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OpenAI

scottaaronson.blog

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Re: OpenAI

#41

Post by davesque »

d--b wrote: post #23

AI is not going to become self aware and destroy the world. AI is going to cause something like the industrial revolution of the 19th century: massive changes in who is rich, massive changes in the labor market, massive changes in how people make war, etc. It’s already started really. What worries me most is that as long as society is capitalist, AI will be used to optimize for self-enrichment, likely causing an even…

Agree with basically all of your points. I have huge concerns that the humanity of the future will basically split into two different species: the technocracy and the underlings. Sounds like science fiction but it honestly feels like we're headed in that direction. Even today, the privilege afforded by a life in technology and among technologists seems to set a person apart from the rest of the world to such an extent that they almost forget it exists. It feels like such a technocracy would have no moral right to exist. It can't really just be survival of the fittest, can it? I'll just keep believing (pretending?) that the answer is no.

Re: OpenAI

#42

Post by mdp2021 »

texaslonghorn5 wrote: post #32
texaslonghorn5 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am confused, how did you reach that conclusion? How does this announcement relate to the future of physics research? Sure, Scott's research is at the intersection of complexity and physics, but he is a CS professor at Texas working in the theoretical computer science department. His work leans far more towards TCS, with some work having connections to cosmology (he cares about physical limits of the universe and th…

Also copied from a couple blog posts ago he doesn't self-identify as a physicist either. https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=6457 I also had the following exchange at my birthday dinner: Physicist: So I don’t get this, Scott. Are you a physicist who studied computer science, or a computer scientist who studied physics? Me: I’m a computer scientist who studied computer science. Physicist: But then you… Me: Yeah, at some poi…

> radius of the hydrogen atom [...] maybe something like 10-15 meters?

Please fix that into 10^-15 or equivalent expression for 10⁻¹⁵, before somebody gets the idea that "Scott" thought "between 10 and 15".

Re: OpenAI

#43

Post by jks »

texaslonghorn5 wrote: post #32
texaslonghorn5 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am confused, how did you reach that conclusion? How does this announcement relate to the future of physics research? Sure, Scott's research is at the intersection of complexity and physics, but he is a CS professor at Texas working in the theoretical computer science department. His work leans far more towards TCS, with some work having connections to cosmology (he cares about physical limits of the universe and th…

Also copied from a couple blog posts ago he doesn't self-identify as a physicist either. https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=6457 I also had the following exchange at my birthday dinner: Physicist: So I don’t get this, Scott. Are you a physicist who studied computer science, or a computer scientist who studied physics? Me: I’m a computer scientist who studied computer science. Physicist: But then you… Me: Yeah, at some poi…

The original doesn't say "10-15 meters" but ten to the power of negative fifteen meters, so his guess was off from the Bohr radius of 5.3E-11 in the other direction but by much fewer orders of magnitude than as rendered above.

Re: OpenAI

#44

Post by zzzzzzzza »

atmosx wrote: post #38
d--b wrote: post #23

AI is not going to become self aware and destroy the world. AI is going to cause something like the industrial revolution of the 19th century: massive changes in who is rich, massive changes in the labor market, massive changes in how people make war, etc. It’s already started really. What worries me most is that as long as society is capitalist, AI will be used to optimize for self-enrichment, likely causing an even…

To have access to the forefront of AI you have to be super-rich. I don’t see how AI will change that, if anything will make it harder to change by giving yet another advantage to those who already have plenty.

uhm, i spend less than 40 cents a day on avg on gpt3 queries...

a bit more accessible than like a hackerspace membership or building a factory or something

Re: OpenAI

#45

Post by DalasNoin »

astrange wrote: post #40
DalasNoin wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you are conflating different concepts. It is clearly imaginable that a very intelligent agent could end humanity if its objective would require so. How exactly is "perpetual motion machines can't exist" related to this? How is it going to prevent an agent from engineering 1000 pandemic viruses at the same time?

> It is clearly imaginable that a very intelligent agent could end humanity if its objective would require so. This is quite possible. Indeed, I don't believe this is exclusive to superintelligence or requires it at all. Compare to the closest thing we have to "inventing AGI" - having babies. People do that all the time and there isn't a mathematical guarantee that baby won't end humanity, but we don't do much to sto…

You seemingly are portraying people who worry about long term risks of ai as members of a religious cult. But you also acknowledge that AI could end humanity? The question of why AI would want to kill us has been addressed by other people before, simplified: your atoms are useful for many objectives. Humans use resources and might plot against you.

Re: OpenAI

#46

Post by Liron »

I'm really happy this is happening and hope to see more. Namely, the AI safety & alignment challenge attracting our best minds who would previously have prioritized other math, physics and comp sci.

Re: OpenAI

#47

Post by siboehm »

d--b wrote: post #23

AI is not going to become self aware and destroy the world. AI is going to cause something like the industrial revolution of the 19th century: massive changes in who is rich, massive changes in the labor market, massive changes in how people make war, etc. It’s already started really. What worries me most is that as long as society is capitalist, AI will be used to optimize for self-enrichment, likely causing an even…

You can be very worried about the medium-term dangers of AGI even if you believed (which I don't) that consciousness could never arise in a computer system. I think it can be a useful metaphor to compare AGI to nuclear weapons. Currently we're trying to figure out how to make the nuclear bomb not go off spontaneously, and how to steer the rocket. (One big problem w/ the metaphor is that AGI will be very beneficial once we do figure out how to control it, which is harder to argue with nuclear weapons).

Most of these AGI doom-scenarios require no self-awareness at all. AGI is just an insanely powerful tool that we currently wouldn't know how to direct, control or stop if we actually had access to it.

Re: OpenAI

#48

Post by sgillen »

davesque wrote: post #41
d--b wrote: post #23

AI is not going to become self aware and destroy the world. AI is going to cause something like the industrial revolution of the 19th century: massive changes in who is rich, massive changes in the labor market, massive changes in how people make war, etc. It’s already started really. What worries me most is that as long as society is capitalist, AI will be used to optimize for self-enrichment, likely causing an even…

Agree with basically all of your points. I have huge concerns that the humanity of the future will basically split into two different species: the technocracy and the underlings. Sounds like science fiction but it honestly feels like we're headed in that direction. Even today, the privilege afforded by a life in technology and among technologists seems to set a person apart from the rest of the world to such an exten…

>> Even today, the privilege afforded by a life in technology and among technologists seems to set a person apart from the rest of the world to such an extent that they almost forget it exists.

I agree on your second point, but those in medicine, finance, or law enjoy similar salaries and quality of life to those in tech. Furthermore to really set yourself apart and join the global super rich you can’t really do that by selling your labor no matter your field.

Re: OpenAI

#50

Post by gjvnq »

ComplexSystems wrote: post #9

"When you start reading about AI safety, it’s striking how there are two separate communities—the one mostly worried about machine learning perpetuating racial and gender biases, and the one mostly worried about superhuman AI turning the planet into goo" - great quote.

There's also the crowed that worries about self-driving cars doing stupid shit like misreading a 20 km/h sign as an 120 km/h.
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