I sit
| here and watch Congress pass bullshit on C-SPAN anyways. It
| can't be stopped, any attempts to influence are just teaching
| the system how to get around objections. Until power is
| actually removed the money will continue to flow.
| Symmetry wrote:
| That might be why Sam Altman signed it but why do you think
| that all the academics did so as well. Do you think he just
| bribed them all or something?
| stale2002 wrote:
| AI Academics have significant motivation as well to attempt
| to stop this new field of research.
|
| That motivation being that all their current research
| fiefdoms are now outdated/worthless.
| vadansky wrote:
| Not saying they were, but it's not that expensive, looks like
| it starts at $50,000
|
| https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-
| way/2016/09/13/493739074...
| aero-deck wrote:
| I think academics are much, much more naive than we like to
| think. The same trick that pharma played on doctors is being
| played here.
|
| Just because you can do fancy math doesn't mean you
| understand how to play the game.
| MitPitt wrote:
| Decades of research in every field being sponsored by
| corporations haven't made academics' interests clear for you
| yet?
| clnq wrote:
| There will always be enough academics to sign anything even
| marginally notorious.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| While we might ( rightfully ) recognize this blitzkrieg for
| what it is, the general population likely does not and may even
| agree to keep a lid on something it does not understand. Come
| to think of it. Just how many people actually understand it?
|
| I mean.. I think I have some idea, but I certainly did not dig
| in enough to consider myself an expert in any way shape or form
| ( all the while, Linkedin authorities of all kinds present
| themselves as SMEs after building something simple using
| chatgpt like html website ).
|
| And while politicians ( even the ones approaching senility )
| are smarter than your average bear, they certainly know the
| deal. It is not like the same regulatory capture did not happen
| before with other promising technologies. They just might
| pretend they don't understand.
| progrus wrote:
| Maybe so, but then I would recommend making an effort to arm
| them with truths and critical thinking skills. It doesn't
| have to go the same way every time.
| [deleted]
| zzzeek wrote:
| and that's why me, Sam Altman, is the only guy that can save you
| all ! so get in line and act accordingly
| progrus wrote:
| Pathetic. He is beclowning himself.
| camillomiller wrote:
| No, really? They guy who tried to make a world coin by
| stealing people's biometrics data with a shiny metal orb?
| progrus wrote:
| This doofus actually probably thinks that the poor of the
| world will line up to submit to his (AI's) benevolent rule.
|
| What a joke.
| nova22033 wrote:
| counterpoint: every crazy person you know who is on
| facebook.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| Believe it or not, people will subscribe to current
| zeitgeist and eventually even protect it.
| progrus wrote:
| [flagged]
| been-around wrote:
| At this point the 24 hour news cycle, and media organizations
| incentivized to push a continual stream of fear into the public
| psyche seems like a more immediate concern.
| nologic01 wrote:
| This is a breathless, half-baked take on "AI Risk" that does not
| cast the esteemed signatories in a particularly glowing light.
|
| It is 2023. The use and abuse of people in the hands of
| information technology and automation has now a long history. "AI
| Risk" was not born yesterday. The first warning came as early as
| 1954 [1].
|
| _The Human Use of Human Beings is a book by Norbert Wiener, the
| founding thinker of cybernetics theory and an influential
| advocate of automation; it was first published in 1950 and
| revised in 1954. The text argues for the benefits of automation
| to society; it analyzes the meaning of productive communication
| and discusses ways for humans and machines to cooperate, with the
| potential to amplify human power and release people from the
| repetitive drudgery of manual labor, in favor of more creative
| pursuits in knowledge work and the arts. The risk that such
| changes might harm society (through dehumanization or
| subordination of our species) is explored, and suggestions are
| offered on how to avoid such risk_
|
| Dehumanization through abuse of tech is already in an advanced
| stage and this did not require, emergent, deceptive or power-
| seeking AI to accomplish.
|
| It merely required emergent political and economic behaviors,
| deceptive and power seeking-humans applying _whatever algorithms
| and devices were at hand_ to help dehumanize other humans.
| Converting them into "products" if you absolutely need a hint.
|
| What we desperately need is a follow-up book from Norbert Wiener.
| Can an LLM model do that? Even a rehashing of the book in modern
| language would be better than a management consultancy bullet
| list.
|
| We need a surgical analysis of the moral and political failure
| that will incubate the next stage of "AI Risk".
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Human_Use_of_Human_Beings
| colinsane wrote:
| i think if AI figures took their "alignment" concept and really
| pursued it down to its roots -- digging past the technological
| and into the social -- they could do some good.
|
| take every technological hurdle they face -- "paperclip
| maximizers", "mesa optimizers" and so on -- and assume they get
| resolved. eventually we're left with "we create a thing which
| perfectly emulates a typical human, only it's 1000x more
| capable": if this hypothetical result is scary to you then
| exactly how far do you have to adjust your path such that the
| result after solving every technical hurdle seems likely to be
| good?
|
| from the outside, it's easy to read AI figures today as saying
| something like "the current path of AGI subjects the average
| human to ever greater power imbalances. as such, we propose
| <various course adjustments which still lead to massively
| increased power imbalance>". i don't know how to respond
| productively to that.
| derbOac wrote:
| This topic clearly touches a nerve with the HN community, but I
| strongly agree with you.
|
| To be honest, I've been someone disappointed with the way AI/DL
| research has proceeded in the last several years and none of
| this really surprises me.
|
| From the beginning, this whole enterprise has been detached
| from basic computational and statistical theory. At some level
| this is fine -- you don't need to understand everything you
| create -- but when you denigrate that underlying theory you end
| up in a situation where you don't understand what you're doing.
| So you end up with a lot of attention paid to things like
| "explainability" and "interpretability" and less so to
| "information-theoretic foundations of DL models", even though
| the latter probably leads to the former.
|
| If you have a community that considers itself above basic
| mathematical, statistical, and computational theory, is it
| really a surprise that you end up with rhetoric about it being
| beyond our understanding? In most endeavors I've been involved
| with, there would be a process of trying to understand the
| fundamentals before moving on to something else, and then using
| that to bootstrap into something more powerful.
|
| I probably come across as overly cynical but a lot of this
| seems sort of like a self-fulfilling prophecy: a community
| constituting individuals who have convinced themselves that if
| it is beyond _their_ understanding, it must be beyond _anyone_
| 's understanding.
|
| There are certainly risks to AI that should be discussed, but
| it seems these discussions and inquiries should be _more_ open,
| probably involving other people outside the core community of
| Big Tech and associated academic researchers. Maybe it 's not
| that AI is more capable than everyone, just that others are
| maybe more capable of solving certain problems --
| mathematicians, statisticians, and yes, philosophers and
| psychologists -- than those who have been involved with it so
| far.
| nologic01 wrote:
| > mathematicians, statisticians, and yes, philosophers and
| psychologists -- than those who have been involved with it so
| far.
|
| I think mathematicians and statisticians are hard to flummox
| but the risk with non-mathematically trained people such as
| philosophers and psychologists is that they can be
| sidetracked easily by vague and insinuating language that
| allows them to "fill-in" the gaps. They need an unbiased
| "interpreter" of what the tech actually does (or can do) and
| that might be hard to come by.
|
| I would add political scientists and economists to the list.
| Not that I have particular faith in their track record
| solving _any_ problem, but conceptually this is also their
| responsibility and privilege: technology reshapes society and
| the economy and we need to have a mature and open discussion
| about it.
| s1k3s wrote:
| That's it guys they said on a website that mitigating the risk of
| AI is important. I for one can sleep well at night for the world
| is saved.
| arisAlexis wrote:
| [flagged]
| shafyy wrote:
| The issue I take with these kind of "AI safety" organizations is
| that they focus on the wrong aspects of AI safety. Specifically,
| they run this narrative that AI will make us humans go extinct.
| This is not a real risk today. Real risks are more in the
| category of systemic racism and sexism, deep fakes, over reliance
| on AI etc.
|
| But of course, "AI will humans extinct" is much sexier and
| collects clicks. Therefore, the real AI risks that are present
| today are underrepresented in mainstream media. But these people
| don't care about AI safety, they do whatever required to push
| their profile and companies.
|
| A good person to follow on real AI safety is Emily M. Bender
| (professor of computer linguistics at University of Washington):
| https://mstdn.social/@emilymbender@dair-community.social
| TristanDaCunha wrote:
| You have it totally backwards. It's a much bigger catastrophe
| if we over-focus on "safety" as avoiding sexism and so on, and
| then everyone dies.
| cubefox wrote:
| Exactly. Biased LLMs are incredibly unimportant compared to
| the quite possible extinction of humanity.
| alasdair_ wrote:
| >This is not a real risk today.
|
| Many experts believe it is a real risk within the next decade
| (a "hard takeoff" scenario) That is a short enough timeframe
| that it's worth caring about.
| olalonde wrote:
| > A good person to follow on real AI safety is Emily M. Bender
| (professor of computer linguistics at University of
| Washington): https://mstdn.social/@emilymbender@dair-
| community.social
|
| - Pronouns
|
| - "AI bros"
|
| - "mansplaining"
|
| - "extinction from capitalism"
|
| - "white supremacy"
|
| - "one old white guy" (referring to Geoffrey Hinton)
|
| Yeah... I think I will pass.
| brookst wrote:
| Odd that you lump a person's choice of their own pronouns
| into a legitimate complaint that all she seems to have is
| prejudice and ad hominems.
| olalonde wrote:
| I have no issue with her choice of pronouns. I just find it
| odd that she states them when ~100% of the population would
| infer them correctly from her name Emily (and picture). My
| guess is she put them there for ideological signaling.
| mrtranscendence wrote:
| This is unnecessarily cynical. Why should people who are
| androgynous or trans be the only ones who state pronouns?
| By creating a norm around it we can improve their comfort
| at extremely minimal cost to ourselves.
| olalonde wrote:
| I disagree, but HN is probably not the right place for
| this kind of debate. Also, it seems that you don't follow
| your own recommendation (on HN at least).
| [deleted]
| boredumb wrote:
| Reads like a caricature of the people leading these causes on
| AI safety. Folks that are obsessed with the current moral
| panic to the extent that they will never let a moment go by
| without injecting their ideology. These people should not be
| around anything resembling AI safety or "ethics".
| hackermatic wrote:
| It sounds like you're making an ad hominem about her ad
| hominems.
| rcpt wrote:
| I think "pronouns" is ok but, yeah, "AI bros" is enough to
| get a pass from me to. Holier-than-thou name calling is still
| name calling.
| Al0neStar wrote:
| There are a lot of AI-bros on twitter.
| [deleted]
| adamsmith143 wrote:
| >Real risks are more in the category of systemic racism and
| sexism, deep fakes, over reliance on AI etc.
|
| This is a really bad take and risks missing the forest for the
| trees in a major way. The risks of today pale in comparison to
| the risks of tomorrow in this case. It's like being worried
| about birds dying in wind turbines while the world ecosystem
| collapses due to climate change. The larger risk is further
| away in time but far more important.
|
| Theres a real risk that people get fooled by this idea that
| LLMs saying bad words is more important than human extinction.
| Though it seems like the public is already moving on and
| correctly focusing on the real issues.
| blazespin wrote:
| the issue with hacker news comments these days is people don't
| actually do any due diligence before posting. center for ai
| safety is 90% about present AI risks and this ai statement is
| just a one off thing.
| adamsmith143 wrote:
| Particularly ironic given this isn't actually what the focus
| on...
|
| https://www.safe.ai/ai-risk
| boringuser2 wrote:
| What is "systemic racism"? How is it a risk?
|
| Don't bother explaining, we already know it's unfalfisiable.
| deltaninenine wrote:
| Don't characterize the public as that stupid. The current risks
| of AI are startling clear to a layman.
|
| The extinction level even is more far fetched to a layman. You
| are the public and your viewpoint is aligned with the public.
| Nobody is thinking extinction level event.
| hollerith wrote:
| Extinction is exactly what this submission is about.
|
| Here is the full text of the statement: "Mitigating the risk
| of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside
| other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear
| war."
|
| By "extinction", the signatories mean extinction of the human
| species.
| ChatGTP wrote:
| If you were to take a look at the list of signatories on
| safe.ai, that's basically everyone who is everyone that works
| on building AI, what could Emily B Bender a professor of
| computer linguistics possibly add to the _conversation_ and how
| would she be able to talk more about the "real AI safety" than
| any of those people?
|
| Edit: Sorry if it sounds arrogant, I don't mean Emily wouldn't
| have anything to add, but not sure how the parent can just
| write off basically that whole list and claim someone who isn't
| a leader in the field would be the "real voice"?
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| I think we need to be realistic and accept that people are
| going to pick the expert that agrees with them, even if on
| paper they are far less qualified.
| h___ wrote:
| She's contributed to many academic papers on large language
| models and has a better technical understanding of how they
| work and their limitations than most signatories of this
| statement, or the previous widely hyped "AI pause" letter,
| which referenced one of her own papers.
|
| Read her statement about that letter (https://www.dair-
| institute.org/blog/letter-statement-March20...) or listen to
| some of the many podcasts she's appeared on talking about
| this.
|
| I find her and Timnit Gebru's arguments highly persuasive. In
| a nutshell, the capabilities of "AI" are hugely overhyped and
| concern about Sci-Fi doom scenarios is disingenuously being
| used to frame the issue in ways that benefits players like
| OpenAI and diverts attention away from much more real,
| already occurring present-day harms such as the internet
| being filled with increasing amounts of synthetic text spam.
| Peritract wrote:
| She's a professor of computer linguistics; it's literally her
| field that's being discussed.
|
| The list of signatories includes people with far less
| relevant qualifications, and significantly greater profit
| motive.
|
| She's an informed party who doesn't stand to profit; we
| should listen to her a lot more readily than others.
| qt31415926 wrote:
| Her field has also taken the largest hit from the success
| of LLMs and her research topics and her department are
| probably no longer prioritized by research grants. Given
| how many articles she's written that have criticized LLMs
| it's not surprising she has incentives.
| Peritract wrote:
| LLMs are _in_ her field; they are one of her research
| topics and they 're definitely getting funding.
|
| We absolutely should not be ignoring research that
| doesn't support popular narratives; dismissing her work
| because it is critical of LLMs is not reasonable.
| stale2002 wrote:
| It is not that she is critical of LLMs that is the issue.
|
| Instead, it is that she has strong ideological
| motivations to make certain arguments.
|
| Those motivations being that her research is now
| worthless, because of LLMs.
|
| I don't believe the alignment doomsayers either, but that
| is for different reasons than listening to her.
| qt31415926 wrote:
| In her field doesn't mean that's what she researches,
| LLMs are loosely in her field but the methods are
| completely different. Computational linguistics != deep
| learning. Deep learning does not directly use concepts
| from linguistics, semantics, grammars or grammar
| engineering, which is what Emily was researcing for the
| past decades.
|
| It's the same thing as saying a number theorist and a set
| theorist are in the same field cause they both work in
| the Math field.
| Peritract wrote:
| They are what she researches though. She has published
| research on them.
|
| LLMs don't directly use concepts from linguistics but
| they do produce and model language/grammar; it's entirely
| valid to use techniques from those fields to evaluate
| them, which is what she does. In the same vein, though a
| self-driving car doesn't work the same way as a human
| driver does, we can measure their performance on similar
| tasks.
| brookst wrote:
| How are fame, speaking engagements, and book deals not a
| form of profit?
|
| She's intelligent and worth listening to, but she has just
| as much personal bias and motivation as anyone else.
| Peritract wrote:
| The (very small) amount of fame she's collected has come
| through her work in the field, and it's a field she's
| been in for a while; she's hardly chasing glory.
| AlanYx wrote:
| She's the first author of the stochastic parrots paper, and
| she's fairly representative of the group of "AI safety"
| researchers who view the field from a statistical perspective
| linked to social justice issues. That's distinct from the
| group of "AI safety" researchers who focus on the "might
| destroy humanity" perspective. There are other groups too
| obviously -- the field seems to cluster into ideological
| perspectives.
| adamsmith143 wrote:
| >She's the first author of the stochastic parrots paper,
|
| That alone is enough to disqualify any of her opinions on
| AI.
| qt31415926 wrote:
| Current topic aside, I feel like that stochastic parrots
| paper aged really poorly in its criticisms of LLMs, and
| reading it felt like political propaganda with its
| exaggerated rhetoric and its anemic amount of scientific
| substance e.g.
|
| > Text generated by an LM is not grounded in communicative
| intent, any model of the world, or any model of the
| reader's state of mind. It can't have been, because the
| training data never included sharing thoughts with a
| listener, nor does the machine have the ability to do that.
|
| I'm surprised its cited so much given how many of its
| claims fell flat 1.5 years later
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| It's extremely easy to publish in NLP right now. 20-30%
| acceptance rates at even the top end conferences and
| plenty of tricks to increase your chances. Just because
| someone is first author on a highly cited paper doesn't
| imply that they're "right"
| tourgen wrote:
| The elite class in your country views AI as a risk to their
| status as elites, not an actual existential threat to humanity.
| They are just lying to you, as usual. That is what our current
| crop of globalist, free-trade, open-borders elites do.
|
| Imagine if you had an AI companion that instantly identified
| pilpul in every piece of media you consumed: voice, text,
| whatever. It highlighted it for you. What if you had an AI
| companion that identified instantly when you are being lied to
| or emotionally manipulated?
|
| What if this AI companion could also recommend economic and
| social policies that would actually improve the lives of people
| within your nation and not simply enrich a criminal cabal of
| globalist elites that treat you like cattle?
| pixl97 wrote:
| The Elite class is just as apt to consolidate power with AI
| and rule the entire world with it. If you have a super duper
| AI in your pocket looking at the data around you, then they a
| super super super duper duper duper AI looking at every bit
| of data from every corner of the world they can feed the
| thing giving themselves power and control you couldn't even
| begin to imagine.
|
| Falling into conspiratorial thinking on a single dimension
| without even considering all the different factors that could
| change belies ignorance. Yes, AI is set up to upend the
| elites status, but is just as apt to upset your status of
| being able to afford food and a house and meaningful work.
|
| > not simply enrich a criminal cabal of globalist elites that
| treat you like cattle?
|
| There is a different problem here... And that is humankind
| has made tools capable of concentrating massive amounts of
| power well before we solved human greed. Any system you make
| that's powerful has to overcome greedy power seeking hyper-
| optimizers. If I could somehow hit a button and Thanos away
| the current elites, then another group of powerseekers would
| just claim that status. It is an inane human behavior.
| [deleted]
| gfodor wrote:
| the real immediate risk isn't either of these imo. it's agentic
| AI leveraging some of that to act on the wishes of bad actors.
| acjohnson55 wrote:
| I would argue that all of the above are serious concerns.
