[HN Gopher] Defending against hypothetical moon life during Apol...
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Defending against hypothetical moon life during Apollo 11
Author : Metacelsus
Score : 54 points
Date : 2024-01-07 17:38 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (eukaryotewritesblog.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (eukaryotewritesblog.com)
| TheEzEzz wrote:
| A good analogy for AI risk. We'd never visited the Moon before,
| or any other celestial object. The risk analysis was not "we've
| never seen life from a foreign celestial object cause problems on
| Earth, therefore we aren't worried." The risk analysis was also
| not "let's never go to the Moon to be _extra_ safe, it's just not
| worth it."
|
| The analysis was instead "with various methods we can be
| reasonably confident the Moon is sterile, but the risk of getting
| this wrong is very high, so we're going to be extra careful just
| in case." Pressing forward while investing in multiple layers of
| addressing risk.
| yreg wrote:
| I agree with you, but to be fair:
|
| - The worst case worry about AI is a much bigger problem than
| the worst case worry about moon life. (IMHO)
|
| - With moon we had a good idea on how to mitigate the risks
| just to be extra safe. With AI I believe we don't have any clue
| on how to do containment / alignment or if it's even possible.
| What is currently being done on the alignment front (e.g. GPT
| refusing to write porn stories or scam emails) has absolutely
| nothing to do with what worries some people about
| superintelligence.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| No, the worst case worry about moon life is the total
| extinction of all life on earth. It's no better than AI.
| johntask wrote:
| Total extinction of all life on Earth isn't also the worst
| case worry about AI? Anyway, both seem highly unlikely,
| that's why we shouldn't compare worst or best scenarios,
| but rather real, more probable risks, i.e. AI being used to
| develop advanced weapons. In that regard I'd say AI is
| worst, but it's mostly a matter of opinion, really.
| yreg wrote:
| Again, devils advocate, but the people worried about AI
| (like Yudkowsky) are absolutely worried about it killing
| all humans. You can read more about the specifics on
| lesswrong.
|
| With moon life I presume the worst case is some infectious
| and fatal disease that's difficult to contain?
|
| The first one sounds like a bigger problem to me, but maybe
| it's not a discussion worth having. So, fair enough.
| Geisterde wrote:
| Skynet will only nuke us after the AI safety crowd has
| thoroughly convinced the military of how supremely
| dangerous and capable AI is. AI on its own seems pretty
| benign, keep security vulnerabilities patched and be
| skeptical of what you read on the internet.
|
| I honestly believe this pop-scifi view we have of AI is
| probably the most dangerous part, it gives certain people
| (like those in weapons procurement) dangerous levels of
| confidence in something that doesnt provide consistent
| and predictable results. When the first AI cruise missile
| blows up some kids because it hallucinated them as a
| threat, it wont be because AI is so dangerous, it will be
| the overconfidence of the designers. Its threat to
| humanity is directly correlated to the responsibility we
| delegate it.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| Maybe we can just EMP ourselves / turn off the grid for a
| day.
| TheEzEzz wrote:
| I agree -- the risks are bigger, the rewards larger, the
| variance much higher, and the theories much less mature.
|
| But what's striking to me as the biggest difference is the
| seeming lack of ideological battles in this Moon story. There
| were differences of opinion on how much precaution to take,
| how much money to spend, how to make trade offs that may
| affect the safety of the astronauts, etc. But there's no
| mention of a vocal ideological group that stands outright
| opposed to those worried about risks -- or a group that
| stands opposed to the lunar missions entirely. They didn't
| politicize the issue and demonize their opponents.
|
| Maybe what we're seeing with the AI risk discussion is just
| the outcome of social media. The most extreme voices are also
| the loudest. But we desperately need to recapture a culture
| of earnest discussion, collaboration, and sanity. We need
| every builder and every regulator thinking holistically about
| the risks and the rewards. And we need to think from first
| principles. This new journey and its outcomes will almost
| surely be different in unexpected ways.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| Not a great analogy. Today we have all kinds of profit-driven
| companies "going to the moon" without thinking too hard about
| the risks. There is not, and practically can't be, a central
| safety effort that has more effect than releasing reports. No
| one is enforcing quarantine.
|
| If there was life on the moon in an analogous scenario, it
| would be a matter of a few trips before it was loose on earth.
