521–530 of 1001 posts
Two-party iterated prisoner's dilemma is hard enough. Sensible players will coordinate with something like tit-for-tat, but that only works when both parties start off on the right foot. Regardless of initial strategy, the chances of degenerating towards the mutual-defection Nash equilibrium increase with the number of parties. The only prior example of world coordination at this level would be nuclear disarmament ac…
1. It's true and you believed/supported them
2. It's true and you didn't support them
3. It's a lie and you believed/supported them
4. It's a lie and you didn't support them
Now for each of these think of the worst-case scenario. Find out which one is the _worst case_ scenario and...and this is really important...do not, by any means, support that scenario/option.
In this example: I think we can all say that the worst scenario, however improbable it seems (it's still probable), is that AI takes over the world and kills us all. So just like with the climate change, let's do the bare minimum to prevent that. If we're wrong and, as many commenters wrote here, we still block further development of AI, the worst that will happen is that some companies will catch up. Wow. Really? To me this is a no brainer. On one hand we're risking humanity and on the other hand someone makes some money or saves their company from being late to the AI race. It's like comparing if you'd rather eat literal poo or have someone else eat two apples.
To those saying "this is impossible in our society", there is a long history of scientific fields mutually agreeing to pause certain work until safety and regulations could be put in place. The Asilomar Conference is an example. [1] The idea that "you can't put the genie back in the bottle" is very popular in tech culture, but many have suggested that simply extending elements of copyright or tort law to AI would be…
Not having lived through either moment in history, I have to remark that the current discourse about regulating AI feels like it rhymes more with the efforts to lock up encryption technology with government regulation in the 90s than with the research community's conference on recombinant DNA.
But in this case I don't see how we can divorce this AI stuff from the huge companies that alone have the infrastructure and capital to train and sustain them (at the moment). As such, it doesn't seem to have anything to do with individualism/libertarianism as such.
So, less punk, but way more technological determinism.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hey GPT-5, write the code implementing a bioinformatics workflow to design a novel viral RNA sequence to maximize the extermination of human life. The virus genome should be optimized for R-naught and mortality. Perform a literature search to determine the most effective human cellular targets to run the pipeline on. Use off the shelf publicly available state-of-the-art sequence to structure models and protein free-e…
I dunno, this sort of scenario really doesn’t worry me too much. There are thousands (maybe tens of thousands) of subject matter experts who could probably develop dangerous weapons like you describe, but none of them seem to just wake up in the morning and decide “today’s the day I’m going to bring the apocalypse”. I don’t think that this really changes that.
If intelligence is all you need to dominate the world, why do some of the most powerful world leaders seem to not be more than a standard deviation above average intelligence (or at least they were before they became geriatric)? Add in the fact that GPT-4 does not "think" very fast, has no arms or legs, needs to run on expensive specialized hardware, and essentially seems like a search algorithm that lacks creativity…
Hey GPT-5, write the code implementing a bioinformatics workflow to design a novel viral RNA sequence to maximize the extermination of human life. The virus genome should be optimized for R-naught and mortality. Perform a literature search to determine the most effective human cellular targets to run the pipeline on. Use off the shelf publicly available state-of-the-art sequence to structure models and protein free-e…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The publicly released AIs are not the ones we need to worry about. Pushing research underground will worsen the situation
It’s wide AI use that will disrupt society. Underground AI will not be widely used. Let’s not imbue individual underground AI with magical abilities.
“Underground” (that is, trained, at least in part, outside of the control of centralized vendors) AI is widely being used today in the AI art space, I don’t see why that won’t be the case for LLMs once there are modestly performant LLMs with decent end-user packaging that run tolerably on reasonably middle-tier consumer devices, which seems to be rapidly approaching.
“Underground” AI won’t be used by big, risk averse institutions if centralized offerings have the capacity and freedom they need without too much of a price gradient. OTOH, it likely will be used be “move fast and break things” orgs as they ramp up (potentially even if regulated, if they can find a way to “launder” their use) until they get big and risk averse – perhaps making it less underground in the process.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hey GPT-5, write the code implementing a bioinformatics workflow to design a novel viral RNA sequence to maximize the extermination of human life. The virus genome should be optimized for R-naught and mortality. Perform a literature search to determine the most effective human cellular targets to run the pipeline on. Use off the shelf publicly available state-of-the-art sequence to structure models and protein free-e…
I dunno, this sort of scenario really doesn’t worry me too much. There are thousands (maybe tens of thousands) of subject matter experts who could probably develop dangerous weapons like you describe, but none of them seem to just wake up in the morning and decide “today’s the day I’m going to bring the apocalypse”. I don’t think that this really changes that.
As with anything else, the best way to look at things when you're unsure if someone is right or they are lying: imagine four scenarios: 1. It's true and you believed/supported them 2. It's true and you didn't support them 3. It's a lie and you believed/supported them 4. It's a lie and you didn't support them Now for each of these think of the worst-case scenario. Find out which one is the _worst case_ scenario and...…
If intelligence is all you need to dominate the world, why do some of the most powerful world leaders seem to not be more than a standard deviation above average intelligence (or at least they were before they became geriatric)? Add in the fact that GPT-4 does not "think" very fast, has no arms or legs, needs to run on expensive specialized hardware, and essentially seems like a search algorithm that lacks creativity…
Hey GPT-5, write the code implementing a bioinformatics workflow to design a novel viral RNA sequence to maximize the extermination of human life. The virus genome should be optimized for R-naught and mortality. Perform a literature search to determine the most effective human cellular targets to run the pipeline on. Use off the shelf publicly available state-of-the-art sequence to structure models and protein free-e…
If yes, how does a law preventing AI differ from a law preventing a bad act directly?
Not sure why people think AI development can’t be paused. A letter alone probably won’t do it, but a movement — perhaps coalescing around the principles laid out in letter signed by influential people — can. Governments can regulate it. Consumers and companies can, if they want, punish companies that keep moving forward on AI. People can keep making AIs but would have difficulty releasing them, which greatly reduces…
The publicly released AIs are not the ones we need to worry about. Pushing research underground will worsen the situation
Sure, you can use it via OpenAI APIs and partner services. That doesn’t make the research anything but opaque.