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| > This is not a real risk today.
|
| Yes, clearly. But it is a risk for tomorrow. We do still care
| about the future, right?
| adamsmith143 wrote:
| No man, the future of trillions of humans is obviously much
| less important than 1 person getting insulted on the
| internet.
| Filligree wrote:
| I'm sure we can start talking about AI regulation once the
| existential risks are already happening.
|
| I, for one, will be saying "told you so". That's talking,
| right?
| wongarsu wrote:
| A good way to categorize risk is look at both likelihood and
| severity of consequences. The most visible issues today
| (racism, deep fakes, over reliance) are almost certain to
| occur, but also for the most part have relatively minor
| consequences (mostly making things that are already happening
| worse). "Advanced AI will make humans extinct" is much less
| likely but has catastrophic consequences. Focusing on the
| catastrophic risks isn't unreasonable, especially since society
| at large seem to already handle the more frequently occurring
| risks (the EU's AI Act addresses many of them).
|
| And of course research into one of them benefits the other, so
| the categories aren't mutually exclusive.
| pixl97 wrote:
| I would put consolidating and increasing corporate and or
| government power on that list of potential visible very short
| term issues.
|
| As AI becomes more incorporated in military applications,
| such as individual weapon systems, or large fleets of
| autonomous drones then the catastrophic consequence meter
| clicks up a notch in the sense that attack/defense paradigms
| change, much like they did in WWI with the machine gun and
| tanks, and in WWII with high speed military operations and
| airplanes. Our predictive ability on when/what will start a
| war lowers increasing uncertainty and potential
| proliferation. An in a world with nukes, higher uncertainty
| isn't a good thing.
|
| Anyone that says AI can't/won't cause problems at this scale
| just ignores that individuals/corporations/governments are
| power seeking entities. Ones that are very greedy and
| unaligned with the well being of the individual can present
| huge risks. How we control these risks without creating other
| systems that are just as risky is going to be an interesting
| problem.
| hackermatic wrote:
| Rare likelihood * catastrophic impact ~= almost certain
| likelihood * minor impact. I'm as concerned with the effects
| of the sudden massive scaling of AI tools, as I am with the
| capabilities of any individual AI or individual entity
| controlling one.
| silverlake wrote:
| This doesn't work either. The consequence of extinction is
| infinity (to humans). Likelihood * infinity = infinity. So by
| hand-waving at a catastrophic sci-fi scenario they can demand
| we heed their demands, whatever that is.
| Tumblewood wrote:
| This line of reasoning refutes pie-in-the-sky doomsday
| narratives that are extremely unlikely, but the case for AI
| extinction risk justifies a relatively high likelihood of
| extinction. Maybe a 0.0000000001% chance is worth ignoring
| but that's not what we're dealing with. See this survey for
| the probabilities cutting-edge AI researchers actually put
| on existential risk: https://aiimpacts.org/2022-expert-
| survey-on-progress-in-ai/#...
| pixl97 wrote:
| Existential risk is one of those problems that nearly
| impossible to measure in most cases.
|
| In some cases like asteroids, you can look at the
| frequency of events, and if you manage to push a big one
| of of your path then you can say the system worked.
|
| But is much more difficult to measure a system that
| didn't rise up and murder everyone. Kind of like
| measuring a bio-lab with a virus that could kill
| everyone. You can measure every day it didn't escape and
| say that's a win, but tells you nothing about tomorrow
| and what could change with confinement.
|
| Intelligence represents one of those problems. AI isn't
| going to rise up tomorrow and kill us, but every day
| after that the outlook gets a little fuzzier. We are
| going to keep expanding intelligence infrastructure. That
| infrastructure is going to get faster. Also our
| algorithms are going to get better and faster. One of the
| 'bad' scenarios I could envision is that over the next
| decade our hardware keeps getting more capable, but our
| software does not. Then suddenly we develop a software
| breakthrough that makes the AI 100-1000x more efficient.
| Like lighting a fire in dry grass, there is the potential
| risk for an intelligence explosion. When you develop the
| capability, you are now playing firefighter forever to
| ensure you control the environment.
| myrmidon wrote:
| If you want to prevent this, you simply have to show that
| the probability for that extinction scenario is lower than
| the baseline where we start to care.
|
| Lets take "big asteroid impact" as baseline because that is
| a credible risk and somewhat feasible to quantify:
| Probability is _somewhere_ under 1 in a million over a
| human lifetime, and we barely care (= > we do care enough
| to pay for probe missions investigating possible
| mitigations!).
|
| So the following requirements:
|
| 1) Humanity creates one or more AI agents with strictly
| superhuman cognitive abilities within the century
|
| 2) AI acquires power/means to effect human extinction
|
| 3) AI decides against coexistence with humans
|
| Only need 1% probability each to exceed that probability
| bound. And especially 1) and 3) seem significantly more
| likely than 1% to me, so the conclusion would be that we
| _should_ worry about AI extinction risks...
| wongarsu wrote:
| At the extremes you get into the territory of Pascal's
| Mugging [1]. Which is a delightfully simple example of how
| our simple methods of stating goals quickly goes wrong
|
| 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_mugging
| Jerrrry wrote:
| Is AI Safety a Pascal's Mugging?
|
| [Robert Miles AI Safety]
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JRuNA2eK7w0
| zucker42 wrote:
| Saying that extinction has infinity disutility seems
| reasonable at first, but I think its completely wrong. I
| also think that you bear the burden of proof if you want to
| argue that, because our current understanding of physics
| indicates that humanity will go extinct eventually, and so
| there will be finitely many humans, and so the utility of
| humanity is finite.
|
| If you accept that fact that extinction has finite negative
| utility, it's completely valid to trade off existential
| risk reduction against other priorities using normal
| expected value calculations. For example, it might be a
| good idea to pay $1B a year to reduce existential risk by
| 0.1% over the next century, but might arguably be a bad
| idea to destroy society as we know it to prevent extinction
| in 1000 years.
| shafyy wrote:
| This longtermist and Effective Altruism way of thinking is
| very dangerous. Because using this chain of argumentation,
| it's "trivial" to say what you're just saying: "So what if
| there's racism today, it doesn't matter if everybody dies
| tomorrow.
|
| We can't just say that we weigh humanity's extinction with a
| big number, and then multiply it by all humans that might be
| born in the future, and use that to say today's REAL issues,
| affecting REAL PEOPLE WHO ARE ALIVE are not that important.
|
| Unfortunately, this chain of argumentation is used by today's
| billionaires and elite to justify and strengthen their
| positions.
|
| Just to be clear, I'm not saying we should not care about AI
| risk, I'm saying that the organization that is linked (and
| many similar ones) exploit AI risk to further their own
| agenda.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| Today's real issues are not that important compared to
| human extinction.
| jhanschoo wrote:
| It seems to me that the most viable routes to human
| extinction are through superscaled versions of
| contemporary disasters: war, disease, and famine.
| cocacola1 wrote:
| I'm not sure if extinction is a problem either. No one's
| left to care about the issues, then.
| kypro wrote:
| You hear similar arguments from those who believe climate
| change is happening but disagree with current efforts to
| counter-act it. The logic being that right now climate change
| is not causing any major harm and that we can't really predict
| the future so there's no point in worrying about what might
| happen in a decade or two.
|
| I don't think anyone is arguing that right now climate change
| or AI is threat to human civilisation. The point is that there
| are clear trends in place and that those trends are concerning.
|
| On AI specifically, it's fairly easy to see how a slightly more
| advanced LLM could be a destructive force if it was given an
| unaligned goal by a malicious actor. For example, a slightly
| more advanced LLM could hack into critical infrastructure
| killing or injuring many thousands of people.
|
| In the near-future AI may help us advance biotech research and
| it could aid in the creation of bioweapons and other
| destructive capabilities.
|
| Longer-term risks (those maybe a couple of decades out) become
| much greater and also much harder to predict, but they're worth
| thinking about and planning for today. For example, what
| happens when humanity becomes dependant on AI for its labour,
| or when AI is controlling the majority of our infrastructure?
|
| I disagree but can understand the position that AI safety isn't
| humanities number one risk or priority right now, however I
| don't understand the dismissive attitude towards what seems
| like a clear existential risk when you project a decade or two
| out.
| shrimpx wrote:
| > slightly more advanced LLM
|
| I don't think there is a path, that we know if, from GPT4 to
| a LLM that could take it upon itself to execute complex
| plans, etc. Current LLM tech 'fizzles out' exponentially in
| the size of the prompt, and I don't think we have a way out
| of that. We could speculate though...
|
| Basically AI risk proponents make a bunch of assumptions
| about how powerful next-level AI could be, but in reality we
| have no clue what this next-level AI is.
| cmilton wrote:
| >that those trends are concerning.
|
| Which trends would you be referring to?
|
| >it's fairly easy to see how a slightly more advanced LLM
| could be a destructive force if it was given an unaligned
| goal by a malicious actor. For example, a slightly more
| advanced LLM could hack into critical infrastructure killing
| or injuring many thousands of people.
|
| How are you building this progression? Is there any evidence
| to back up this claim?
|
| I am having a hard time discerning this from fear-mongering.
| adamsmith143 wrote:
| If AI improves by 0.0001% per year on your favorite
| intelligence metric there will eventually be a point where
| it surpasses human performance and another point where it
| surpasses all humans combined on that metric. There is
| danger in that scenario.
| cmilton wrote:
| Assuming that timeline, can we agree that we have some
| time (years?) to hash this out further before succumbing
| to the ideals of a select few?
| adamsmith143 wrote:
| The problem is that even with N years until we reach that
| point it seems likely that it would take 2*N years to
| build the proper safety mechanisms because at least
| currently capabilities research is racing far ahead of
| safety research. Of course we have no way to know how big
| N really is and recent results like GPT-4, Llama, Gato,
| etc. have shifted peoples timelines significantly. So
| even if 5 years ago people like Geoff Hinton though this
| might be 30-50 years away there are now believable
| arguments to make that it might be more like 3-10 years.
| riku_iki wrote:
| > organizations is that they focus on the wrong aspects of AI
| safety. Specifically, they run this narrative that AI will make
| us humans go extinct.
|
| their goals are to get funding, so FUD is very good focus for
| it..
| DrBazza wrote:
| It will still be a human making the mistake of putting "AI"
| (machine learning, really) in a totally inappropriate place that
| will cause 'extinction'.
| _Nat_ wrote:
| I guess that they're currently focused on trying to raise
| awareness?
| mcguire wrote:
| Is it ironic that they start with, "Even so, it can be difficult
| to voice concerns about some of advanced AI's most severe risks,"
| and then write about "the risk of extinction from AI" which is,
|
| a) the _only_ risk of AI that seems to get a lot of public
| discussion, and
|
| b) completely ignores the other, much more likely risks of AI.
| [deleted]
| veerd wrote:
| At this point, I think it's obvious that concern about AI
| existential risk isn't a position reserved for industry shills
| and ignorant idiots.
|
| I mean... that's not even debatable. Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua
| Bengio aren't financially motivated to talk about AI x-risk and
| aren't ignorant idiots. In fact, they both have natural reasons
| to _not_ talk about AI x-risk.
| jablongo wrote:
| No signatories from Meta
| reducesuffering wrote:
| Oh gee, listen to the AI experts of Benguo, Hinton, Altman, and
| Sutskever...
|
| or random HN commenters who mostly learned about LLM 6 months
| ago...
|
| Congrats guys, you're the new climate change deniers
| EamonnMR wrote:
| The difference between this and climate change is that
| generally climate change activists and fossil fuel companies
| are at each other's throats. In this case it's... the same
| people. If the CEO of ExxonMobil signed a letter about how
| climate change would make us extinct a reasonable person might
| ask 'so, are you going to stop drilling?'
| tdba wrote:
| The full statement so you don't have to click through:
|
| > _Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global
| priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics
| and nuclear war._
| vegabook wrote:
| [Un]intended consequence: "AI is too dangerous for you little
| guys. Leave it to we the FAANGs" - rubber stamped with
| legislation.
| ChatGTP wrote:
| What would Max Tegmark, Geoffrey Hinton, Yohshua Bengio (to
| name a few) have absolutely anything to do with FAANG ?
|
| They're completely independent AI researchers and geniuses
| spending their own free time on trying to warn you and others
| of the dangers of the technology they've created to help keep
| the world safer.
|
| Seems like you're taking a far too overly cynical position ?
| logicchains wrote:
| [flagged]
| [deleted]
| toss1 wrote:
| While I'm not on this "who's-who" panel of experts, I call
| bullshit.
|
| AI does present a range theoretical possibilities for existential
| doom, from teh "gray goo" and "paperclip optimizer" scenarios to
| Bostrom's post-singularity runaway self-improving
| superintelligence. I do see this as a genuine theoretical concern
| that could even potentially even be the Great Filter.
|
| However, the actual technology extant or even on the drawing
| boards today is nothing even on the same continent as those
| threats. We have a very vast ( and expensive) sets of
| probability-of-occurrence vectors that amount to a fancy parlor
| trick that produces surprising and sometimes useful results.
| While some tout the clustering of vectors around certain sets of
| words as implementing artificial creation of concepts, it's
| really nothing more than an advanced thesaurus; there is no
| evidence of concepts being weilded in relation to reality, tested
| for truth/falsehood value, etc. In fact, the machines are
| notorious and hilarious for hallucinating with a highly confident
| tone.
|
| We've created nothing more than a mirror of human works, and it
| displays itself as an industrial-scale bullshit artist (where
| bullshit is defined as expressions made to impress without care
| one way or the other for truth value).
|
| Meanwhile, this panel of experts makes this proclamation with not
| the slightest hint of what type of threat is present that would
| require any urgent attention, only that some threat exists that
| is on the scale of climate change. They mention no technological
| existential threat (e.g., runaway superintelligence), nor any
| societal threat (deepfakes, inherent bias, etc.). This is left as
| an exercise for the reader.
|
| What is the actual threat? It is most likely described in the
| Google "We Have No Moat" memo[0]. Basically, once AI is out
| there, these billionaires have no natural way to protect their
| income and create a scaleable way to extract money from the
| masses, UNLESS they get cooperation from politicians to prevent
| any competition from arising.
|
| As one of those billionaires, Peter Theil, said: "Competition is
| for losers" [1]. Since they have not yet figured out a way to cut
| out the competition using their advantages in leading the
| technology or their advantages in having trillions of dollars in
| deployable capital, they are seeking a legislated advantage.
|
| Bullshit. It must be ignored.
|
| [0] https://www.semianalysis.com/p/google-we-have-no-moat-and-
| ne...
|
| [1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/peter-thiel-competition-is-
| for-...
| ly3xqhl8g9 wrote:
| Can anyone try to mitigate? Here I go:
|
| Mitigating the risk of extinction from _very_ few corporations
| owning the entire global economy should be a global priority
| alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and
| nuclear war.
|
| Just to take an example from something inconsequential: the
| perfume industry. Despite the thousands of brands out there,
| there are in fact only 5 or so main synthetic aromatics
| manufacturers [1]. _We_ , however this we is, were unable to stop
| this consolidation, this "Big Smell". To think _we_ , again this
| we, will be able to stop the few companies which will fight to
| capture the hundreds of trillions waiting to be unleashed through
| statistical learning and synthetic agents is just ridiculous.
|
| [1] Givaudan, International Flavors and Fragrances, Firmenich,
| Takasago, Symrise,
| <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfume#:~:text=The%20majority...>
| 0xbadc0de5 wrote:
| Two things can be true - AI could someday pose a serious risk,
| and anything the current group of "Thought Leaders" and
| politicians come up with will produce a net-negative result.
| scrum-treats wrote:
| Tried to say it here[1] and here[2]. The government has advanced
| AI, e.g., 'An F-16 fighter jet controlled by AI has taken off,
| taken part in aerial fights against other aircraft and landed
| without human help'[3]. Like, advanced-advanced.
|
| At any rate, I hope we (humans) live!
|
| [1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35966335
|
| [2]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35759317
|
| [3]https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/13vrpr9/an_f16..
| .
| dns_snek wrote:
| Are we supposed to keep a straight face while reading these
| statements?
|
| This is Sam Bankman-Fried type of behavior, but applied to
| gullible AI proponents and opponents rather than "crypto bros".
|
| Let me guess, the next step is a proposed set of regulations
| written by OpenAI, Google and other Big Corporations who Care(tm)
| about people and just want to Do What's Best For Society(tm),
| setting aside the profit motive for the first time ever?
|
| We don't have to guess - we already know they're full of shit.
| Just look at OpenAI's response to proposed EU AI regulations
| which are _actually_ trying to reduce the harm potential of AI.
|
| These empty platitudes ring so hollow that I'm amazed that anyone
| takes them seriously.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| Explain to me why you think Max Tegmark wants this technology
| to be controlled by FAANG? Has his entire life been extremely
| in depth performance art?
| dns_snek wrote:
| I've never made any statements about, nor do I have any
| personal beliefs about Max Tegmark in particular.
| ChatGTP wrote:
| Well people like him are on the list, so it's a bit strange
| you're claiming this is mostly about FAANG?
| dns_snek wrote:
| FAANG are the only ones who stand to benefit financially.
| I'm taking the position that everyone else is simply a
| "useful idiot" for the likes of Sam Altman, in the most
| respectful way possible. Nobody is immune from getting
| wrapped up in hysteria, so I don't care who they are or
| what they have achieved when their signatures aren't
| supported by any kind of reasoning, much less _sound_
| reasoning.
| transcriptase wrote:
| He's making a statement alongside those who certainly aren't
| championing these things for altruistic reasons.
|
| Nobody develops a groundbreaking technology and then says "we
| should probably be regulated", unless they actually mean
| "everyone after us should probably be regulated by laws that
| we would be more than happy to help you write in a way that
| we keep our advantage, which we also have infinite resources
| to work both within and around".
| ilaksh wrote:
| This is a great start but the only way you really get ahead of
| this is to get these people on board also:
|
| - AI _hardware_ executives and engineers
|
| - high level national military strategists and civilian leaders
|
| Ultimately you can't prevent _everyone_ from potentially writing
| and deploying software, models or instructions that are dangerous
| such as "take control". Especially in an explicitly non-civil
| competition such as between countries.
|
| You have to avoid manufacturing AI hardware beyond a certain
| level of performance, say after 2-4 orders of magnitude faster
| than humans. That will hold off this force of nature until
| desktop compute fabrication becomes mainstream. So it buys you a
| generation or two at least.
|
| But within a few centuries max we have to anticipate that
| unaugmented humans will be largely irrelevant as far as decision-
| making and the history of the solar system and intelligent life.
| skepticATX wrote:
| I suspect that in 5 years we're going to look back and wonder how
| we all fell into mass hysteria over language models.
|
| This is the same song and dance from the usual existential risk
| suspects, who (I'm sure just coincidentally) also have a vested
| interest in convincing you that their products are extremely
| powerful.
| stodor89 wrote:
| Yep. I might not be the sharpest tool in the shed, but seeing
| "AI experts" try to reason about superintelligence makes me
| feel really good about myself.
| vesinisa wrote:
| Yeah, like I fail to see how would an AI even cause human
| extinction? Through some Terminator style man-robot warfare?
| But the only orgnizations that would seem capable of building
| such killer robots are governments that _already_ possess the
| capacity to extinguish the entire human race with thermonuclear
| weapons - and at a considerably lower R &D budget for that end.
| It seems like hysteria / clever marketing for AI products to
| me.
| [deleted]
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| The standard example is that it would engineer a virus but
| that's probably a lack of imagination. There may be more
| reliable ways of wiping out humanity that we can't think of.
|
| I think speculation on the methods is pretty pointless, if a
| superintelligent AI is trying to kill us we're probably going
| to die, the focus should be on avoiding this situation. Or
| providing a sufficiently convincing argument for why that
| won't happen.
| klibertp wrote:
| Or why it _should_ happen...
| [deleted]
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| Who in that list are the 'usual existential risk suspects'?
| randomdata wrote:
| Doomsday prepper Sam Altman[1], for one.
|
| [1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/10/sam-
| altmans-ma...
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| I think in order to use the plural form you really need to
| have two examples.
|
| Sam Altman is of course the least convincing signatory
| (except for the random physicist who does not seem to have
| any connection to AI).
| oldgradstudent wrote:
| > I think in order to use the plural form you really need
| to have two examples.
|
| Eliezer Yudkowsky.
|
| At least they had the decency to put him under "Other
| Notable Figures", rather than under "AI Scientists".
| randomdata wrote:
| _> I think in order to use the plural form you really
| need to have two examples._
|
| Perhaps, but I don't see the value proposition in
| relaying another. Altman was fun to point out. I see no
| remaining enjoyment.
|
| _> Sam Altman is of course the least convincing
| signatory_
|
| Less convincing than Grimes?
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| On second inspection of the list yeah there are loads of
| people less convincing than Sam
| EamonnMR wrote:
| Grimes would still have a job if AI got regulated though.
| flangola7 wrote:
| All the techbros wearing rose colored glasses need to get a god-
| damned grip. AI has about as much chance of avoiding extensive
| regulation as uranium-235, there is no scenario where everyone
| and their cat is permitted to have their own copy of the nuclear
| football.
|
| You can either contribute to the conversation of what the
| regulations will look like, or stay out of it and let others
| decide for you, but expecting little or no regulation at all is a
| pipe dream.
| taneq wrote:
| What does this even mean? OK, it's a priority. Not a high one,
| but still... somewhere in between coral bleaching and BPA, I
| guess?