| mastersummoner wrote:
| Yes, but that's today. When the moon landing initially
| happened, nobody had ever been to another celestial body
| before, whereas now we have lots more experience visiting
| them and sampling their atmospheres and surfaces.
|
| Nobody's ever created AI before, so we're in a similar
| situation in that nobody has firsthand experience of what to
| expect.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| Oh definitely, _that_ part of the analogy works fine.
| cubefox wrote:
| Sounds like a great analogy?
| gumballindie wrote:
| A great analogy indeed - ai, as moon life, turned out to be
| false alarms.
| LargeTomato wrote:
| You can easily harm people with ai. I can hypothetically harm
| people with ai today (fake news, etc). I can't harm people
| with fake moon life. AI already poses a greater threat to
| humanity than moon life ever did.
| gumballindie wrote:
| You can harm people with a feather. AI is a non issue, the
| only issue is the people using it, and thus far it seems
| like there are too many sociopaths using it, willing to
| steal people's property just to generate images of
| sexualised animals and dubious quality code.
| The_Colonel wrote:
| > so we're going to be extra careful just in case
|
| If we're going with that analogy, moon is roughly
| simultaneously visited by many private companies, each bringing
| samples back, some paying lip service "we're totally be
| careful", some not.
|
| Continuing with that analogy, there are other planets, moons,
| solar systems with perhaps bigger chance of finding life. The
| laissez-faire approach to bringing samples back continues, now
| strengthened by the "see, we visited moon, brought samples and
| we still live!".
| invig wrote:
| Well, extra careful, but we've still got to beat the Russians.
| We're not going to not beat the Russians over this, so figure
| it out.
| gwern wrote:
| And, what OP downplays, not taking it seriously, having many
| serious fatal flaws, and then covering all those flaws up while
| assuring the public everything was going great:
| https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/09/science/nasa-moon-quarant...
| https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/724888
|
| Something to think about: even if there are AI 'warning shots',
| why do you think anyone will be allowed to hear them?
| TheEzEzz wrote:
| Good question. Perhaps depends on the type of warning shot.
| Plenty of media has an anti-tech bend and will publicize
| warning shots if they see them -- and they do this already
| with near term risks, such as facial recognition.
|
| If the warning shot is from an internal red team, then higher
| likelihood that it isn't reported. To address that I think we
| need to continue to improve the culture around safety, so
| that we increase the odds that a person on or close to that
| red team blows the whistle if we're stepping toward
| undisclosed disaster.
|
| I think the bigger risk isn't that we don't hear the warning
| shots though. It's that we don't get the warning shots, or we
| get them far too late. Or, perhaps more likely, we get them
| but are already set on some inexorable path due to
| competitive pressure. And a million other "or's".
| 627467 wrote:
| I wonder if similar approach was taken for for internet/www.
| Google? Did anyone worry about PageRank threat to life? Maybe
| PageRank will turn out to have been the human nemesis after
| all... Only in hundred of years time frame
| andy99 wrote:
| You mean skynet terminator wintermute risk it seems, which
| doesn't exist and we have no pathway to. The analogy doesn't
| hold for matrix multiplication. It might be fun to pontificate
| about what could happen if we had something that is effectively
| now magic, but it's just a philosophy thought experiment with
| no bearing on reality. The real danger would be policy makers
| who don't understand the different between current technology
| and philosophy class imposing silly rules based on their
| confusion.
| macintux wrote:
| Much more extensive article than I expected.
|
| Seems like they found a reasonable balance between crew safety
| and protection against contamination, at least for the moon, but
| I'm left with the thought that if there _is_ life on Mars, there
| 's no way to prevent contamination when probes or people bring it
| back.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| If life on Mars is not a recent thing, it will probably have
| contaminated Earth already (and probably vice versa) as there
| are meteorites found on Earth that almost definitely came from
| Mars.
| jjallen wrote:
| Yes but the life that is possibly currently on Mars would
| have evolved significantly since life there originally came
| to Earth.
| Metacelsus wrote:
| The article alludes to this, but the quarantine efforts were not
| actually very successful. See also:
| https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/724888?jou...
| comfysocks wrote:
| Wouldn't a disease-causing moon organism need to co-evolve with a
| host on the moon to infect?
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