[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. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2023-05-30 23:01 UTC)