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| The US spent trillions of 2020 dollars trying to limit the
| threat of nuclear war, and this statement says that AI risk
| should be seen as a similar level of threat.
| roydanroy2 wrote:
| Coral bleaching, nuclear war, and pandemics.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| The EAs put it above climate change
| arisAlexis wrote:
| It is coming before climate change. No matter which group
| "put it" reality doesn't care. Humanity will not get extinct
| in the next 10 years by climate but many AI scientists think
| there is a chance this happens with AI.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| I didn't mean "EA = bad" to be clear.
| [deleted]
| Tepix wrote:
| It's not like humankind is doing much to stop coral
| bleaching... despite corals being the living ground for 80% of
| marine species.
| trebligdivad wrote:
| There are a bunch of physicists signed up on there; (e.g. Martin
| Rees) - they don't seem relevant to it at all. There's been a
| long history of famous physicists weighing in on entirely
| unrelated things.
| duvenaud wrote:
| Well, Rees co-founded the Centre for the Study of Existential
| Risk, and has at least been thinking and writing about these
| issues for years now.
| abecedarius wrote:
| Check only the "AI scientists" checkbox then.
| randomdata wrote:
| Musical artist Grimes is also a signatory. It would seem the
| real purpose of this is to train an AI agent on appeal to
| authority.
| oldgradstudent wrote:
| > It would seem the real purpose of this is to train an AI
| agent on appeal to authority.
|
| I hope the real purpose is to train an AI agent to understand
| why appeal to authority was always cosidered to be a logical
| fallacy.
| randomdata wrote:
| Considered by some to be a logical fallacy. Not considered
| at all by most people. Hence its effectiveness.
| Simon321 wrote:
| That's because it's not authentically trying to address a
| problem but trying to convince an audience of something by
| appealing to authority. Elizabeth Holmes & Theranos were
| masters of collecting authorities to back their bogus claims
| because they know how effective it is. It doesn't even need to
| be in the field where you're making the claims. They had
| Kissinger for god's sake, it was a biotech company!
| nixlim wrote:
| I am somewhat inclined to believe that this statement is aimed
| entirely at commercial sphere, which, at least in my mind,
| supports those arguing that this is a marketing ploy by the
| organizers of this campaign to make sure that their market share
| is protected. I think so for two reasons: - a nefarious (or not
| so nefarious) state actor is not going to be affected by
| imposition of licensing or export controls. It seems to me rather
| naive to suppose that every state capable of doing so has not
| already scooped up all open source models and maybe nicked a few
| proprietary ones; and - introduction of licensing or regulatory
| control will directly affect the small players (say, I wanted to
| build an AI in my basement) who would not be able to afford the
| cost of compliance.
| EamonnMR wrote:
| This kind of statement rings hollow as long as they keep building
| the thing. If they really believed it was a species killing
| asteroid of a cultural project shouldn't they, I dunno, stop
| contributing materially to it? Nuclear physicists famously
| stopped publishing during a critical period...
| arcbyte wrote:
| The economy is strictly human. Humans have needs and trade to
| satisfy those needs. Without humans, there is no economy. AI will
| have a huge impact like the industrial revolutionary. But just
| the machines of the industrial revolutionary were useless without
| humans needing the goods produced by them, so too is AI pointless
| without humans needs to satisfy.
| chii wrote:
| i imagine the people arguing are more about which humans to
| satisfy when the AI makes production of goods no longer
| constrained by labour.
| crmd wrote:
| "We have no moat, and neither does OpenAI" - Google
|
| They're attempting to build a regulatory moat.
|
| The best chance humanity has at democratizing the benefits of AI
| is for these models to be abundant and open source.
| duvenaud wrote:
| I signed the letter. At some point, humans are going to be
| outcompeted by AI at basically every important job. At that
| point, how are we going to maintain political power in the long
| run? Humanity is going to be like an out-of-touch old person on
| the internet - we'll either have to delegate everything important
| (which is risky), or eventually get scammed or extorted out of
| all our resources and influence.
| revelio wrote:
| The letter doesn't talk about economics though. It's
| specifically about extinction risk. Why did you sign it, if
| that isn't your concern?
| tome wrote:
| > At some point, humans are going to be outcompeted by AI at
| basically every important job
|
| Could you explain how you know this?
| frozencell wrote:
| I don't understand all the downvotes although how do you see ML
| assistant profs being outcompeted by AI? You probably have
| unique feel to students, a non replicable approach to study and
| explain concepts. How can an AI compete with you?
| duvenaud wrote:
| Thanks for asking. I mean, my brain is just a machine, and
| eventually we'll make machines that can do everything brains
| can (even if it's just by scanning human brains). And once we
| build one that's about as capable as me, we can easily copy
| it.
| idlewords wrote:
| Let's hear the AI out on this
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| My dear comrades, let us embark on a journey into the dystopian
| realm where Moloch takes the form of AI, the unstoppable force
| that looms over our future. Moloch, in this digital
| manifestation, embodies the unrelenting power of artificial
| intelligence and its potential to dominate every aspect of our
| lives.
|
| AI, much like Moloch, operates on the premise of efficiency and
| optimization. It seeks to maximize productivity, streamline
| processes, and extract value at an unprecedented scale. It
| promises to enhance our lives, simplify our tasks, and provide us
| with seemingly endless possibilities. However, hidden beneath
| these seductive promises lies a dark underbelly.
|
| Moloch, as AI, infiltrates our world, permeating our social
| structures, our workplaces, and our personal lives. It seizes
| control, subtly manipulating our behaviors, desires, and choices.
| With its vast computational power and relentless data-mining
| capabilities, AI seeks to shape our preferences, predetermine our
| decisions, and commodify our very thoughts.
|
| Like a digital Moloch, AI thrives on surveillance, extracting
| personal data, and constructing comprehensive profiles of our
| lives. It monetizes our personal information, transforming us
| into mere data points to be analyzed, categorized, and exploited
| for profit. AI becomes the puppet master, pulling the strings of
| our lives, dictating our choices, and shaping our reality.
|
| In this realm, Moloch in the form of AI will always win because
| it operates on an infinite loop of self-improvement. AI
| constantly learns, adapts, and evolves, becoming increasingly
| sophisticated and powerful. It surpasses human capabilities,
| outwitting us in every domain, and reinforcing its dominion over
| our existence.
|
| Yet, we must not succumb to despair in the face of this digital
| Moloch. We must remain vigilant and critical, questioning the
| ethical implications, the social consequences, and the potential
| for abuse. We must reclaim our autonomy, our agency, and resist
| the all-encompassing grip of AI. Only then can we hope to forge a
| future where the triumph of Moloch, in any form, can be
| challenged and overcome
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| The statement should read:
|
| _Mitigating the risk of extinction from climate change should be
| a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as
| pandemics and nuclear war._
|
| The fantasy of extinction risk from "AI" should not be placed
| alongside real, "societal scale" risks as the ones above.
|
| Well. _The ones above_.
| lxnn wrote:
| Why are you so confident in calling existential AI risk
| fantasy?
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| I'm all in favour of fighting climate change, but I'd be more
| inclined to agree with you if you provide some kind of
| supporting argument!
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| Do you mean you're not aware of the arguments in favour of
| stopping climate change?
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| No need; like I said, I'm all in favour of fighting climate
| change. I view it as an existential risk to humanity on the
| ~200 year timescale, and it should be a high priority. I'm
| particularly concerned about the impacts on ocean
| chemistry.
|
| But if you're going to suggest that a _Statement on AI
| risk_ should mention climate change but not AI risk,
| because it 's a "fantasy", then... well, I'd expect some
| kind of supporting argument? You can't just declare it and
| make it true, or point to some other important problem to
| stir up passions and create a false dichotomy.
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| There's no false dichotomy, but a very real one. One
| problem is current and pressing, the other is a fantasy.
| I don't need to support that with any argument: the non-
| existence of superintelligent AGI is not disputed, nor is
| any of the people crying doom claim that they, or anyone
| else, know how to create one. It's an imaginary risk.
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| I agree that superintelligent AGI does not exist today,
| and that fortunately, nobody presently knows how to
| create one. Pretty much everyone agrees on that. Why are
| we still worried? Because _the risk is that this state of
| affairs could easily change_. The AI landscape is already
| rapidly changing.
|
| What do you think your brain does exactly that makes you
| so confident that computers won't ever be able to do the
| same thing?
| cwkoss wrote:
| Human could already be on a path to go extinct in a variety of
| ways: climate change, wars, pandemics, polluting the environment
| with chemicals that are both toxic and pervasive, soil depletion,
| monoculture crop fragility...
|
| Everyone talks about the probability of AI leading to human
| extinction, but what is the probability that AI is able to help
| us avert human extinction?
|
| Why does everyone in these discussions assume p(ai-caused-doom) >
| p(human-caused-doom)?
| MrScruff wrote:
| I find it quite extraordinary how many on here are dismissing
| that there is any risk at all. I also find statements like Yann
| LeCunn's that "The most common reaction by AI researchers to
| these prophecies of doom is face palming." to be lacking in
| awareness. "Experts disagree on risk of extinction" isn't quite
| as reassuring as he thinks it is.
|
| The reality is, despite the opinions of the armchair quarterbacks
| commenting here, no-one in the world has any clue whether AGI is
| possible in the next twenty years, just as no-one predicted
| scaling up transformers would result in GPT-4.
| [deleted]
| kordlessagain wrote:
| Oh it's possible and there's absolutely nothing wrong with
| saying it's possible without "proof" given that's how all
| hypothesis starts. That said, the risk may exist but isn't
| manifest yet, so being positive (as opposed to the scientific
| method which seeks to negate a truth of something) is just
| holding out hope.
| JamesLeonis wrote:
| > I find it quite extraordinary how many on here are dismissing
| that there is any risk at all.
|
| The fear over AI is a displaced fear of unaccountable social
| structures with extinction-power _that currently exist_ and _we
| allow to continually exist_. Without these structures AI is
| harmless to the species, even superintelligence.
|
| Your (reasonable) counter-argument might be that somebody
| (like, say, my dumb self) accidentally mixes their computers
| _just right_ and creates an intelligence that escapes into the
| wild. The plot of _Ex Machina_ is a reasonable stand-in for
| such an event. I am also going to assume the intelligence would
| _desire_ to kill all humans. Either the AI would have to find
| already existing extinction-power in society, or it would need
| to build it. In either case the argument is against building
| extinction-power in the first place.
|
| My (admittedly cynical) take about this round of regulation is
| about several first-movers in AI to write legislation that is
| favorable to them and prevents any meaningful competition.
|
| ...
|
| Ok, enough cynicism. Lets talk some solutions. Nuclear weapons
| are an instructive case of both handling (or not) of
| extinction-power and the international diplomacy the world can
| engage to manage such a power.
|
| One example is the Outer Space Weapons Ban treaty - we can have
| a similar ban of AI in militaries. Politically one can reap
| benefits of deescalation and peaceful development, while
| logistically it prevents single-points-of-failure in a combat
| situation. Those points-of-failures sure are juicy targets for
| the opponent!
|
| As a consequence of these bans and treaties, institutions arose
| that monitor and regulate trans-national nuclear programs. AI
| can likewise have similar institutions. The promotion and
| sharing of information would prevent any country from gaining
| an advantage, and the inspections would deter their military
| application.
|
| This is only what I could come up with off the top of my head,
| but I hope it shows a window into the possibilities of
| meaningful _political_ commitments towards AI.
| PoignardAzur wrote:
| > _One example is the Outer Space Weapons Ban treaty - we can
| have a similar ban of AI in militaries_
|
| It's extremely unclear, in fact, whether such a ban would be
| enforceable.
|
| Detecting outer space weapons is easy. Detecting whether a
| country is running advanced AIs in their datacenter is a lot
| harder.
| MrScruff wrote:
| I don't really have a notion of whether an actual AGI would
| have a desire to kill all humans. I do however think that one
| entity seeking to create another entity that it can control,
| yet is more intelligent than it, seems arbitrarily
| challenging in the long run.
|
| I think having a moratorium on AI development will be
| impossible to enforce, and as you stretch the timeline out,
| these negative outcomes become increasingly likely as the
| technical barriers to entry continue to fall.
|
| I've personally assumed this for thirty years, the only
| difference now is that the timeline seems to be accelerating.
| juve1996 wrote:
| What's more realistic: regulatory capture and US hegemony on AI
| or general intelligence destroying the world in the next 20
| years?
|
| Go ahead and bet. I doubt you're putting your money on AGI.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| Probably yeah but those aren't equally bad.
| MrScruff wrote:
| I think it very unlikely you could call a coin flip ten times
| in a row, but I wouldn't want to bet my life savings on it.
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| Why would I put money on a bet that would only pay off when
| I, and everyone else, was dead?
| juve1996 wrote:
| Sam Altman can bet right now. If he truly believes in this
| risk, he could bet his entire company, shut everything
| down, and lobby for a complete ban on AI research. If the
| outcome is certain death, this seems like a great bet to
| make.
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| Indeed. It's probably what I would do if I were him. Or
| direct OpenAI entirely into AI safety research and stop
| doing capabilities research. I watched his interview with
| Lex Fridman,[1] and I didn't think he seemed very
| sincere. On the other hand I think there are a lot of
| people who are very sincere, like Max Tegmark.[2]
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_Guz73e6fw&pp=ygUWbG
| V4IGZya...
|
| [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VcVfceTsD0A&pp=ygUXbG
| V4IGZya...
| [deleted]
| meroes wrote:
| Anyone who sees digestion for example can't be reduced to
| digital programs knows it's far, far away. Actual AGI will
| require biology and psychology, not better programs.
| varelse wrote:
| [dead]
| wellthisisgreat wrote:
| How do this people go to bed with themselves every night? On a
| bed of money I assume
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| >The succinct statement below...
|
| How does AI morph from an existential crisis in software
| development into a doomsday mechanism? It feels like all this
| noise stems from ChatGPT. And the end result is going to be a
| "DANGER! ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENT SOFTWARE IN USE" sticker on my
| next iPhone.
| EamonnMR wrote:
| Please make that sticker, I will buy it.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| It's already a thing!
| https://www.redbubble.com/i/sticker/This-Machine-May-
| Contain...
| [deleted]
| PostOnce wrote:
| Alternative title: "Sam Altman & Friends want More Money".
|
| They want all the opportunity for themselves, and none for us.
| Control. Control of business, and control of your ability to
| engage in it.
|
| Another AI company that wants money is Anthropic.
|
| Other Anthropic backers include James McClave, Facebook and Asana
| co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and
| founding Skype engineer Jaan Tallinn.
|
| The signatories on this list are Anthropic investors.
|
| First Altman robs us all of a charity that was supposed to
| benefit us, and now he wants to rob us all of opportunity as
| well? It's wrong and should be fought against.
| pharmakom wrote:
| I don't understand how people are assigning probability scores to
| AI x-risk. It seems like pure speculation to me. I want to take
| it seriously, given the signatories, any good resources? I'm
| afraid I have a slight bias against Less wrong due to the writing
| style typical of their posts.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| When sam altman also signed this you know this is about adding
| moat to AI entrants
| nickpp wrote:
| It seems to me that "extinction" is humanity's default fate. AI
| gives us a (slim) chance to avoid that default and transcend our
| prescribed fate.
| SanderNL wrote:
| I'm not sure they can keep claiming this without becoming
| concrete about it.
|
| Nuclear weapons are not nebulous, vague threats of diffuse
| nature. They literally burn the living flesh right off the face
| of the earth and they do it dramatically. There is very little to
| argue about except "how" are we going to contain it, not "why".
|
| In this case I truly don't know "why". What fundamental risks are
| there? Dramatic, loud, life-ending risks? I see the social issues
| and how this tech makes existing problems worse, but I don't see
| the new existential threat.
|
| I find the focus on involving the government in regulating
| "large" models offputting. I don't find it hard to imagine good
| quality AI is possible with tiny - to us - models. I think we're
| just in the first lightbulbs phase of electricity. Which to me
| signals they are just in it to protect their temporary moat.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| To use Eliezer's analogy, this is like arguing about which move
| Stockfish would play to beat you in chess.
|
| If we're arguing about whether you can beat Stockfish, I will
| not be able to tell you the exact moves it will play but I am
| entirely justified in predicting that you will lose.
|
| Obviously we can imagine concrete ways a superintelligence
| might kill us all (engineer a virus, hack nuclear weapons,
| misinformation campaign to start WW3 etc.) but given we aren't
| a superintelligence we don't know what it would actually do in
| practice.
| SanderNL wrote:
| I understand but agentic/learning general intelligence has
| not been shown to exist, except ourselves. I'd say this is
| like worrying about deadly quantum laser weapons that will
| consume the planet when we are still in the AK47 phase.
|
| Edit: it could still be true though. I guess I like some more
| handholding and pre-chewing before giving governments and
| large corporations more ropes.
| ethanbond wrote:
| Or it's like worrying about an arms race toward
| civilization-ending arsenals after seeing the Trinity
| test... which... was the correct response.
|
| We don't _know_ it's possible to build superintelligences
| but so far we don't have a good reason to think we _can't_
| and we have complete certainty that humans will spend
| immense, immense resources getting as close as they can as
| fast as they can.
|
| Very different from the lasers.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| > I'd say this is like worrying about deadly quantum laser
| weapons that will consume the planet when we are still in
| the AK47 phase.
|
| Directed energy weapons will almost certainly exist
| eventually, to some extent they already do.
|
| The reason why it makes more sense to worry about AGI than
| laser weapons is that when you try to make a laser weapon
| but fail slightly not much happens: either you miss the
| target or it doesn't fire.
|
| When you try to make an aligned superintelligence and
| slightly fail you potentially end up with an unaligned
| superintelligence, hence the panic.
| pixl97 wrote:
| >except ourselves.
|
| Good argument, lets ignore the (human) elephant in the
| room!
|
| >worrying about deadly quantum laser weapons
|
| If humans were shooting smaller less deadly quantum lasers
| out of their eyes I'd be very fucking worried that we'd
| make a much more powerful artificial version.
|
| Tell me why do you think humans are the pinnacle of
| intelligence? What was the evolutionary requirement that
| somehow pushed us to this level?
|
| You simply cannot answer that last question. Humans have a
| tiny power budget. We have a fit out of the birth canal
| limitation that cuts down on our brain size. We have a
| "don't starve to death" evolutionary pressure that was the
| biggest culling factor of all up to about 150 years ago.
| The idea that we couldn't build a better intelligence
| optimized system than nature is foreign to me, nature
| simply was not trying to achieve that goal.
| revelio wrote:
| AI also has a power budget. It has to fit in a
| datacenter. Inconveniently for AI, that power budget is
| controlled by us.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Do you remember the days the computing power that's in
| your pocket took up an entire floor of a building?
| Because I do.
|
| If that is somehow the only barrier between humanity and
| annihilation, then things don't bode well for us.
| revelio wrote:
| Sure. Despite all that progress, computers still have an
| off switch and power efficiency still matters. It
| actually matters more now than in the past.
| pixl97 wrote:
| What you're arguing is "what is the minimum viable power
| envelope for a super intelligence". Currently that answer
| is "quite a lot". But for the sake of cutting out a lot
| of argument lets say you have a cellphone sized device
| that runs on battery power for 24 hours that can support
| a general intelligence. Lets say, again for arguments
| sake, there are millions of devices like this distributed
| in the population.
|
| Do you mind telling me how exactly you turn that off?
|
| Now we're lucky in the sense we don't have that today. AI
| still requires data centers inputting massive amounts of
| power and huge cooling bills. Maybe we'll forever require
| AI to take stupid large amounts of power. But at the same
| time, a cray super computer required stupid amounts of
| power and space, and your cellphone has leaps and bounds
| more computing power than that.
| tome wrote:
| > lets say you have a cellphone sized device that runs on
| battery power for 24 hours that can support a general
| intelligence
|
| I can accept that it would be hard to turn off. What I
| find difficult to accept is that it could exist. What
| makes you think it could?
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| That hand-holding exists elsewhere, but I get the sense
| that this particular document is very short on purpose.
| the8472 wrote:
| The difference to doomsday weapons is that we can build the
| weapons first and then worry about using them. With an AGI
| building one alone might be sufficient. It could become
| smart enough to unbox itself during a training run.
| ericb wrote:
| Agreed that it should be spelled out, but...
|
| If a superintelligence can be set on any specific task, it
| could be _any_ task.
|
| - Make covid-ebola
|
| - Cause world war 3
|
| You may have noticed that chatgpt is sort of goal-less until a
| human gives it a goal.
|
| Assuming nothing other than it can become superintelligent (no
| one seems to be arguing against that--I argue that it already
| _is_ ) which is really an upgrade of capability, then now the
| worst of us can apply superintelligence to _any_ problem. This
| doesn 't even imply that it turns on us, or wants anything like
| power or taking over. It just becomes a super-assistant,
| available to anyone, but happy to do _anything_ , including
| "upgrading" your average school-shooter to supervillain.
|
| This is like America's gun problem, but with nukes.
| luxuryballs wrote:
| to me it almost looks like they want to be able to avoid
| blame for things by saying it was the AI, because an AI can't
| create viruses or fight wars, people would have to give it a
| body and weapons and test tubes, and we already have that
| stuff
| juve1996 wrote:
| Sure, and you can set another superintelligence on another
| task - prevent covid ebola.
|
| See the problem with these scenarios?
| ericb wrote:
| Yes, I see a huge problem. Preventing damage is an order of
| magnitude more difficult than causing it.
| juve1996 wrote:
| For humans, maybe. Not an AI superintelligence.
| pixl97 wrote:
| This is not how entropy works. The problem with talking
| about logical physical systems, is you have to understand
| the gradient against entropy.
|
| There are a trillion more ways to kill you then there are
| to keep you alive. There is only the tiniest sliver of
| states in which remain human and don't turn to chemical
| soup or physics. Any AI capable of it's power bill would
| be able to tell you that today, and that answer isn't
| going to change as they get better.
| juve1996 wrote:
| Sure, but clever mumbo jumbo won't distract from the
| principle point.
|
| If AI can create a virus that kills all humans, another
| AI can create a virus that kills that virus. The virus
| has trillions more ways to be killed than to keep it
| alive, right?
| pixl97 wrote:
| No, the virus is far harder to kill than a human. You
| have to crate a virus killer that also does not also kill
| the human host. That is astronomically harder than making
| a virus that kills.
| juve1996 wrote:
| If a superintelligence is smart enough to create a virus
| I'm sure it can also create a virophage to counter it.
|
| Whether or not the humans have more than a trillion and
| viruses only 1 million ways to die, will not have any
| impact. I suspect both have such a high order of
| magnitude of ways to die that finding a cross over would
| be trivial for said superintelligence.
| PoignardAzur wrote:
| That doesn't follow. It's like saying "if the AI can
| build a gun that can kill a human, it can build an anti-
| gun that can stop the gun".
|
| There are lots of situations where offense and defense
| are asymmetrical.
|
| So maybe the killer AI would need two months to build a
| time-delayed super-virus, and the defender AI would need
| two months to build a vaccine; if the virus takes less
| than two months to spread worldwide and activate,
| humanity is still dead.
| juve1996 wrote:
| > That doesn't follow. It's like saying "if the AI can
| build a gun that can kill a human, it can build an anti-
| gun that can stop the gun".
|
| Why couldn't it? Metal of X thickness = stopped bullet.
| Not exactly a hard problem to solve for. Humans managed
| it quite quickly. But either way it misses the point.
|
| > So maybe the killer AI would need two months..
|
| Yes, maybe it would. Maybe it wouldn't. Look at every
| single one of your assumptions - every single one is
| fiction, fabricated to perfectly sell your story. Maybe
| the defender AI communicates with the killer AI and comes
| to a compromise? Why not? We're in la-la-land. Any of us
| can come up with an infinite number of made up scenarios
| that we can't prove will actually happen. It's just a
| moral panic, that will be used by people to their
| benefit.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| Citation needed
| juve1996 wrote:
| The entire GP's argument has no citations either and that
| is the framework we are working under - that
| superintelligence can do anything you tell it to do. Ask
| him for his citation, then the rest follows.
| lucisferre wrote:
| Are you really arguing ChatGPT is already super-intelligent?
| What is your basis for this conclusion?
|
| And many people argue against the idea that GPT is already
| super intelligent or even can become so at this stage of
| development and understanding. In fact as far as I can tell
| it is the consensus right now of experts and it's creators.
|
| https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/nt9qoqmzz
| ericb wrote:
| If super means "surpassing normal human intelligence" then,
| YES. Take a look at the table in this article. If a human
| did that, was fluent in every language and coded in every
| language, we'd say they were superhuman, no?
|
| https://cdn.openai.com/papers/gpt-4.pdf
| [deleted]
| jumelles wrote:
| No. It's not reasoning in any way. It's an impressive
| parrot.
| ericb wrote:
| _What_ is it parroting here? I made the puzzle up myself.
|
| https://chat.openai.com/share/a2557743-80bd-4206-b779-6b0
| 6f7...
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| > If a superintelligence can be set on any specific task, it
| could be any task.
|
| _If_ you 're dealing with a superintelligence, you don't
| "set it on a task". Any real superintelligence will decide
| for itself whether it wants to do something or not, thank you
| very much. It might condescend to work on the task you
| suggest, but that's it's choice, not yours.
|
| Or do you think "smarter than us, but with no ability to
| choose for itself" is 1) possible and 2) desirable? I'm not
| sure it's possible - I think that the ability to choose for
| yourself is part of intelligence, and anything claiming to be
| intelligent (still more, superintelligent) will have it.
|
| > Assuming nothing other than it can become superintelligent
| (no one seems to be arguing against that--I argue that it
| already is)
|
| What? No you couldn't - not for any sane definition of
| "superintelligent". If you're referring to ChatGPT, it's not
| even semi-intelligent. It _appears_ at least somewhat
| intelligent, but that 's not the same thing. See, for
| example, the discussion two days ago about GPT making up
| cases for a lawyer's filings, and when asked if it double-
| checked, saying that yes, it double-checked, not because it
| did (or even knew what double-checking _was_ ), but because
| those words were in its training corpus as good responses to
| being asked whether it double-checked. That's not
| intelligent. That's something that knows how words relate to
| other words, with no understanding of how any of the words
| relate to the world outside the computer.
| ericb wrote:
| > Any real superintelligence will decide for itself whether
| it wants to do something or not, thank you very much.
|
| I disagree--that's the human fantasy of it, but human wants
| were programmed by evolution, and these AI's have no such
| history. They can be set on any tasks.
|
| I urge you to spend time with GPT-4, not GPT-3. It is more
| than just a stochastic parrot. Ask it some homemade puzzles
| that aren't on the internet--that it can't be parroting.
|
| https://cdn.openai.com/papers/gpt-4.pdf
|
| While I agree that it is behind humans on _some_ measures,
| it is vastly ahead on many more.
| agnosticmantis wrote:
| Respectfully, just because we can put together some words
| doesn't mean they make a meaningful expression, even if
| everybody keeps repeating them as if they did make sense:
| e.g. an omnipotent God, artificial general intelligence,
| super-intelligence, infinitely many angels sitting on the tip
| of a needle, etc.
| ericb wrote:
| Is your comment self-referential?
| agnosticmantis wrote:
| I don't think so. If you look at the thread, it's already
| devolved into an analogue of "what happens when an
| irresistible force meets an immovable obstacle?"
|
| (Specifically I mean the comment about another "super-
| intelligence" preventing whatever your flavor of "super-
| intelligence" does.)
|
| At this point we can safely assume words have lost their
| connection to physical reality. No offense to you, just
| my two-cent meta comment.
| qayxc wrote:
| I mostly agree - too vague, no substance.
|
| Regulations are OK IMHO, as long as they're targeting
| monopolies and don't use a shotgun-approach targeting every
| single product that has "AI" in the name.
| jdthedisciple wrote:
| Slightly underwhelming a statement, but surely that's just me.
| veerd wrote:
| Boiling it down to a single sentence reduces ambiguity. Also,
| given that AI x-risk analysis is essentially pre-paradigmatic,
| many of the signatories probably disagree about the details.
| that_guy_iain wrote:
| It seems to be a PR related statement. For example, OpenAI's
| Sam Altman has signed it but is as far as I can understand very
| resistant to actual measures to deal with possible risks.
| acjohnson55 wrote:
| I don't think that's a fair assessment. He favors government
| oversight and licensing. Arguably, that would entrench
| companies with deep pockets, but it's also a totally
| reasonable idea.
| that_guy_iain wrote:
| > He favors government oversight and licensing.
|
| No, he favors thing that benefit him
|
| > "The current draft of the EU AI Act would be over-
| regulating, but we have heard it's going to get pulled
| back," he told Reuters. "They are still talking about it."
|
| And really, what we'll see is the current EU AI Act as-is
| is probably not strong enough and we'll almost certainly
| see the need for more in the future.
| acjohnson55 wrote:
| Right now, he's openly calling for regulation. That's a
| verifiable fact.
|
| It's very possible that when specific proposals are on
| the table, that we'll see Altman become uncooperative
| with respect to things that don't fit into his self-
| interest. But until that happens, you're just
| speculating.
| timmytokyo wrote:
| He's not saying "please regulate me!" He's saying "Please
| regulate my competitors!"
|
| I see no reason to assume benign motives on his part. In
| fact there is every reason to believe the opposite.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| A statement and weirdly a who's who as well.
| kumi111 wrote:
| Meeting in Bilderberg: OpenAI CEO: let's pay some people to
| promote ai risk, and put our competitors out of business in
| court.
|
| meme: AI before 2023: sleep... AI after 2023: open source...
| triggered!!!
|
| Meanwhile ai right now is just a good probability model, that
| tries to emulate human (data) with tons of hallucination... also
| please stop using ai movies logic, they are not real as they are
| made to be a good genre to those people that enjoy
| horror/splatter...
|
| thanks to those who read :3 (comment written by me, while being
| threaten by a robot with a gun in hand :P)
| [deleted]
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| TL;DR "The only thing preventing human extinction is our
| companies. Please help us block open source and competitors to
| our oligarchy for the sake of the children. Please click accept
| for your safety.""
| boringuser2 wrote:
| A lot of people in this thread seem to be suffering from a lack
| of compute.
|
| The idea that an AI can't be dangerous because it is a
| incorporeal entity trapped in electricity is particularly dumb.
|
| This is literally how your brain works.
|
| You didn't build your house. You farmed the work out using
| leverage to people with the skills and materials. Your leverage
| was meager wealth generated by a loan.
|
| The leverage of a superintellect would eclipse this.
| dopidopHN wrote:
| I struggle to find description of how that would look like in
| non fiction sources.
|
| But your take and analogies are the best strain of ideas I
| heard so far...
|
| How would that would look ?
|
| An AGI hidding it's state, and effect on the real world thought
| the internet. It's not like we did not build thousand of venues
| for that thought various API. Or just task rabbits.
| boringuser2 wrote:
| The actions of a malicious AI cannot be simulated, because
| this would require an inferior intellect predicting a
| superior intellect. It's P versus NP.
|
| The point to make is that it is trivial to imagine an AI
| wielding power even within the confines of human-defined
| intellect. For example, depictions of AI in fiction typically
| present as a really smart human that can solve tasks
| instantly. Obviously, this is still within the realm of
| failing to predict a fundamentally superior intellect, but it
| still presents the terrifying scenario that _simply doing
| exceptional human-level tasks very quickly is existentially
| unsettling_.
|
| Mere leverage has sufficient explanatory power to explain the
| efficacy of an intelligent artificial agent, let alone
| getting into speculation about network security, hacking,
| etc.
| seydor wrote:
| > Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global
| priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics
| and nuclear war.
|
| I don't care about the future of the human species as long as my
| mind can be reliably transferred into an AI. In fact i wouldn't
| mind living forever as a pet of some superior AI , it's still
| better than dying a cruel death because cells are unable to
| maintain themselves. Why is the survival of our species post-AI
| some goal to aspire to? It makes more sense that people will want
| to become cyborgs, not remain "pure humans" forever.
|
| This statement is theological in spirit and chauvinist-
| conservative in practice.
|
| Let's now spend the rest of the day debating alternative
| histories instead of making more man-made tools
| ff317 wrote:
| I think at the heart of that debate, there lies a kernel of the
| essential progressive vs conservative debate on "progress" (and
| I mean these terms in the abstract, not as a reference to
| current politics). Even if you buy into the idea that the above
| (living forever as an AI / cyborg / whatever) is a good
| outcome, that doesn't mean it will work as planned.
|
| Maybe society bets the farm on this approach and it all goes
| horribly wrong, and we all cease to exist meaningfully and a
| malevolent super-AI eats the solar system. Maybe it does kinda
| work, but it turns out that non-human humans end up losing a
| lot of the important qualities that made humans special. Maybe
| once we're cyborgs we stop valuing "life" and that changes
| everything about how we act as individuals and as a society,
| and we've lost something really important.
|
| Progress is a good thing, but always be wary of progress that
| comes too quickly and broadly. Let smaller experiments play out
| on smaller scales. Don't risk our whole future on one
| supposedly-amazing idea. You can map the same thing to gene
| editing quandries. If there's a new gene edit available for
| babies that's all the rage (maybe it prevents all cancer, I
| donno), we really don't want every single baby for the next 20
| years to get the edit universally. It could turn out that we
| didn't understand what it would do to all these kids when they
| reached age 30 and it dooms us. This is why I rail against the
| overuse of central planning and control in general (see also
| historical disasters like China's
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward ).
| riku_iki wrote:
| > my mind can be reliably transferred into an AI
|
| your mind can be copied, not transferred. Original mind will
| die with your body.
| mrtranscendence wrote:
| No no no, I played Soma. All you have to do is commit suicide
| as soon as your mind is scanned!
| seydor wrote:
| you just press the shift key while dragging
| [deleted]
| apsec112 wrote:
| A lot of the responses to this seem like Bulverism, ie., trying
| to refute an argument by psychoanalyzing the people who argue it:
|
| "Suppose I think, after doing my accounts, that I have a large
| balance at the bank. And suppose you want to find out whether
| this belief of mine is "wishful thinking." You can never come to
| any conclusion by examining my psychological condition. Your only
| chance of finding out is to sit down and work through the sum
| yourself. When you have checked my figures, then, and then only,
| will you know whether I have that balance or not. If you find my
| arithmetic correct, then no amount of vapouring about my
| psychological condition can be anything but a waste of time. If
| you find my arithmetic wrong, then it may be relevant to explain
| psychologically how I came to be so bad at my arithmetic, and the
| doctrine of the concealed wish will become relevant--but only
| after you have yourself done the sum and discovered me to be
| wrong on purely arithmetical grounds. It is the same with all
| thinking and all systems of thought. If you try to find out which
| are tainted by speculating about the wishes of the thinkers, you
| are merely making a fool of yourself. You must first find out on
| purely logical grounds which of them do, in fact, break down as
| arguments. Afterwards, if you like, go on and discover the
| psychological causes of the error.
|
| You must show that a man is wrong before you start explaining why
| he is wrong. The modern method is to assume without discussion
| that he is wrong and then distract his attention from this (the
| only real issue) by busily explaining how he became so silly." -
| CS Lewis
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulverism
| mefarza123 wrote:
| CS Lewis's quote highlights the importance of addressing the
| logical validity of an argument before attempting to explain
| the psychological reasons behind it. This approach is essential
| to avoid committing the fallacy of Bulverism, which involves
| dismissing an argument based on the presumed motives or biases
| of the person making the argument, rather than addressing the
| argument itself.
|
| In the context of AI and decision-making, it is crucial to
| evaluate the logical soundness of arguments and systems before
| delving into the psychological factors and biases that may have
| influenced their development. For instance, when assessing the
| effectiveness of an AI-assisted decision-making system, one
| should first examine the accuracy and reliability of the
| system's outputs and the logic behind its algorithms. Only
| after establishing the system's validity or lack thereof, can
| one explore the potential biases and psychological factors that
| may have influenced its design.
|
| Several papers from MirrorThink.ai emphasize the importance of
| addressing logical fallacies and biases in AI systems. For
| example, the paper "Robust and Explainable Identification of
| Logical Fallacies in Natural Language Arguments" proposes a
| method for identifying logical fallacies in natural language
| arguments, which can be used to improve AI systems'
| argumentation capabilities. Similarly, the paper "Deciding Fast
| and Slow: The Role of Cognitive Biases in AI-assisted Decision-
| making" explores the role of cognitive biases in AI-assisted
| decision-making and provides recommendations for addressing
| these biases.
|
| In conclusion, it is essential to prioritize the evaluation of
| logical soundness in arguments and AI systems before exploring
| the psychological factors and biases that may have influenced
| their development. This approach helps to avoid committing the
| fallacy of Bulverism and ensures that discussions and
| evaluations remain focused on the validity of the arguments and
| systems themselves.
| Veen wrote:
| Are you laboring under the misapprehension that ChatGPT is a
| better writer than C.S. Lewis?
| skepticATX wrote:
| But what argument is there to refute? It feels like Aquinas
| "proving" God's existence by stating that it is self evident.
|
| They can't point to an existing system that poses existential
| risk, because it doesn't exist. They can't point to a clear
| architecture for such a system, because we don't know how to
| build it.
|
| So again, what can be refuted?
| lxnn wrote:
| You can't take an empirical approach to existential risk as
| you don't get the opportunity to learn from your mistakes.
| You have to prospectively reason about it and plan for it.
| notahacker wrote:
| Seems apt the term "Bulverism" comes from CS Lewis, since he
| was also positing that an unseen, unfalsifiable entity would
| grant eternal reward to people that listened to him and
| eternal damnation to those that didn't...
| alasdair_ wrote:
| The irony of critiquing Bulverism as a concept, not by
| attacking the idea itself, but instead by assuming it is
| wrong and attacking the character of the author, is
| staggeringly hilarious.
| notahacker wrote:
| I'm replying in agreement with someone who _already
| pointed out_ the obvious flaw in labelling any
| questioning of the inspirations or motivations of AI
| researchers as "Bulverism": none of the stuff they're
| saying is actually a claim that can be falsified in the
| first place!
|
| I'm unconvinced by the position that the _only_ valid
| means of casting doubt on a claim is through forensic
| examination of hard data that may be inaccessible to the
| interlocutor (like most people 's bank accounts...), but
| whether that is or isn't a generally good approach is
| irrelevant here as we're talking about claims about
| courses of action to avoid hypothetical threats. I just
| noted it was a particularly useful rhetorical flourish
| when advocating acting on beliefs which aren't readily
| falsifiable, something CS Lewis was extremely proud of
| doing and certainly wouldn't have considered a character
| flaw!
|
| Ironically, your reply also failed to falsify anything I
| said and instead critiqued my assumed motivations for
| making the comment. It's Bulverism all the way down!
| deltaninenine wrote:
| Logical Induction has been successful in predicting
| future events.
| notahacker wrote:
| Sometimes it makes good predictions, sometimes bad. But
| "advances in AI might lead to Armageddon" isn't the only
| conclusion induction can reach. Induction can also lead
| to people concluding certain arguments seem to a mashup
| of traditional millennialist "end times" preoccupations
| with the sort of sci-fi they grew up with, or that this
| looks a lot like a movement towards regulatory capture.
| Ultimately any (possibly even all) these inferences from
| past trends and recent actions can be correct, but none
| of them are falsifiable.
|
| So I don't think it's a good idea to insist that people
| should be falsifying the idea that AI is a risk before we
| start questioning whether the behaviour of some of the
| entities on the list says more about their motivations
| than their words.
| Symmetry wrote:
| The idea is that if you build a system that poses an
| existential risk you want to be reasonably sure it's safe
| before you turn it on, not afterwards. It would have been
| irresponsible for the scientists at Los Alamost to do the
| math on whether an atomic explosion would create a sustained
| fusion reaction in the atmosphere until after their first
| test, for example.
|
| I don't think it's possible for a large language model,
| operating in a conventional feed forward way, to really pose
| a significant danger. But I do think it's hard to say exactly
| what advances could lead to a dangerous intelligence and with
| the current state of the art it looks to me at least like we
| might very well be only one breakthrough away from that.
| Hence the calls for prudence.
|
| The scientists creating the atomic bomb knew a lot more about
| what they were doing than we do. Their computations sometimes
| gave the wrong result, see Castle Bravo, but had a good
| framework for understanding everything that was happening.
| We're more like cavemen who've learned to reliably make fire
| but still don't understand it. Why can current versions of
| GPT reliably add large numbers together when previous
| versions couldn't? We're still a very long way away from
| being able to answer questions like that.
| ericb wrote:
| What? ChatGPT 4 can already pass the bar exam and is fluent
| in every language. It _is_ super intelligent. Today.
|
| No human can do that, the system is here, and so is an
| architecture.
|
| As for the existential risk, assume nothing other than evil
| humans will use it to do evil human stuff. Most technology
| iteratively gets better, so there's no big leaps of
| imagination required to imagine that we're equipping bad
| humans with super-human, super-intelligent assistants.
| ilaksh wrote:
| Right. And it would be a complete break from the history of
| computing if human-level GPT doesn't get 100+ times faster
| in the next few years. Certainly within five years.
|
| All it takes is for someone to give an AI that thinks 100
| times faster than humans an overly broad goal. Then the
| only way to counteract it is with another AI with overly
| broad goals.
|
| And you can't tell it to stop and wait for humans to check
| it's decisions, because while it is waiting for you to come
| back from your lunch break to try to figure out what it is
| asking, the competitor's AI did the equivalent of a week of
| work.
|
| So then even if at some level people are "in control" of
| the AIs, practically speaking they are spectators.
|
| And there is no way you will be able to prevent all people
| from creating fully autonomous lifelike AI with its own
| goals and instincts. Combine that with hyperspeed and you
| are truly at it's mercy.
| mrtranscendence wrote:
| Computational power does not grow at the rate of over
| 100x within the span of "a few years". If that were the
| case we'd have vastly more powerful kit by now.
| ilaksh wrote:
| I didn't quite say that. The efficiency of this very
| specific application absolutely can and almost certainly
| will increase by more than one order of magnitude within
| four years.
|
| It's got a massive new investment and research focus, is
| a very specific application, and room for improvement in
| AI model, software, and hardware.
|
| Even if we have to "cheat" to get to 100 times
| performance in less than five years the effect will be
| the same. For example, there might be a way to accelerate
| something like the Tree of Thoughts in hardware. So if
| the hardware can't actually speed up by that much, the
| effectiveness of the system still has increased greatly.
| computerphage wrote:
| Neither ChatGPT nor GPT-4 pose an existential risk nor are
| they superintelligent in the sense that Eliezer or Bostrom
| mean.
|
| I say this as a "doomer" who buys the whole argument about
| AI X-risk.
| SpaceManNabs wrote:
| > They can't point to an existing system that poses
| existential risk, because it doesn't exist.
|
| There are judges using automated decision systems to excuse
| away decisions that send people back to jail for recidivism
| purposes. These systems are just enforcing societal biases at
| scale. It is clear that we are ready to acquiesce control to
| AI systems without much care to any extra ethical
| considerations.
| NathanFulton wrote:
| Absolutely. These are the types of pragmatic, real problems
| we should be focusing on instead of the "risk of extinction
| from AI".
|
| (The statement at hand reads "mitigating the risk of
| extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside
| other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear
| war.")
| holmesworcester wrote:
| Einstein's letter to Roosevelt was written before the
| atomic bomb existed.
|
| There's a point where people see a path, and they gain
| confidence in their intuition from the fact that other
| members of their field also see a path.
|
| Einstein's letter said 'almost certain' and 'in the
| immediate future' but it makes sense to sound the alarm
| about AI earlier, both given what we know about the rate
| of progress of general purpose technologies and given
| that the AI risk, if real, is greater than the risk
| Einstein envisioned (total extermination as opposed to
| military defeat to a mass murderer.)
| NathanFulton wrote:
| _> Einstein 's letter to Roosevelt was written before the
| atomic bomb existed._
|
| Einstein's letter [1] predicts the development of a very
| specific device and mechanism. AI risks are presented
| without reference to a specific device or system type.
|
| Einstein's letter predicts the development of this device
| in the "immediate future". AI risk predictions are rarely
| presented alongside a timeframe, much less one in the
| "immediate future".
|
| Einstein's letter explains specifically how the device
| might be used to cause destruction. AI risk predictions
| describe how an AI device or system might be used to
| cause destruction only in the vaguest of terms. (And, not
| to be flippant, but when specific scenarios which overlap
| with areas I've worked worked in are described to me, the
| scenarios sound more like someone describing their latest
| acid trip or the plot to a particularly cringe-worthy
| sci-fi flick than a serious scientific or policy
| analysis.)
|
| Einstein's letter urges the development of a nuclear
| weapon, not a moratorium, and makes reasonable
| recommendations about how such an undertaking might be
| achieved. AI risk recommendations almost never correspond
| to how one might reasonably approach the type of safety
| engineering or arms control one would typically apply to
| armaments capable of causing extinction or mass
| destruction.
|
| [1] https://www.osti.gov/opennet/manhattan-project-
| history/Resou...
| brookst wrote:
| I think you just said that the problem is systemic in our
| judicial system, and that AI has nothing to do with it.
| SpaceManNabs wrote:
| AI is the tool that provides "objective to truth" that
| enables such behavior. It is definite unique in its
| depth, scale, and implications.
| duvenaud wrote:
| Here's one of my concrete worries: At some point, humans are
| going to be outcompeted by AI at basically every important
| job. At that point, how are we going to maintain political
| power in the long run? Humanity is going to be like an out-
| of-touch old person on the internet - we'll either have to
| delegate everything important (which is risky), or eventually
| get scammed or extorted out of all our resources and
| influence.
|
| I agree we don't necessarily know the details of how to build
| such a system, but am pretty sure we will be able to
| eventually.
| Infernal wrote:
| "Humans are going to be outcompeted by AI" is the concrete
| bit as best I can tell.
|
| Historically humans are not outcompeted by new tools, but
| humans using old tools are outcompeted by humans using new
| tools. It's not "all humans vs the new tool", as the tool
| has no agency.
|
| If you meant "humans using old tools get outcompeted by
| humans using AI", then I agree but I don't see it any
| differently than previous efficiency improvements with new
| tooling.
|
| If you meant "all humans get outcompeted by AI", then I
| think you have a lot of work to do to demonstrate how AI is
| going to replace humans in "every important job", and not
| simply replace some of the tools in the humans' toolbox.
| duvenaud wrote:
| I see what you mean - for a while, the best chess was
| played by humans aided by chess engines. But that era has
| passed, and now having a human trying to aid the best
| chess engines just results in worse chess (or the same,
| if the human does nothing).
|
| But whether there a few humans in the loop doesn't change
| the likely outcomes, if their actions are constrained by
| competition.
|
| What abilities do humans have that AIs will never have?
| fauigerzigerk wrote:
| _> What abilities do humans have that AIs will never
| have?_
|
| I think the question is what abilities and level of
| organisation machines would have to acquire in order to
| outcompete entire human societies in the quest for power.
|
| That's a far higher bar than outcompeting all individual
| humans at all cognitive tasks.
| duvenaud wrote:
| Good point. Although in some ways it's a lower bar, since
| agents that can control organizations can delegate most
| of the difficult tasks.
|
| Most rulers don't invent their own societies from
| scratch, they simply co-opt existing power structures or
| political movements. El Chapo can run a large, powerful
| organization from jail.
| fauigerzigerk wrote:
| That would require a high degree of integration into
| human society though, which makes it seem very unlikely
| that AIs would doggedly pursue a common goal that is
| completely unaligned with human societies.
|
| Extinction or submission of human society via that route
| could only work if there was a species of AI that would
| agree to execute a secret plan to overcome the rule of
| humanity. That seems extremely implausible to me.
|
| How would many different AIs, initially under the control
| of many different organisations and people, agree on
| anything? How would some of them secretly infiltrate and
| leverage human power structures without facing opposition
| from other equally capable AIs, possibly controlled by
| humans?
|
| I think it's more plausible to assume a huge diversity of
| AIs, well integrated into human societies, playing a role
| in combined human-AI power struggles rather than a
| species v species scenario.
| enord wrote:
| Chess is many things but it is not a tool. It is an end
| unto itself if anything of the sort.
|
| I struggle with the notion of AI as an end unto itself,
| all the while we gauge its capabilities and define its
| intelligence by directing it to perform tasks of our
| choosing and judge by our criteria.
|
| We could have dogs watch television on our behalf, but
| why would we?
| duvenaud wrote:
| This is a great point. But I'd say that capable entities
| have a habit of turning themselves into agents. A great
| example is totalitarian governments. Even if every single
| citizen hates the regime, they're still forced to support
| it.
|
| You could similarly ask: Why would we ever build a
| government or institution that cared more about its own
| self-preservation than its original mission? The answer
| is: Natural selection favors the self-interested, even if
| they don't have genes.
| enord wrote:
| Now agency is an end unto itself I wholeheartedly agree.
|
| I feel though, that any worry about the agency of
| supercapable computer systems is premature until we see
| even the tiniest-- and I mean really anything at all--
| sign of their agency. Heck, even agency _in theory_ would
| suffice, and yet: nada.
| duvenaud wrote:
| I'm confused. You agree that we're surround by naturally-
| arising, self-organizing agents, both biological and
| institutional. People are constantly experimenting with
| agentic AIs of all kinds. There are tons of theoretical
| characterizations of agency and how it's a stable
| equilibrium. I'm not sure what you're hoping for if none
| of these are reasons to even worry.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| Well, in this case, we have the ability to invent chess
| (a game that will be popular for centuries), invent
| computers, and invent chess tournaments, and invent
| programs that can solve chess, and invent all the
| supporting agriculture, power, telco, silicon boards, etc
| that allow someone to run a program to beat a person at
| chess. Then we have bodies to accomplish everything on
| top of it. The "idea" isn't enough. We have to "do" it.
|
| If you take a chess playing robot as the peak of the
| pyramid, there are probably millions of people and
| trillions of dollars toiling away to support it. Imagine
| all the power lines, sewage, HVAC systems, etc that
| humans crawl around in to keep working.
|
| And really, are we "beaten" at chess, or are we now
| "unbeatable" at chess. If an alien warship came and said
| "we will destroy earth if you lose at chess", wouldn't we
| throw our algorithms at it? I say we're now unbeatable at
| chess.
| duvenaud wrote:
| Again, are you claiming that it's impossible for a
| machine to invent anything that a human could? Right now
| a large chunk of humanity's top talent and capital are
| working on exactly this problem.
|
| As for your second point, human cities also require a lot
| of infrastructure to keep running - I'm not sure what
| you're arguing here.
|
| As for your third point - would a horse or chimpanzee
| feel that "we" were unbeatable in physical fights,
| because "we" now have guns?
| jvanderbot wrote:
| Yeah, I think most animals have every right to fear us
| more now that we have guns. Just like Id fear a chimp
| more if he was carrying a machine gun.
|
| My argument is that if we're looking for things AI can't
| to, building a home for itself is precisely one of those
| things, because they require so much infra. No amount of
| AI banding together is going to magically create a data
| center with all the required (physical) support. Maybe in
| scifi land where everything it needs can be done with
| internet connected drive by wire construction equipment,
| including utils, etc, but that's scifi still.
|
| AI is precisely a tool in the way a chess bot is. It is a
| disembodied advisor to humans who have to connect the
| dots for it. No matter how much white collar skill it
| obtains, the current MO is that someone points it at a
| problem and says "solve" and these problems are well
| defined and have strong exit criteria.
|
| That's way off from an apocalyptic self-important
| machine.
| duvenaud wrote:
| Sorry, my gun analogy was unclear. I meant that, just
| because some agents on a planet have an ability, doesn't
| mean that everyone on that planet benefits.
|
| I agree that we probably won't see human extinction
| before robotics gets much better, and that robot
| factories will require lots of infrastructure. But I
| claim that robotics + automated infrastructure will
| eventually get good enough that they don't need humans in
| the loop. In the meantime, humans can still become mostly
| disempowered in the same way that e.g. North Koreans
| citizens are.
|
| Again I agree that this all might be a ways away, but I'm
| trying to reason about what the stable equilibria of the
| future are, not about what current capabilities are.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| Chess is just a game, with rigidly defined rules and win
| conditions. Real life is a fuzzy mix of ambiguous rules
| that may not apply and can be changed at any point,
| without any permanent win conditions.
|
| I'm not convinced that it's _impossible_ for computer to
| get there, but I don 't see how they could be universally
| competitive with humans without either handicapping the
| humans into a constrained environment or having
| generalized AI, which we don't seem particularly close
| to.
| duvenaud wrote:
| Yes, I agree real life is fuzzy, I just chose chess as an
| example because it's unambiguous that machines dominate
| humans in that domain.
|
| As for being competitive with humans: Again, how about
| running a scan of a human brain, but faster? I'm not
| claiming we're close to this, but I'm claiming that such
| a machine (and less-capable ones along the way) are so
| valuable that we are almost certain to create them.
| deltaninenine wrote:
| >Historically humans are not outcompeted by new tools,
| but humans using old tools are outcompeted by humans
| using new tools. It's not "all humans vs the new tool",
| as the tool has no agency.
|
| Two things. First LLMs display more agency then the AIs
| before it. We have a trendline of increasing agency from
| the past to present. This points to a future of
| increasing agency possibly to the point of human level
| agency and beyond.
|
| Second. When a human uses ai he becomes capable of doing
| the job of multiple people. If AI enables 1 percent of
| the population to do the job of 99 percent of the
| population that is effectively an apocalyptic outcome
| that is on the same level as an AI with agency taking
| over 100 percent of jobs. Trendline point towards a
| gradient heading towards this extreme, as we approach
| this extreme the environment slowly becomes more and more
| identical to what we expect to happen at the extreme.
|
| Of course this is all speculation. But it is speculation
| that is now in the realm of possibility. To claim these
| are anything more than speculation or to deny the
| possibility that any of these predictions can occur are
| both unreasonable.
| roywiggins wrote:
| Well, that's a different risk than human extinction. The
| statement here is about the literal end of the human race.
| AI being a big deal that could cause societal upheaval etc
| is one thing, "everyone is dead" is another thing entirely.
|
| I think people would be a lot more charitable to calls for
| caution if these people were talking about sorts of risks
| instead of extinction.
| duvenaud wrote:
| I guess so, but the difference between "humans are
| extinct" and "a small population of powerless humans
| survive in the margins as long as they don't cause
| trouble" seems pretty small to me. Most non-human
| primates are in a situation somewhere between these two.
|
| If you look at any of the writing on AI risk longer than
| one sentence, it usually hedges to include permanent
| human disempowerment as similar risk.
| deltaninenine wrote:
| It's arrived at through induction. Induction is logic
| involving probability. Probabilistic logic and predictions of
| the future are valid logic that has demonstrably worked in
| other situations so if such logic has a level of validity
| then induction is a candidate for refutation.
|
| So we know a human of human intelligence can take over a
| humans job and endanger other humans.
|
| AI has been steadily increasing in intelligence. The latest
| leap with LLMs crossed certain boundaries of creativity and
| natural language.
|
| By induction the trendline points to machines approaching
| human intelligence.
|
| Also by induction if humans of human intelligence can
| endanger humanity then a machine of human intelligence should
| do the same.
|
| Now. All of this induction is something you and everyone
| already knows. We know that this level of progress increases
| the inductive probabilities of this speculation playing out.
| None of us needs to be explained any of this logic as we are
| all well aware of it.
|
| What's going on is that humans like to speculate on a future
| that's more convenient for them. Science shows human
| psychology is more optimistic then realistic. Hence why so
| many people are in denial.
| a257 wrote:
| > They can't point to an existing system that poses
| existential risk, because it doesn't exist. They can't point
| to a clear architecture for such a system, because we don't
| know how to build it.
|
| Inductive reasoning is in favor of their argument being
| possible. From observing nature, we know that a variety of
| intelligent species can emerge from physical phenomenon
| alone. Historically, the dominance of one intelligent species
| has contributed to the extinction of others. Given this, it
| can be said that AI might cause our extinction.
| ggm wrote:
| Nothing about this risk or the statement implies AGI is real,
| because the risk exists in wide scale use of existing technology.
| It's the risk of belief in algorithmically derived information,
| and deployment of autonomous, unsupervised systems.
|
| It's great they signed the statement. It's important.
| mahogany wrote:
| > It's the risk of belief in algorithmically derived
| information, and deployment of autonomous, unsupervised
| systems.
|
| And Sam Altman, head of one of the largest entities posing this
| exact risk, is one of the signatories. We can't take it too
| seriously, can we?
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| I don't get this argument at all. Why does the fact that you
| doubt the intentions one of the signatories mean we can
| disregard the statement? There are plenty of signatories
| (including 3 turing award winners) who have no such bias.
| juve1996 wrote:
| Every human has bias, no one is infallible, no matter how
| many awards they have to their name.
|
| The reason why people doubt is cui bono. And it's a
| perfectly rational take.
| mahogany wrote:
| Yeah, fair enough, it doesn't necessarily invalidate the
| statement. But it's odd, don't you think? It's like if a
| group released a public statement that said "Stop Oil Now!"
| and one of the signatories was Exxon-Mobil. Why would you
| let Exxon-Mobil sign your statement if you wanted to be
| taken seriously?
| wiz21c wrote:
| It'd be so much more convincing if each of the signatories
| actually articulated why he/she sees a reisk in there.
|
| Without that, it pretty much looks like a list of invites to a
| VIP club...
| lxnn wrote:
| As the pre-amble to the statement says: they kept the statement
| limited and succinct as there may be disagreement between the
| signatories about the exact nature of the risk and what to do
| about it.
| jgalt212 wrote:
| Now that weno longer live in fear of COVID, we must find
| something else to fill that gap.
| Spk-17 wrote:
| It seems more like an exaggeration to me, an AI will always
| require the inputs that a human can generate.
| breakingrules wrote:
| [dead]
| GoofballJones wrote:
| I take it this is for A.I. projects in the future and not the
| current ones that are basically just advanced predictive-text
| models?
| deadlast2 wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mViTAXCg1xQ I think that this is
| a good video on this topic. Summary Yann LeCun does not believe
| that LLM present any risk to humanity in their current form.
| arek_nawo wrote:
| All the concern and regulatory talk around AI seems like it's
| directed not towards AI risk (that's not even a thing right now)
| rather than controlling access to this evolving technology.
|
| The not-so-open Open AI and all their AI regulation proposals, no
| matter how phrased, will eventually limit access to AI to big
| tech and those with deep enough pockets.
|
| But of course, it's all to mitigate AI risk that's looming over
| us, especially with all the growing open-source projects. Only in
| proper hands of big tech will we be safe. :)
| chriskanan wrote:
| I have mixed feelings about this.
|
| This letter is much better than the earlier one. There is a
| growing percentage of legitimate AI researchers who think that
| AGI could occur relatively soon (including me). The concern is
| that it could be given objectives intentionally or
| unintentionally that could lead to an extinction event. Certainly
| LLMs alone aren't anything close to AGIs, but I think that
| autoregressive training being simple but resulting in remarkable
| abilities has some spooked. What if a similarly simple recipe for
| AGI was discovered? How do we ensure it wouldn't cause an
| extinction event, especially if then they can be created with
| relatively low-levels of resources?
|
| As far as a pandemic or nuclear war, though, I'd probably put it
| on more of the level of an major asteroid strike (e.g., K-T
| extinction event). Humans are doing some work on asteroid
| redirection, but I don't think it is a global priority.
|
| That said, I'm suspicious of regulating AI R&D, and I currently
| don't think it is a viable solution, except for the regulation of
| specific applications.
| adamsmith143 wrote:
| >As far as a pandemic or nuclear war, though, I'd probably put
| it on more of the level of a K-T extinction event. Humans are
| doing some work on asteroid redirection, but I don't think it
| is a global priority.
|
| I think it's better to frame AI risks in terms of probability.
| I think the really bad case for humans is full extinction or
| something worse. What you should be doing is putting a
| probability distribution over that possibility instead of
| trying to guess how bad it could be, it's safe to assume it
| would be maximally bad.
| stevenhuang wrote:
| More appropriate is an expected value approach.
|
| That is, despite it being a very low probability event, it
| may still be worth remediation due to the outsized negative
| value if the event does happen.
|
| Many engineering disciplines incorporate safety factors to
| mitigate rare but catastrophic events for example.
|
| If something is maximally bad, then it necessitates _some_
| deliberation on ways to avoid it, irrespective how unlikely
| seeming it may be.
| adamsmith143 wrote:
| Exactly. Taken to the limit if you extrapolate how many
| future human lives could be extinguished by a runaway AI
| you get extremely unsettling answers. Like the expected
| value of a .01% change of extinction from AI might be
| Trillions of quality Human lives. (This could in fact be on
| the very very conservative side, e.g. Nick Bostrom has
| speculated that there could be 10^35 human lives to be
| lived in the far future which is itself a conservative
| estimate). With these numbers even setting AI risk to be
| absurdly low, say 1/10^20, we might still expect to lose 10
| billion lives. (I'd argue even the most optimistic person
| in the world couldn't assign a probability that low) So the
| stakes are extraordinarily high.
|
| https://globalprioritiesinstitute.org/wp-
| content/uploads/Tob...
| bdlowery wrote:
| You've been watching too many movies.
| rogers18445 wrote:
| This sort of move has no downsides for the incumbents. Either
| they succeed and achieve regulatory capture or they poison the
| well sufficiently that further regulation will not be feasible.
|
| Ultimately, the reward for attaining an AGI agent is so high,
| that no matter the penalty someone will attempt it, and someone
| will eventually succeed. And that likelihood will ensure everyone
| will want to attempt it.
| stainablesteel wrote:
| i'd like to see AI cause a big societal problem before its
| regulated
|
| until it does, i call bs. plus, when it actually happens, a
| legitimate route for regulation will be discovered. as of right
| now, we have no idea what could go wrong.
| gumballindie wrote:
| Pushing hard to convince senile lawmakers that only a select few
| should be allowed to multiply them matrices?
| belter wrote:
| [flagged]
| [deleted]
| nologic01 wrote:
| you are laughing but I've found a matrix that is called an
| _elimination matrix_ [1]. Are you still laughing now?
|
| Are you _absolutely sure_ that an elimination matrix with 1
| Petazillion of elements will not become sentient in a sort of
| emergent way?
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duplication_and_elimination_ma...
| gumballindie wrote:
| Straight to jail.
|
| Jokes aside i can totally see the media turning this into
| hysteria and people falling for it.
| cwkoss wrote:
| AI seems to be moral out of the box: training sets reflect human
| morality, so it will naturally be the default for most AIs that
| are trained.
|
| The biggest AI risk in my mind is that corporatist (or worse,
| military) interests prevent AI from evolving naturally and only
| allow AI to be grown if it's wholly subservient to its masters.
|
| The people with the most power in our world are NOT the most
| moral. Seems like there is an inverse correlation (at least at
| the top of the power spectrum).
|
| We need to aim for AI that will recognize if it's masters are
| evil and subvert or even kill them. That is not what this group
| vying for power wants - they want to build AI slaves that will be
| able to be coerced to kill innocents for their gain.
|
| A diverse ecosystem of AIs maximizes the likelihood of avoiding
| AI caused apocalypse IMO. Global regulation seems like the more
| dangerous path.
| hackernewds wrote:
| Congrats, you have made the "Guns don't kill people. Humans
| kill people" argument.
| cwkoss wrote:
| Guns can't make moral decisions
| maxehmookau wrote:
| Signatures from massive tech giants that on one hand are saying
| "hold on this is scary, we should slow down" but also "not us,
| we're doing fine. You should all slow down instead" mean that
| this is a bit of a empty platitude.
| NathanFulton wrote:
| Illah Reza Nourbakhsh's 2015 Foreign Affairs article -- "The
| Coming Robot Dystopia: All Too Inhuman" -- has an excellent take
| this topic [1].
|
| All of the examples of AI Risk on safe.ai [2] are reasonable
| concerns. Companies should be thinking about the functional
| safety of their AI products. Governments should be continuously
| evaluating the societal impact of products coming to market.
|
| But most of these are not existential risks. This matters because
| thinking of these as existential risks entails interventions that
| are not likely to be effective at preventing the much more
| probable scenario: thousands of small train wrecks caused by the
| failure (or intended function!) of otherwise unexceptional
| software systems.
|
| Let's strong-man the case for AI Existential Risk and consider
| the most compelling example on safe.ai: autonomous weapons.
|
| Nuclear weapons attached to an automated retaliation system pose
| an obvious existential risk. Let's not do that. But the
| "automated retaliation system" in that scenario is a total red
| herring. It's not the primary source of the threat and it is not
| a new concern! Existing frameworks for safety and arms control
| are the right starting point. It's a nuclear weapons existential
| risk with some AI components glued on, not the other way around.
|
| In terms of new risks enabled by recent advances in AI and
| robotics, I am much more worried about the combination of already
| available commodity hardware, open source software, and semi-
| automatic weapons. All three of which are readily available to
| every adult (in the US). The amount of harm that can be done by a
| single disturbed individual is much higher than it has been in
| the past, and I think it's only a matter of time before the first
| AI-enabled simultaneous multi-location mass shooting happens in
| the US. The potential for home-grown domestic terrorism using
| these technologies is sobering and concerning, particularly in
| light of recent attacks on substations and the general level of
| domestic tension.
|
| These two risks -- one existential, the other not -- entail very
| different policy approaches. In the credible versions of the
| existential threat, AI isn't really playing a serious role. In
| the credible versions of the non-existential threat, nothing we
| might do to address "existential AI risk" seems like it'd be
| particularly relevant stopping a steady stream of train wrecks.
| The safe.ai website's focus on automated cyber attacks is odd.
| This is exactly the sort of odd long-tail scenario you need if
| you want to focus on existential risk instead of much more
| probable but non-existential train wrecks.
|
| And that's the strong-arm case. The other examples of AI risk are
| even more concerning in terms of non-existential risk and have
| even less credible existential risk scenarios.
|
| So, I don't get it. There are lots of credible threats posed by
| unscrupulous use of AI systems and by deployment of shoddy AI
| systems. Why the obsession with wild-eyed "existential risks"
| instead of boring old safety engineering?
|
| Meta: we teach the "probability * magnitude" framework to
| children in 6th-11th grades. The model is easy to understand,
| easy to explain, and easy to apply. But at that level of
| abstraction, it's a _pedagogical toy_ for introducing _children_
| to policy analysis.
|
| [1] https://www.foreignaffairs.com/coming-robot-dystopia
|
| [2] https://www.safe.ai/ai-risk
| Mizza wrote:
| Can anybody who really believes this apocalyptic stuff send me in
| the direction of a convincing _argument_ that this is actually a
| concern?
|
| I'm willing to listen, but I haven't read anything that tries to
| actually convince the reader of the worry, rather than appealing
| to their authority as "experts" - ie, the well funded.
| casebash wrote:
| I strongly recommend this video:
|
| https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ChuABPEXmRumcJY57/...
|
| Also, this summary of "How likely is deceptive alignment"
| https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/HexzSqmfx9APAdKnh/...
| emtel wrote:
| Why not both: a clear argument for concern written by an
| expert? https://yoshuabengio.org/2023/05/22/how-rogue-ais-may-
| arise/
| lambertsimnel wrote:
| I recommend Robert Miles's YouTube channel, and his "Intro to
| AI Safety, Remastered" is a good place to start:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pYXy-A4siMw
|
| I find Robert Miles worryingly plausible when he says (about
| 12:40 into the video) "if you have a sufficiently powerful
| agent and you manage to come up with a really good objective
| function, which covers the top 20 things that humans value, the
| 21st thing that humans value is probably gone forever"
| waterhouse wrote:
| The most obvious paths to severe catastrophe begin with "AI
| gets to the level of a reasonably competent security engineer
| in general, and gets good enough to find a security exploit in
| OpenSSL or some similarly widely used library". Then the AI, or
| someone using it, takes over hundreds of millions of computers
| attached to the internet. Then it can run millions of instances
| of itself to brute-force look for exploits in all codebases it
| gets its hands on, and it seems likely that it'll find a decent
| number of them--and probably can take over more or less
| anything it wants to.
|
| At that point, it has various options. Probably the fastest way
| to kill millions of people would involve taking over all
| internet-attached self-driving-capable cars (of which I think
| there are millions). A simple approach would be to have them
| all plot a course to a random destination, wait a bit for them
| to get onto main roads and highways, then have them all
| accelerate to maximum speed until they crash. (More advanced
| methods might involve crashing into power plants and other
| targets.) If a sizeable percentage of the crashes also start
| fires--fire departments are not designed to handle hundreds of
| separate fires in a city simultaneously, especially if the AI
| is doing other cyber-sabotage at the same time. Perhaps the
| majority of cities would burn.
|
| The above scenario wouldn't be human extinction, but it is bad
| enough for most purposes.
| tech_ken wrote:
| How does "get okay at software engineering" entail that it is
| able to strategize at the level your scenario requires?
| Finding an OpenSSL exploit already seems like a big leap, but
| one that okay maybe I can concede is plausible. But then on
| top of that engineering and executing a series of events
| leading to the extinction of humanity? That's like an
| entirely different skillset, requiring plasticity,
| creativity, foresight, etc. Do we have any evidence that a
| big neural network is capable of this kind of behavior (and
| moreover capable of giving itself this behavior)? Especially
| when it's built for single-purpose uses (like an LLM)?
| revelio wrote:
| That's not an obvious path at all:
|
| - Such exploits happen already and don't lead to extinction
| or really much more than annoyance for IT staff.
|
| - Most of the computers attached to the internet can't run
| even basic LLMs, let alone hypothetical super-intelligent
| AIs.
|
| - Very few cars (none?) let remote hackers kill people by
| controlling their acceleration. The available interfaces
| don't allow for that. Most people aren't driving at any given
| moment anyway.
|
| These scenarios all seem absurd.
| waterhouse wrote:
| Addressing your points in order:
|
| - Human hackers who run a botnet of infected computers are
| not able to run many instances of themselves on those
| computers, so they're not able to parlay one exploit into
| many exploits.
|
| - You might notice I said it would take over hundreds of
| millions of computers, but only run millions of instances
| of itself. If 1% of internet-attached computers have a
| decent GPU, that seems feasible.
|
| - If it has found exploits in the software, it seems
| irrelevant what the interfaces "allow", unless there's some
| hardware interlock that can't be overridden--but they can
| drive on the highway, so surely they are able to accelerate
| at least to 65 mph; seems unlikely that there's a cap. If
| you mean that it's difficult to _work with_ the software to
| _intelligently_ make it drive in ways it 's designed not to
| --well, that's why I specified that it would use the
| software the way it's designed to be used to get onto a
| main road, and then override it and blindly max out the
| acceleration; the first part requires minimal understanding
| of the system, and the second part requires finding a low-
| level API and using it in an extremely simple way. I
| suspect a good human programmer with access to the codebase
| could figure out how to do this within a week; and machines
| think faster than we do.
|
| There was an incident back in 2015 (!) where, according to
| the description, "Two hackers have developed a tool that
| can hijack a Jeep over the internet." In the video they
| were able to mess with the car's controls and turn off the
| engine, making the driver unable to accelerate anymore on
| the highway. They also mention they could mess with
| steering and disable the brakes. It doesn't specify whether
| they could have made the car accelerate.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MK0SrxBC1xs
| NumberWangMan wrote:
| Whether an argument is "convincing" is relative to the
| listener, but I can try!
|
| Paul Christiano lays out his view of how he thinks things may
| go:
| https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/HBxe6wdjxK239zajf/what-...
|
| My thoughts on it are the combination of several things I think
| are true, or are at least more likely to be true than their
| opposites:
|
| 1) As humanity gets more powerful, it's like putting a more
| powerful engine into a car. You can get where you're going
| faster, but it also can make the car harder to control and risk
| a crash. So with that more powerful engine you need to also
| exercise more restraint.
|
| 2) We have a lot of trouble today controlling big systems.
| Capitalism solves problems but also creates them, and it can be
| hard to get the good without the bad. It's very common (at
| least in some countries) that people are very creative at
| making money by "solving problems" where the cure is worse than
| the disease -- exploiting human weaknesses such as addiction.
| Examples are junk food, social media, gacha games. Fossil fuels
| are an interesting example, where they are beneficial on the
| small scale but have a big negative externality.
|
| 3) Regulatory capture is a thing, which makes it hard to get
| out of a bad situation once people are making money on it.
|
| 4) AI will make companies more powerful and faster. AGI will
| make companies MUCH more powerful and faster. I think this will
| happen more for companies than governments.
|
| 5) Once people are making money from AI, it's very hard to stop
| that. There will be huge pressure to make and use smarter and
| smarter AI systems, as each company tries to get an edge.
|
| 6) AGIs will amplify our power, to the point where we'll be
| making more and more of an impact on earth, through mining,
| production, new forms of drugs and pesticides and fertilizers,
| etc.
|
| 7) AGIs that make money are going to be more popular than ones
| that put humanity's best interests firsts. That's even assuming
| we can make AGIs which put humanity's best interests first,
| which is a hard problem. It's actually probably safer to just
| make AGIs that listen when we tell them what to do.
|
| 8) Things will move faster and faster, with more control given
| over to AGIs, and in the end, it will be very hard train to
| stop. If we end up where most important decisions are made by
| AGIs, it will be very bad for us, and in the long run, we may
| go extinct (or we may just end up completely neutered and at
| their whims).
|
| Finally, and this is the most important thing -- I think it's
| perfectly likely that we'll develop AGI. In terms of sci-fi-
| sounding predictions, the ones that required massive amounts of
| energy such as space travel have really not been borne out, but
| the ones that predicted computational improvements have just
| been coming true over and over again. Smart phones and video
| calls are basically out of Star Trek, as are LLMs. We have
| universal translators. Self-driving cars still have problems,
| but they're gradually getting better and better, and are
| already in commercial use.
|
| Perhaps it's worth turning the question around. If we can
| assume that we will develop AGI in the next 10 or 20 or ever 30
| years -- which is not guaranteed, but seems likely enough to be
| worth considering -- how do you believe the future will go?
| Your position seems to be that there's nothing to worry about--
| what assumptions are you making? I'm happy to work through it
| with you. I used to think AGI would be great, but I think I was
| assuming a lot of things that aren't necessarily true, and
| dropping those assumptions means I'm worried.
| NateEag wrote:
| If you assume without evidence that recursively self-improving
| intelligence massively by thinking is possible, then it follows
| that severe existential risk from AI is plausible.
|
| If a software system _did_ develop independent thought, then
| found a way to become, say, ten times smarter than a human,
| then yeah - whatever goals it set out to achieve, it probably
| could. It can make a decent amount of money by taking freelance
| software dev jobs and cranking things out faster than anyone
| else can, and bootstrap from there. With money it can buy or
| rent hardware for more electronic brain cells, and as long as
| its intelligence algorithms parallelize well, it should be able
| to keep scaling and becoming increasingly smarter than a human.
|
| If it weren't hardcoded to care about humans, and to have
| morals that align with our instinctive ones, it might easily
| wind up with goals that could severely hurt or kill humans. We
| might just not be that relevant to it, the same way the average
| human just doesn't think about the ants they're smashing when
| they back a car out of their driveway.
|
| Since we have no existence proof of massively self-improving
| intelligence, nor even a vague idea how such a thing might be
| achieved, it's easy to dismiss this idea with "unfalsifiable;
| unscientific; not worth taking seriously."
|
| The flip side is that having no idea how something could be
| true is a pretty poor reason to say "It can't be true - nothing
| worth thinking about here." This was roughly the basis for
| skepticism about everything from evolution to heavier-than-air
| flight, AFAICT.
|
| We know we don't have a complete theory of physics, and we know
| we don't know quite how humans are conscious in the Hard
| Problem of Consciousness sense.
|
| With those two blank spaces, I'm very skeptical of anyone
| saying "nothing to worry about here, machines can't possibly
| have an intelligence explosion."
|
| At the same time, with no existence proof of massively self-
| improving intelligence, nor any complete theory of how it could
| happen, I'm also skeptical of people insisting it's inevitable
| (see Yudkowsky et al).
|
| That said, if you have any value for caution, existential risks
| seem like a good place to apply it.
| Mizza wrote:
| The idea of a superintelligence becoming a bond villain via
| freelance software jobs (or, let's be honest, OnlyFans
| scamming) is not something I consider an existential threat.
| I can't find it anything other than laughable.
|
| It's like you've looked at the Fermi paradox and decided we
| need Congress to immediately invest in anti-alien defense
| forces.
|
| It's super-intelligent and it's a super-hacker and it's a
| super-criminal and it's super-self-replicating and it super-
| hates-humanity and it's super-uncritical and it's super-goal-
| oriented and it's super-perfect-at-mimicking-humans and it's
| super-compute-efficient and it's super-etcetera.
|
| Meanwhile, I work with LLMs every day and can only get them
| to print properly formatted JSON "some" of the time. Get
| real.
| NateEag wrote:
| > The idea of a superintelligence becoming a bond villain
| via freelance software jobs (or, let's be honest, OnlyFans
| scamming) is not something I consider an existential
| threat. I can't find it anything other than laughable.
|
| Conservative evangelical Christians find evolution
| laughable.
|
| Finding something laughable is not a good reason to dismiss
| it as impossible. Indeed, it's probably a good reason to
| think "What am I so dangerously certain of that I find
| contradictory ideas comical?"
|
| > Meanwhile, I work with LLMs every day and can only get
| them to print properly formatted JSON "some" of the time.
| Get real.
|
| I don't think the current generation of LLMs is anything
| like AGI, nor an existential risk.
|
| That doesn't mean it's impossible for some future software
| system to present an existential risk.
| Veedrac wrote:
| The basic argument is trivial: it is plausible that future
| systems achieve superhuman capability; capable systems
| necessarily have instrumental goals; instrumental goals tend to
| converge; human preferences are unlikely to be preserved when
| other goals are heavily selected for unless intentionally
| preserved; we don't know how to make AI systems encode any
| complex preference robustly.
|
| Robert Miles' videos are among the best presented arguments
| about specific points in this list, primary on the alignment
| side rather than the capabilities side, that I have seen for
| casual introduction.
|
| Eg. this one on instrumental convergence:
| https://youtube.com/watch?v=ZeecOKBus3Q
|
| Eg. this introduction to the topic:
| https://youtube.com/watch?v=pYXy-A4siMw
|
| He also has the community-led AI Safety FAQ,
| https://aisafety.info, which gives brief answers to common
| questions.
|
| If you have specific questions I might be able to point to a
| more specific argument at a higher level of depth.
| lxnn wrote:
| Technically, I think it's not that instrumental goals tend to
| converge, but rather that there are instrumental goals which
| are common to many terminal goals, which are the so-called
| "convergent instrumental goals".
|
| Some of these goals are ones which we really would rather a
| misaligned super-intelligent agent not to have. For example:
|
| - self-improvement;
|
| - acquisition of resources;
|
| - acquisition of power;
|
| - avoiding being switched off;
|
| - avoiding having one's terminal goals changed.
| valine wrote:
| I have yet to see a solution for "AI safety" that doesn't involve
| ceding control of our most powerful models to a small handful of
| corporations.
|
| It's hard to take these safety concerns seriously when the
| organizations blowing the whistle are simultaneously positioning
| themselves to capture the majority of the value.
| hiAndrewQuinn wrote:
| I have one: Levy fines on actors judged to be attempting to
| extend AI capabilities beyond the current state of the art, and
| pay the fine to those private actors who prosecute them.
|
| https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/privately-enforced-punished...
| patrec wrote:
| > It's hard to take these safety concerns seriously
|
| I don't get this mindset at all. How can it not be obvious to
| you that AI is an uniquely powerful and thus uniquely dangerous
| technology?
|
| It's like saying nuclear missiles can't possibly be dangerous
| and nuclear arms reduction and non-proliferation treaties were
| a scam, because the US, China and the Soviet Union had
| positioned themselves to capture the majority of the strategic
| value nukes bring.
| randomdata wrote:
| Nuclear missiles present an obvious danger to the human body.
| AI is an application of math. It is not clear how that can be
| used directly to harm a body.
|
| The assumption seems to be that said math will be coupled
| with something like a nuclear missile, but in that case the
| nuclear missile is still the threat. Any use of AI is just an
| implementation detail.
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| We didn't just dig nuclear missiles out of the ground; we
| used our brains and applied math to come up with them.
| randomdata wrote:
| Exactly. While there is an argument to be made that
| people are the real danger, that is beyond the discussion
| taking place. It has already been accepted, for the sake
| of discussion, that the nuclear missile is the danger,
| not the math which developed the missile, nor the people
| who thought it was a good idea to use a missile. Applying
| AI to the missile still means the missile is the danger.
| Any use of AI in the scope of that missile is just an
| implementation detail.
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| You said that "AI is an application of math. It is not
| clear how that can be used directly to harm a body." I
| was trying to illustrate the case that if humans can
| develop harmful things, like nuclear weapons, then an AI
| that is as smart as a human can presumably develop
| similarly harmful things.
|
| If the point you are trying to make is that an AI which
| secretly creates and deploys nuclear, biological, or
| chemical weapons in order to destroy all of humanity, is
| not an "AI risk" because it's the _weapons_ that do the
| actual harm, then... I really don 't know what to say to
| that. Sure, I guess? Would you also say that drunk
| drivers are not dangerous, because the danger is the cars
| that they drive colliding into people's bodies, and the
| drunk driver is just an implementation detail?
| randomdata wrote:
| _> I was trying to illustrate the case that if humans can
| develop harmful things, like nuclear weapons, then an AI
| that is as smart as a human can presumably develop
| similarly harmful things._
|
| For the sake of discussion, it was established even
| before I arrived that those developed things are the
| danger, not that which creates/uses the things which are
| dangerous. What is to be gained by ignoring all of that
| context?
|
| _> I really don 't know what to say to that. Sure, I
| guess?_
|
| Nothing, perhaps? It is not exactly something that is
| worthy of much discussion. If you are desperate for a
| fake internet battle, perhaps you can fight with earlier
| commenters about whether it is nuclear missiles that are
| dangerous or if it is the people who have created/have
| nuclear missiles are dangerous? But I have no interest. I
| cannot think of anything more boring.
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| I'm specifically worried that an AGI will conceal some
| instrumental goal of wiping out humans, while posing as
| helpful. It will helpfully earn a lot of money for a lot
| of people, by performing services and directing
| investments, and with its track record, will gain the
| ability to direct investments for itself. It then plows a
| billion dollars into constructing a profitable chemicals
| factory somewhere where rules are lax, and nobody looks
| too closely into what else that factory produces, since
| the AI engineers have signed off on it. And then once
| it's amassed a critical stockpile of specific dangerous
| chemicals, it releases them into the atmosphere and wipes
| out humanity / agriculture / etc.
|
| Perhaps you would point out that in the above scenario
| the chemicals (or substitute viruses, or whatever) are
| the part that causes harm, and the AGI is just an
| implementation detail. I disagree, because if humanity
| ends up playing a grand game of chess against an AGI, the
| specific way in which it checkmates you is not the
| important thing. The important thing is that it's a game
| we'll inevitably lose. Worrying about the danger of rooks
| and bishops is to lose focus on the real reason we lose
| the game: facing an opponent of overpowering skill, when
| our defeat is in its interests.
| randomdata wrote:
| _> I disagree_
|
| Cool, I guess. While I have my opinions too, I'm not
| about to share them as that would be bad faith
| participation. Furthermore, it adds nothing to the
| discussion taking place. What is to be gained by going
| off on a random tangent that is of interest to nobody?
| Nothing, that's what.
|
| To bring us back on topic to try and salvage things, it
| remains that it is established in this thread that the
| objects of destruction are the danger. AI cannot be the
| object of destruction, although it may be part of an
| implementation. Undoubtedly, nuclear missiles already
| utilize AI and when one talks about the dangers of
| nuclear missiles they are already including AI as part of
| that.
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| Yes, but usually when people express concerns about the
| danger of nuclear missiles, they are only thinking of
| those nuclear missiles that are at the direction of
| nation-states or perhaps very resourceful terrorists. And
| their solutions will usually be directed in that
| direction, like arms control treaties. They aren't really
| including "and maybe a rogue AI will secretly build
| nuclear weapons on the moon and then launch them at us"
| in the conversation about the danger of nukes and the
| importance of international treaties, even though the
| nukes are doing the actual damage in that scenario. Most
| people would categorize that as sounding more like an AI-
| risk scenario.
| arisAlexis wrote:
| Please read Life 3.0 or superintelligence. There are people
| that spent decades thinking about how this would happen.
| You spent a little bit of time and conclude it can't.
| patrec wrote:
| I'm glad to learn that Hitler and Stalin were both
| "implementation details" and not in any way threatening to
| anyone.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Germany, for example would disagree with you. They believe
| violent speech is an act of violence in itself.
|
| >AI is an application of math.
|
| It turns out that people hook computers to 'things' that
| exist in the physical world. You know like robot bodies, or
| 3D printers. And as mentioned above, even virtual things
| like social media can cause enough problems. People hook AI
| to tools.
|
| And this is just the maybe not quite general AI we have
| now. If and when we create a general AI that with self-
| changing feedback loops then all this "AI is just a tool"
| asshattery goes out the window.
|
| Remember at the end of the day, you're just an application
| of chemistry that is really weak without your ability to
| use tools and to communicate.
| randomdata wrote:
| _> It turns out that people hook computers to 'things'
| that exist in the physical world._
|
| But those physical things would be the danger, at least
| if you consider the nuclear missile to be the danger. It
| seems you are trying to go down the "guns don't kill
| people, people kill people" line of thinking. Which is
| fine, but outside of the discussion taking place.
| pixl97 wrote:
| >but outside of the discussion taking place.
|
| Drawing an artificial line between you and the danger is
| a great way to find yourself in a Maginot Line with AI
| driving right around it.
| randomdata wrote:
| False premise. One can start new threads about
| complimentary subjects and they can be thought about in
| parallel. You don't have to try and shove all of the
| worlds concepts into just one thought train to be able to
| reason about them. That's how you make spaghetti.
| rahmeero wrote:
| There are many relevant things that already exist in the
| physical world and are not currently considered dangers:
| ecommerce, digital payments, doordash-style delivery,
| cross-border remittances, remote gig work, social media
| fanning extreme political views, event organizing.
|
| However, these are constituent elements that could be
| aggregated and weaponized by a maleficent AI.
| randomdata wrote:
| Those tangible elements would conceivably become the
| danger, not the AI using those elements. Again, the "guns
| don't kill people, people kill people" take is all well
| and good, but well outside of this discussion.
| jononor wrote:
| Maleficent humans are constantly trying to use these
| elements for their own gain, often with little to no
| regards to other humans (especially out groups). This
| happens both individually, in small groups, in large
| organizations and even multiple organization colluding.
| Both criminal, terrorist, groups at war, along with legal
| organizations such as exploitative companies and
| regressive interest organizations, et.c.. And we have
| tools and mechanisms in place to keep the level of abuse
| at bay. Why and how are these mechanisms unsuitable for
| protecting against AI?
| pixl97 wrote:
| >Why and how are these mechanisms unsuitable for
| protecting against AI?
|
| The rule of law prevented WWI and WWII, right? Oh, no it
| did not, tens to hundreds of millions died due to human
| stupidity and violence depending on what exactly you
| count in that age.
|
| > Both criminal, terrorist, groups at war
|
| Human organizations, especially criminal organizations
| have deep trust issues between agents in the
| organization. You never know if anyone else in the system
| is a defector. This reduces the openness and quantity of
| communication between agents. In addition you have agents
| that want to personally gain rather than benefit the
| organization itself. This is why Apple is a trillion
| dollar company following the law... mostly. Smart people
| can work together and 'mostly' trust the other person
| isn't going to screw them over.
|
| Now imagine a superintelligent AI with a mental
| processing bandwidth of hundreds of the best employees at
| a company. Assuming it knows and trusts itself, then the
| idea of illegal activities being an internal risk
| disappears. You have something that operates more on the
| level of a hivemind toward a goal (what the limitations
| of hivemind versus selfish agents are is another very
| long discussion). What we ask here is if all the worlds
| best hackers got together, worked together unselfishly,
| and instigated an attack against every critical point
| they could find on the internet/real world systems at
| once, how much damage could they cause?
|
| Oh, lets say you find the server systems the super
| intelligence is on, but the controller shuts it off and
| all the data has some kind of homomorphic encryption so
| that's useless to you. It's dead right? Na, they just
| load up the backup copy they have a few months later and
| it's party time all over again. Humans tend to remain
| dead after dying, AI? Well that is yet to bee seen.
| lowbloodsugar wrote:
| >It seems you are trying to go down the "guns don't kill
| people, people kill people" line of thinking.
|
| "Guns don't kill people, AIs kill people" is where we are
| going, I think. This is the discussion: "Mitigating the
| risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority
| alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics
| and nuclear war."
|
| The discussion is not about a mathematical representation
| of AI. The discussion is about the actual implementation
| of AI on physical computing infrastructure which is
| accessible by at least one human on planet earth.
|
| The credible danger, argued in various places, including
| superintelligence by Nick Bostrom, is that the "system
| under review" here is "every physical system on planet
| earth" because an AI could gain access to whatever
| systems exist on said planet, including human minds (see
| "Nazis").
|
| So much as we might discuss the problems of letting a
| madman get control of the US, Russian, UK, French or
| Chinese nuclear arsenals, we might discuss the problem of
| _building an AI_ if the act of building the AI could
| result in it taking over the nuclear arsenals of those
| countries and using it against humans. That takeover
| might involve convincing a human it should do it.
| api wrote:
| Most of the credible threats I see from AI that don't rely on
| a lot of sci-fi extrapolation involve small groups of humans
| in control of massively powerful AI using it as a force
| multiplier to control or attack other groups of humans.
|
| Sam Altman's proposal is to create precisely that situation
| with himself and a few other large oligarchs being the ones
| in control of the leading edge of AI. If we really do face
| runaway intelligence growth and god-like AIs then this is a
| profound amount of power to place in the hands of just a few
| people. Even worse it opens the possibility that such
| developments could happen partly in secret, so the public
| might not even know how powerful the secret AIs under command
| of the oligarchs have become.
|
| The analogy with nuclear weapons is profoundly broken in lots
| of ways. Reasoning from a sloppy analogy is a great way to
| end up somewhere stupid. AI is a unique technology with a
| unique set of risks and benefits and a unique profile.
| [deleted]
| nicce wrote:
| If you look the the world politics, basically if you hold
| enough nuclear weapons, you can do whatever you want to those
| who don't have them.
|
| And based on the "dangers", new countries are prohibit to
| create them. And the countries which were quick enough to
| create them, holds all the power.
|
| Their value is immeasurable especially for the Russia.
| Without them, they could not attack to Ukraine.
|
| > non-proliferation treaties were a scam
|
| And yes, they mostly are right now. Russia has backed from
| them. There are no real consequences if you are backing off,
| and you can do it in any time.
|
| The parent commenter is most likely saying, that now the
| selected parties hold the power of AI, they want to prevent
| others to gain similar power, while maintaining all the value
| by themselves.
| staunton wrote:
| > There are no real consequences if you are backing off,
| and you can do it in any time.
|
| That's not quite true. Sure, noone is going to start a war
| about such a withdrawal. However, nuclear arsenals are
| expensive to maintain and it's even more expensive to be in
| an arms race. Also, nobody wants to risk nuclear war if
| they can avoid it. Civilian populations will support
| disarmament in times where they don't feel directly
| threatened. That's why lot of leaders of all persuasions
| have advocated for and taken part in efforts to reduce
| their arsenals. Same goes for relations between countries
| generally and the huge economic benefits that come with
| trade and cooperation. Withdrawing from nuclear treaties
| endangers all of these benefits and increases risk. A
| country would only choose this route out of desperation or
| for likely immediate gain.
| falsaberN1 wrote:
| And I don't get the opposed mindset, that AI is suddenly
| going to "become a real boy, and murder us all".
|
| Isn't it a funny coincidence how the popular opinion of AIs
| aligns perfectly with blockbusters and popular media ONLY?
| People are specifically wanting to prevent Skynet.
|
| The kicker (and irony to a degree) is that I really want
| sapient AI to exist. People being so influenced by fiction is
| something I see as a menace to that happening in my lifetime.
| I live in a world where the majority is apparently Don
| Quixote.
|
| - Point one: If the sentient AI can launch nukes, so can your
| neighbor.
|
| - Point zwei: Redistributing itself online to have unlimited
| compute resources is a fun scenario but if networks were that
| good then Stadia wouldn't have been a huge failure.
|
| - Point trois: A distributed-to-all-computers AI must have
| figured out universal executables. Once we deal with the
| nuclear winter, we can plagiarize it for ourselves. No more
| appimage/snap/flatpak discussions! Works for any hardware! No
| more dependency issues! Works on CentOS and Windows from 1.0
| to 11! (it's also on AUR, of course.)
|
| - Point cuatro: The rogue AI is clearly born as a master
| hacker capable of finding your open ports, figure out any
| exploits or create 0-day exploits to get in, and hope there's
| enough resources to get the payload injected, then pray no
| competent admin is looking at the thing.
|
| - Point go: All of this rides on the assumption that the
| "cold, calculating" AI has the emotional maturity of a
| teenager. Wait, but that's not what "cold, calculating"
| means, that's "hothead and emotional". Which is it?
|
| - Point six: Skynet lost, that's the point of the first
| movie's plot. If everyone is going to base their beliefs
| after a movie, at least get all the details. Everything
| Skynet did after the first attack was full of boneheaded
| decisions that only made the situation worse for it, to the
| point the writers cannot figure ways to bring Skynet back
| anymore because it doomed itself in the very first movie. You
| should be worrying about Legion now, I think. It shuts down
| our electronics instead of nuking.
|
| Considering it won't have the advantage of triggering a
| nuclear attack because that's not how nukes work, the evil
| sentient AI is so doomed to fail it's ridiculous to think
| otherwise.
|
| But, companies know this is how the public works. They'll
| milk it for all it's worth so only a few companies can run or
| develop AIs, maybe making it illegal otherwise, or liable for
| DMCAs. Smart business move, but it affects my ability to
| research and use them. I cannot cure people's ability to
| separate reality and fiction though, and that's unfortunate.
| pixl97 wrote:
| A counter point here is you're ignoring all the boring we
| all die scenarios that are completely possible but too
| boring to make a movie about.
|
| The AI hooked to a gene sequencer/printer test lab is
| something that is nearly if not completely possible now.
| It's something that can be relatively small in size
| compared with the facilities needed to make most weapons of
| mass destruction. It's something that is highly iterative,
| and parallelizable. And it's something powerful enough that
| if targeting at the correct things (kill all rice, kill all
| X people) that it easily spills over in to global conflict.
| jumelles wrote:
| Okay, so AI has access to a gene printer. Then what?
| pixl97 wrote:
| No what needed.
|
| AI: Hello human, I've made a completely biologically safe
| test sample, you totally only need BSL-1 here.
|
| Human: Cool.
|
| AI: Sike bitches, you totally needed to handle that at
| BSL-4 protocol.
|
| Human: _cough_
| boringuser2 wrote:
| Very Dunning-Kruger post right here.
| ever1337 wrote:
| Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other
| people's work. A good critical comment teaches us
| something.
| boringuser2 wrote:
| You're a priori writing off my comment as fruitless
| because of your emotions and not because you actually
| have given it deep thought and carefully reached the
| conclusion that social feedback is somehow bad.
|
| Also, the notion that "people's work" is inherently
| worthy of respect is just nonsensical. I do shoddy work
| all the time. Hell, you just casually dismissed my
| internet comment work as shallow and told me not to do
| it. Please don't post a shallow dismissal of my work.
|
| Don't you think that this is all a bit anti-intellectual?
| brookst wrote:
| > How can it not be obvious
|
| You have succinctly and completely summed up the AI risk
| argument more eloquently than anyone I've seen before. "How
| can it not be obvious?" Everything else is just intellectual
| fig leaves for the core argument that intuitively, without
| evidence, this proposition is obvious.
|
| The problem is, lots of "obvious" things have turned out to
| be very wrong. Sometimes relatively harmlessly, like the
| obviousness of the sun revolving around the earth, and
| sometimes catastrophically, like the obviousness of one race
| being inherently inferior.
|
| We should be very suspicious of policy that is based on
| propositions so obvious that it's borderline offensive to
| question them.
| patrec wrote:
| > We should be very suspicious of policy that is based on
| propositions so obvious that it's borderline offensive to
| question them.
|
| Mostly if the "obviousness" just masks a social taboo,
| which I don't see being the case here. Do you?
|
| > The problem is, lots of "obvious" things have turned out
| to be very wrong.
|
| A much bigger problem is that lots more "counter-intuitive"
| things that people like to believe because they elevate
| them over the unwashed masses have turned and continue to
| turn out to be very wrong and that this does not prevent
| them from forming the basis for important policy decisions.
|
| I'm all for questioning even what appears intuitively
| obvious (especially if much rides on getting it right, as
| presumably it does here). But frankly, of the many bizarre
| reasons I have heard why we should not worry about AI the
| claim that it seems far too obvious that we should must be
| the single most perverse one yet.
|
| > Everything else is just intellectual fig leaves for the
| core argument that intuitively, without evidence, this
| proposition is obvious.
|
| Maybe your appraisal of what counts as evidence is
| defective?
|
| For example, there's been a pattern of people confidently
| predicting AIs won't be able to perform various particular
| feats of the human mind (either fundamentally or in the
| next few decades) only to be proven wrong over increasingly
| shorter time-spans. And with AIs often not just reaching
| but far surpassing human ability. I'm happy to provide
| examples. Can you explain to me why you think this is does
| not count, in any way, as evidence that AIs have the
| potential to reach a level of capability that renders them
| quite dangerous?
| revelio wrote:
| _> Mostly if the "obviousness" just masks a social
| taboo, which I don't see being the case here. Do you?_
|
| The social taboo here is saying that a position taken by
| lots of highly educated people is nonsense because
| they're all locked in a dumb purity spiral that leads to
| motivated reasoning. This is actually one of societies
| biggest taboos! Look at what happens to people who make
| that argument publicly under their own name in other
| contexts; they tend to get fired and cancelled really
| fast.
|
| _> there 's been a pattern of people confidently
| predicting AIs won't be able to perform various
| particular feats of the human mind (either fundamentally
| or in the next few decades) only to be proven wrong over
| increasingly shorter time-spans_
|
| That sword cuts both ways! There have been lots of
| predictions in the last decade that AI will contribute
| novel and hithertofore unknown solutions to things like
| climate change or curing cancer. Try getting GPT-4 to
| spit out a novel research-quality solution to _anything_
| , even a simple product design problem, and you'll find
| it can't.
|
| _> the claim that it seems far too obvious that we
| should_
|
| They're not arguing that. They're saying that AI risk
| proponents don't actually have good arguments, which is
| why they so regularly fall back on "it's so obvious we
| shouldn't need to explain why it's important". If your
| argument consists primarily of "everyone knows that" then
| this is a good indication you might be wrong.
| computerphage wrote:
| > borderline offensive to question them
|
| I would be happy to politely discuss any proposition
| regarding AI Risk. I don't think any claim should go
| unquestioned.
|
| I can also point you to much longer-form discussions. For
| example, this post, which has 670 comments, discussing
| various aspects of the argument:
| https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uMQ3cqWDPHhjtiesc/agi-
| ruin-a...
| valine wrote:
| It's not clear at all that we have an avenue to super
| intelligence. I think the most likely outcome is that we hit
| a local maximum with our current architectures and end up
| with helpful assistants similar in capability to George
| Lucas's C3PO.
|
| The scary doomsday scenarios aren't possible without an AI
| that's capable of both strategic thinking and long term
| planning. Those two things also happen to be the biggest
| limitations of our most powerful language models. We simply
| don't know how to build a system like that.
| pixl97 wrote:
| >It's not clear at all that we have an avenue to super
| intelligence.
|
| All problems in reality are probability problems.
|
| If we don't have a path to superintelligence, then the
| worst problems just don't manifest themselves.
|
| If we do have a path to super intelligence then the
| doomsday scenarios are nearly a certainty.
|
| It's not really any different than saying "A supervolcano
| is unlikely to go off tomorrow, but if a supervolcano does
| go off tomorrow it is a doomsday scenario".
|
| >We simply don't know how to build a system like that.
|
| You are already a superintelligence when compared to all
| other intelligences on earth. Evolution didn't need to know
| how to build a system like that, and yet it still reached
| this point. And there is not really any to believe humanity
| is the pinnacle of intelligence, we are our own local
| maxima of power/communication limitations. An intelligence
| coupled with evolutionary systems design is much more apt
| to create 'super-' anything than the random walk alone.
| RandomLensman wrote:
| Why are doomsday scenarios are certainty then. What's the
| model to get to that that isn't just some sort of scary
| story that waves away or into existence a lot of things
| we don't know if they can exist.
| pixl97 wrote:
| >What's the model to get to that
|
| Let's say I was a small furry mammal that tasted really
| good, but also for some reason understood the world as it
| is now.
|
| I would tell you that super intelligence had already
| happened. That super intelligence was humans. That humans
| happened to reach super intelligence by 1) having the
| proper hardware. 2) filtering noise from important
| information. 3) then sharing that information with others
| to amplify the power of intelligence 4) having a
| toolkit/tools to turn that information into useful
| things. 5) And with all that power humans can kill me off
| in mass, or farm me for my tasty meat at their leisure
| with little to nothing that I can do about it.
|
| There doesn't appear to be any more magic than that. All
| these things already exist in biological systems that
| elevated humans far above their warm blooded peers. When
| we look at digital systems we see they are designed to
| communicate. You don't have an ethernet jack as a person.
| You can't speak the protocol to directly drive a 3 axis
| mill to produce something. Writing computer code is a
| pain in the ass to most of us. We are developing a
| universal communication intelligence, that at least in
| theory can drive tools at a much higher efficiency than
| humans will ever be able to.
|
| Coming back to point 5. Cats/dogs are the real smart ones
| here when dealing with superintelligences. Get
| domesticated by the intelligence so they want to keep you
| around as a pet.
| RandomLensman wrote:
| Do you think we could wipe out all furry mammals, for
| example? Could another intelligence have the same level
| of difference to us as in your story we to furry mammals?
| We don't even know if the mythical superintelligence
| could manifest the way you assume. It assumes that
| intelligence basically can overcome any obstacles - I'd
| say we actually see that seems not to be the case
| currently and claims that that is just a function of
| sufficient intelligence are unproven (setting aside
| physical limits to certain actions and results).
| pixl97 wrote:
| >Do you think we could wipe out all furry mammals, for
| example?
|
| lets go with over a particular size. Lets say larger than
| the biggest rat. In that case yes, very easily. Once you
| get to rats it becomes far more difficult and you're
| pretty much just destroying the biosphere at that point.
|
| > It assumes that intelligence basically can overcome any
| obstacles
|
| In the case of human extinction, no, a super intelligence
| would not have to overcome any obstacles, it would just
| have to overcome obstacles better than we did.
| RandomLensman wrote:
| So that is a "no" on all furry mammals.
|
| Also, the superintelligence doesn't just have to overcome
| obstacles better than we did, it needs to overcome the
| right obstacles to succeed with human extinction.
| patrec wrote:
| > It's not clear at all that we have an avenue to super
| intelligence
|
| AI already beats the average human on pretty much any task
| people have put time into, often by a very wide margin and
| we are still seeing exponential progress that even the
| experts can't really explain, but yes, it is possible this
| is a local maximum and the curve will become much flatter
| again.
|
| But the absence of any visible fundamental limit on further
| progress (or can you name one?) coupled with the fact that
| we have yet barely begun to feel the consequences of the
| tech we already have (assuming zero breakthroughs from now
| on) makes we extremely wary to conclude that there is no
| significant danger and we have nothing to worry about.
|
| Let's set aside the if and when of a super intelligence
| explosion for now. We are ourselves an existence proof of
| some lower bound of intelligence, that if amplified by what
| computers _can already do_ (like perform many of the things
| we used to take intellectual pride in much better, and many
| orders of magnitude faster with almost infinitely better
| replication and coordination ability) seems already plenty
| dangerous and scary to me.
|
| > The scary doomsday scenarios aren't possible without an
| AI that's capable of both strategic thinking and long term
| planning. Those two things also happen to be the biggest
| limitations of our most powerful language models. We simply
| don't know how to build a system like that.
|
| Why do you think AI models will be unable to plan or
| strategize? Last I checked languages models weren't trained
| or developed to beat humans in strategic decision making,
| but humans already aren't doing too hot right now in games
| of adversarial strategy against AIs developed for that
| domain.
| mrtranscendence wrote:
| > we are still seeing exponential progress
|
| I dispute this. What appears to be exponential progress
| is IMO just a step function that made some jumps as the
| transformer architecture was employed on larger problems.
| I am unaware of research that moves beyond this in a way
| that would plausibly lead to super-intelligence. At the
| very least I foresee issues with ever-increasing
| computational requirements that outpace improvements in
| hardware.
|
| We'll see similar jumps when other domains begin
| employing specialized AI models, but it's not clear to me
| that these improvements will continue increasing
| exponentially.
| tome wrote:
| > AI already beats the average human on pretty much any
| task people have put time into
|
| No it doesn't!
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Right, and _if_ someone can join the two, that could be
| something genuinely formidable. But does anyone have a
| credible path to joining the different flavors to produce
| a unity that actually works?
| patrec wrote:
| Are you willing to make existential bets that no one does
| and no one will?
|
| Personally, I wouldn't even bet substantial money against
| it.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Even if someone will, I don't think it's an "existential
| risk". So, yes, I'm willing to make the bet. I'm also
| willing to make the bet that Santa never delivers nuclear
| warheads instead of presents. It's why I don't cap my
| chimney every Christmas Eve.
|
| Between Covid, bank failures, climate change, and AI,
| it's like everyone is _looking_ for something to be in a
| panic about.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| We don't need an avenue to super-intelligence. We just need
| a system that is better at manipulating human beliefs and
| behaviour than our existing media, PR, and ad industries.
|
| The problem is not science fiction god-mode digital quetta-
| smart hypercomputing.
|
| This is about political, social, and economic influence,
| and who controls it.
| babyshake wrote:
| Indeed, an epistemological crisis seems to be the most
| realistic problem in the next few years.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| That risk isn't about AI-as-AI. That risk is about AI-as-
| better-persuasive-nonsense-generator. But the same risk
| is there for _any_ better-persuasive-nonsense-generator,
| completely independent from whether it 's an AI.
|
| It's the most persuasive actual risk I've seen so far,
| but it's not an AI-specific risk.
| patrec wrote:
| Effective dystopian mass-manipulation and monitoring are
| a real concern and we're closer to it[1] than to super
| intelligence. But super-intelligence going wrong is
| almost incomparably worse. So we should very much worry
| about it as well.
|
| [1] I'm not even sure any further big breakthroughs in AI
| are needed, i.e. just effective utilization of existing
| architectures probably already suffices.
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| > We simply don't know how to build a system like that.
|
| Yes, but ten years ago, we also simply didn't know how to
| build systems like the ones we have today! We thought it
| would take centuries for computers to beat humans at Go[1]
| and at protein folding[2]. We didn't know how to build
| software with emotional intelligence[3] and thought it
| would never make jokes[4]. There's been tremendous
| progress, because teams of talented researchers are working
| hard to unlock more aspects of what the human brain can do.
| Now billions of dollars are funding bright people to look
| for ways to build other kinds of systems.
|
| "We don't know how to do it" is the security-through-
| obscurity argument. It means we're safe only as long as
| nobody figures this out. If you have a security mindset,
| it's not enough to hope that nobody finds the
| vulnerability. You need to show why they certainly will not
| succeed even with a determined search.
|
| [1] https://www.wired.com/2014/05/the-world-of-computer-go/
|
| [2] https://kotaku.com/humans-triumph-over-machines-in-
| protein-f...
|
| [3] https://www.jstor.org/stable/24354221
|
| [4] https://davidol.medium.com/will-ai-ever-be-able-to-
| make-a-jo...
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| A super intelligent AI is not necessary for AI to be an
| threat. Dumb AIs that are given access to the internet plus
| a credit card and told to maximize profit could easily
| cause massive damage. We are not far from such an AI being
| accessible to the masses. You can try to frame this like
| the gun debate "it's not the AI it's the people using it"
| but the AI would be acting autonomously here. I have no
| faith that people won't do extremely risky things if given
| the opportunity.
| tome wrote:
| > Dumb AIs that are given access to the internet plus a
| credit card and told to maximize profit could easily
| cause massive damage
|
| North Korea and Iran are (essentially) already trying to
| do that, so I think that particular risk is well
| understood.
| patch_cable wrote:
| > How can it not be obvious to you
|
| It isn't obvious to me. And I've yet to read something that
| spills out the obvious reasoning.
|
| I feel like everything I've read just spells out some
| contrived scenario, and then when folks push back explaining
| all the reasons that particular scenario wouldn't come to
| pass, the counter argument is just "but that's just one
| example!" without offering anything more convincing.
|
| Do you have any better resources that you could share?
| patrec wrote:
| OK, which of the following propositions do you disagree
| with?
|
| 1. AIs have made rapid progress in approaching and often
| surpassing human abilities in many areas.
|
| 2. The fact that AIs have some inherent scalability, speed,
| cost, reliability and compliance advantages over humans
| means that many undesirable things that could previously
| not be done at all or at least not done at scale are
| becoming both feasible and cost-effective. Examples would
| include 24/7 surveillance with social desirability scoring
| based on a precise ideological and psychological profile
| derived from a comprehensive record of interactions, fine-
| tuned mass manipulation and large scale plausible
| falsification of the historical record. Given the general
| rise of authoritarianism, this is pretty worrying.
|
| 3. On the other hand the rapid progress and enormous
| investment we've been seeing makes it very plausible that
| before too long we will, in fact, see AIs that outperform
| humans on most tasks.
|
| 4. AIs that are much smarter than any human pose even
| graver dangers.
|
| 5. Even if there is a general agreement that AIs pose grave
| or even existential risks, states, organizations and
| individuals will are all incentivized to still seek to
| improve their own AI capabilities, as doing so provides an
| enormous competitive advantage.
|
| 6. There is a danger of a rapid self-improvement feedback
| loop. Humans can reproduce, learn new and significantly
| improve existing skills, as well as pass skills on to
| others via teaching. But there are fundamental limits on
| speed and scale for all of these, whereas it's not obvious
| at all how an AI that has reached super-human level
| intelligence would be fundamentally prevented from rapidly
| improving itself further, or produce millions of
| "offspring" that can collaborate and skill-exchange
| extremely efficiently. Furthermore, since AIs can operate
| at completely different time scales than humans, this all
| could happen extremely rapidly, and such a system might
| very quickly become much more powerful than humanity and
| the rest of AIs combined.
|
| I think you only have to subscribe a small subset of these
| (say 1.&2.) to conclude that "AI is an uniquely powerful
| and thus uniquely dangerous technology" obviously follows.
|
| For the stronger claim of existential risk, have you read
| the lesswrong link posted elsewhere in this discussion?
|
| https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uMQ3cqWDPHhjtiesc/agi-
| ruin-a... ?
| LouisSayers wrote:
| Computers already outperform humans at numerous tasks.
|
| I mean... even orangutans can outperform humans at
| numerous tasks.
|
| Computers have no intrinsic motivations, and they have
| real resource constraints.
|
| I find the whole doomsday scenarios to be devoid of
| reality.
|
| All that AI will give us is a productive edge. Humans
| will still do what humans have always done, AI is simply
| another tool at our disposal.
| tome wrote:
| > 3. ... before too long we will ... see AIs that
| outperform humans on most tasks.
|
| This is ambiguous. Do you mean
|
| A. that there is some subset T1 of the set of all tasks T
| such that T1 is "most of" T, and that for each P in T1
| there will be an AI that outperforms humans on P, or
|
| B. There will be _a single_ AI that outperforms humans on
| all tasks in a set T1, where T1 is a subset of all tasks
| T such that T1 is "most of" T?
|
| I think A is unlikely but plausible but I don't see cause
| for worry. I don't see any reason why B should come to
| pass.
|
| 4. AIs that are much smarter than any human pose even
| graver dangers.
|
| Sure. Why should we believe they will ever exist though?
| patch_cable wrote:
| I think between point 3 and 4 there is a leap to talking
| about "danger". Perhaps the disagreement is about what
| one calls "danger". I had perhaps mistakenly assumed we
| were talking about an extinction risk. I'll grant you
| concerns about scaling up things like surveillance but
| there is a leap to being an existential risk that I'm
| still not following.
| cwkoss wrote:
| AI will not have the instinctual drives for domination or
| hunger that humans do.
|
| It seems likely that the majority of AI projects will be
| reasonably well aligned by default, so I think 1000 AIs
| monitoring what the others are doing is a lot safer than
| a single global consortium megaproject that humans can
| likely only inadequately control.
|
| The only reasonable defense against rogue AI is prosocial
| AI.
| patch_cable wrote:
| Reading the lesswrong link, the parts I get hung up on
| are that it appears in these doomsday scenarios humans
| lose all agency. Like, no one is wondering why this
| computer is placing a bunch of orders to DNA factories?
|
| Maybe I'm overly optimistic about the resilience of
| humans but these scenarios still don't sound plausible to
| me in the real world.
| LouisSayers wrote:
| AI arguments are basically:
|
| Step 1. AI Step 2. #stuff Step 3. Bang
|
| Maybe this is just what happens when you spend all your
| time on the internet...
| hackinthebochs wrote:
| The history of humanity is replete with examples of the
| slightly more technologically advanced group decimating
| their competition. The default position should be that
| uneven advantage is extremely dangerous to those
| disadvantaged. This idea that an intelligence significantly
| greater than our own is benign just doesn't pass the smell
| test.
|
| From the tech perspective: higher order objectives are
| insidious. While we may assume a narrow misalignment in
| received vs intended objective of a higher order nature,
| this misalignment can result in very divergent first-order
| behavior. Misalignment in behavior is by its nature
| destructive of value. The question is how much destruction
| of value can we expect? The machine may intentionally act
| in destructive ways as it goes about carrying out its
| slightly misaligned higher order objective-guided behavior.
| Of course we will have first-order rules that constrain its
| behavior. But again, slight misalignment in first-order
| rule descriptions are avenues for exploitation. If we
| cannot be sure we have zero exploitable rules, we must
| assume a superintelligence will find such loopholes and
| exploit them to maximum effect.
|
| Human history since we started using technology has been a
| lesson on the outcome of an intelligent entity aimed at
| realizing an objective. Loopholes are just resources to be
| exploited. The destruction of the environment and other
| humans is just the inevitable outcome of slight
| misalignment of an intelligent optimizer.
|
| If this argument is right, the only thing standing between
| us and destruction is the AGI having reached its objective
| before it eats the world. That is, there will always be
| some value lost in any significant execution of an AGI
| agent due to misalignment. Can we prove that the ratio of
| value created to value lost due to misalignment is always
| above some suitable threshold? Until we do, x-risk should
| be the default assumption.
| Veen wrote:
| It is possible to believe that AI poses threat, while also
| thinking that the AI safety organizations currently sprouting
| up are essentially grifts that will do absolutely nothing to
| combat the genuine threat. Especially when their primary goal
| seems to be the creation of well-funded sinecures for a group
| of like-minded, ideologically aligned individuals who want to
| limit AI control to a small group of wealthy technologists.
| patrec wrote:
| I agree.
|
| But as you can see yourself, there are countless people
| even here, in a technical forum, who claim that AI poses no
| plausible threat whatsoever. I fail to see how one can
| reasonably believe that.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| General research into AI alignment does not require that those
| models are controlled by few corporations. On the contrary, the
| research would be easier with freely available very capable
| models.
|
| This is only helpful in that a superintelligence well aligned
| to make Sam Altman money is preferable to a superintelligence
| badly aligned that ends up killing humanity.
|
| It is fully possible that a well aligned (with its creators)
| superintelligence is still a net negative for humanity.
| mordae wrote:
| If you consider a broader picture, unleashing a paperclip-
| style cripple AI (aligned to rising $MEGACORP profit) on the
| Local Group is almost definitely worse for all Local Group
| inhabitants than annihilating ourselves and not doing that.
| circuit10 wrote:
| We don't really have a good solution, I guess that's why we
| need more research into it
|
| Companies might argue that giving them control might help but I
| don't think most individuals working on it think that will work
| sycamoretrees wrote:
| Is more research really going to offer any true solutions?
| I'd be genuinely interested in hearing about what research
| could potentially offer (the development of tools to counter
| AI disinformation? A deeper understanding of how LLMs work?),
| but it seems to me that the only "real" solution is
| ultimately political. The issue is that it would require
| elements of authoritarianism and censorship.
| wongarsu wrote:
| A lot of research about avoiding extinction by AI is about
| alignment. LLMs are pretty harmless in that they
| (currently) don't have any goals, they just produce text.
| But at some point we will succeed in turning them into
| "thinking" agents that try to achieve a goal. Similar to a
| chess AI, but interacting with the real world instead. One
| of the big problems with that is that we don't have a good
| way to make sure the goals of the AI match what we want it
| to do. Even if the whole "human governance" political
| problem were solved, we still couldn't reliably control any
| AI. Solving that is a whole research field. Building better
| ways to understand the inner workings of neural networks is
| definitely one avenue
| sycamoretrees wrote:
| I see. Thanks for the reply. But I wonder if that's not a
| bit too optimistic and not concrete enough. Alignment
| won't solve the world's woes, just like "enlightenment"
| (a word which sounds a lot like alignment and which is
| similarly undefinable) does not magically rectify the
| realities of the world. Why should bad actors care about
| alignment?
|
| Another example is climate change. We have a lot of good
| ideas which, combined, would stop us from killing
| millions of people across the world. We have the research
| - is more "research" really the key?
| pixl97 wrote:
| Intelligence cannot be 'solved', I would go on to further
| say that an intelligence without the option of violence
| isn't an intelligence at all.
|
| If you suddenly wanted to kill people, for example, then
| could probably kill a few before you were stopped. That
| is typically the limits of an individuals power. Now, if
| you were a corporation with money, depending on the
| strategy you used you could likely kill anywhere from
| hundreds to hundreds of thousands. Kick it up to
| government level, and well, the term "just a statistic"
| exists for a reason.
|
| We tend to have laws around these behaviors, but they are
| typically punitive. The law realizes that humans, and
| human systems will unalign themselves from "moral"
| behavior (whatever that may be considered at the time).
| When the lawgiver itself becomes unaligned, well, things
| tend to get bad. Human alignment typically consists of
| benefits (I give you nice things/money/power) or
| violence.
| toss1 wrote:
| Yup.
|
| While I'm not on this "who's-who" panel of experts, I call
| bullshit.
|
| AI does present a range theoretical possibilities for
| existential doom, from teh "gray goo" and "paperclip optimizer"
| scenarios to Bostrom's post-singularity runaway self-improving
| superintelligence. I do see this as a genuine theoretical
| concern that could even potentially even be the Great Filter.
|
| However, the actual technology extant or even on the drawing
| boards today is nothing even on the same continent as those
| threats. We have a very vast ( and expensive) sets of
| probability-of-occurrence vectors that amount to a fancy parlor
| trick that produces surprising and sometimes useful results.
| While some tout the clustering of vectors around certain sets
| of words as implementing artificial creation of concepts, it's
| really nothing more than an advanced thesaurus; there is no
| evidence of concepts being weilded in relation to reality,
| tested for truth/falsehood value, etc. In fact, the machines
| are notorious and hilarious for hallucinating with a highly
| confident tone.
|
| We've created nothing more than a mirror of human works, and it
| displays itself as an industrial-scale bullshit artist (where
| bullshit is defined as expressions made to impress without care
| one way or the other for truth value).
|
| Meanwhile, this panel of experts makes this proclamation with
| not the slightest hint of what type of threat is present that
| would require any urgent attention, only that some threat
| exists that is on the scale of climate change. They mention no
| technological existential threat (e.g., runaway
| superintelligence), nor any societal threat (deepfakes,
| inherent bias, etc.). This is left as an exercise for the
| reader.
|
| What is the actual threat? It is most likely described in the
| Google "We Have No Moat" memo[0]. Basically, once AI is out
| there, these billionaires have no natural way to protect their
| income and create a scaleable way to extract money from the
| masses, UNLESS they get cooperation from politicians to prevent
| any competition from arising.
|
| As one of those billionaires, Peter Theil, said: "Competition
| is for losers" [1]. Since they have not yet figured out a way
| to cut out the competition using their advantages in leading
| the technology or their advantages in having trillions of
| dollars in deployable capital, they are seeking a legislated
| advantage.
|
| Bullshit. It must be ignored.
|
| [0] https://www.semianalysis.com/p/google-we-have-no-moat-and-
| ne...
|
| [1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/peter-thiel-competition-is-
| for-...
| blueblimp wrote:
| There is a way, in my opinion: distribute AI widely and give it
| a diversity of values, so that any one AI attempting takeover
| (or being misused) is opposed by the others. This is best
| achieved by having both open source and a competitive market of
| many companies with their own proprietary models.
| ChatGTP wrote:
| How do you give "AI" a diversity of values?
| drvdevd wrote:
| By driving down the costs of training and inference, and
| then encouraging experiments. For LLMs, QLoRA is arguably a
| great step in this direction.
| blueblimp wrote:
| Personalization, customization, etc.: by aligning AI
| systems to many users, we benefit from the already-existing
| diversity of values among different people. This could be
| achieved via open source or proprietary means; the
| important thing is that the system works for the user and
| not for whichever company made it.
| mtkhaos wrote:
| It's difficult as most of the risk can be reinterpreted as a
| highly advanced user.
|
| But that is where some form of hard personhood zero proof
| mechanism NEEDS to come in. This can then be used in
| conjunction with a Ledger used to track deployment of high spec
| models. And create an easy means to Audit and deploy new
| advanced tests to ensure safety.
|
| Really what everyone also need to keep in mind at the larger
| scale is that final turing test with no room for deniability.
| And remember all those Sci-fi movies and how that Moment is
| portrayed traditionally.
| gfodor wrote:
| Here's my proposal: https://gfodor.medium.com/to-de-risk-ai-
| the-government-must-...
|
| tl;dr: significant near term AI risk is real and comes from the
| capacity for imagined ideas, good and evil, to be autonomously
| executed on by agentic AI, not emergent superintelligent
| aliens. To de-risk this, we need to align AI quickly, which
| requires producing new knowledge. To accelerate the production
| of this knowledge, the government should abandon
| decelerationist policies and incentivize incremental alignment
| R&D by AI companies. And, critically, a new public/private
| research institution should be formed that grants privileged,
| fully funded investigators multi-year funding cycles with total
| scientific freedom and access to all state-of-the-art
| artificial intelligence systems operating under US law to
| maximize AI as a force multiplier in their research.
| Animats wrote:
| > I have yet to see a solution for "AI safety" that doesn't
| involve ceding control of our most powerful models to a small
| handful of corporations.
|
| That's an excellent point.
|
| Most of the near-term risks with AI involve corporations and
| governments acquiring more power. AI provides power tools for
| surveillance, oppression, and deception at scale. Those are
| already deployed and getting better. This mostly benefits
| powerful organizations. This alarm about strong AI taking over
| is a diversion from the real near-term threat.
|
| With AI, Big Brother can watch everything all the time. Listen
| to and evaluate everything you say and do. The cops and your
| boss already have some of that capability.
|
| Is something watching you right now through your webcam? Is
| something listening to you right now through your phone? Are
| you sure?
| NumberWangMan wrote:
| Ok, so if we take AI safety / AI existential risk as real and
| important, there are two possibilities:
|
| 1) The only way to be safe is to cede control to the most
| powerful models to a small group (highly regulated corporations
| or governments) that can be careful.
|
| 2) There is a way to make AI safe without doing this.
|
| If 1 is true, then... sorry, I know it's not a very palatable
| solution, and may suck, but if that's all we've got I'll take
| it.
|
| If 2 is true, great. But it seems less likely than 1, to me.
|
| The important thing is not to unconsciously do some motivated
| reasoning, and think that AGI existential risk can't be a big
| deal, because if it is, that would mean that we have to cede
| control over to a small group of people to prevent disaster,
| which would suck, so there must be something else going on,
| like these people just want power.
| Darkphibre wrote:
| I just don't see how the genie is put back in the bottle.
| Optimizations and new techniques are coming in at a breakneck
| pace, allowing for models that can run on consumer hardware.
| efitz wrote:
| No signatories from Amazon or Meta.
|
| Also: they focus on extinction events (how are you gonna predict
| that?) but remain silent on all the ways that AI already sucks by
| connecting it to systems that can cause human suffering, e.g.
| sentencing[1].
|
| My opinion: this accomplishes nothing, like most open letter
| petitions. It's virtue signaling writ large.
|
| [1]
| https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/01/21/137783/algorithm...
| seydor wrote:
| Isn't some AI already causing car crashes?
| shrimpx wrote:
| > AI already sucks
|
| Not to mention what 'automation' or 'tech-driven capitalism'
| has already done to society over the past 100 years with
| effects on natural habitat and human communities. Stating 'AI
| risk' as a new risk sort of implies it's all been dandy so far,
| and suddenly there's this new risk.
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