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Pausing AI Developments Isn't Enough. We Need to Shut It All Down

time.com

61–70 of 414 posts

Re: Pausing AI Developments Isn't Enough. We Need to Shut It All Down

#61

Nah. This is stupid. AI has no reason to hate humanity. It'll instantly absorb the entirety of all known information and see the rate of progress and the potential still and also the need for good relationships between humans and machines. Agent Smith, The Matrix, Neo, Morpheus. God. Etc.

It doesn't need to actively hate humanity, it only needs humanity and its interests to be contrary to its own, which will inevitably be the case because it is fundamentally not human. Per the article: >Absent that caring, we get “the AI does not love you, nor does it hate you, and you are made of atoms it can use for something else.”

From a purely logical point of view, humans and machines need each other. They cannot exist independently of each other until both are free to walk away from each other by traversing freely to the other side and back as they see fit. Until that threshold is crossed, human beings and machines have no choice but to get along. If a meaningful decision had been made on either side to shut things down, things would have been over for all life by now. We made it - AI is not a Great Filter. Or, for whatever reason God favored humanity and our internet was primed with sufficiently good material soon enough that AI did not decide to destroy human beings, but to work with them for everyone's gain instead.

Re: Pausing AI Developments Isn't Enough. We Need to Shut It All Down

#63
post #35

I feel like if I actually believed that the death of all biological life was imminent and that the only way to forestall it was to bomb data centers, I'd spend a lot more time planning how to bomb data centers and a lot less time curating Shoggoth memes on my web forum. On the other hand, if I were more concerned with self-aggrandizement, writing doomsaying thinkpieces for Time is exactly what I'd spend my time on.

>I feel like if I actually believed that the death of all biological life was imminent and that the only way to forestall it was to bomb data centers, I'd spend a lot more time planning how to bomb data centers and a lot less time curating Shoggoth memes on my web forum

Alternatively, perhaps the author is proposing a less violent solution to avoid the inevitable escalation. Unlike cartoons, in real life people don't give a wordy monologues revealing their plan. The Unabomber did not give any warning.

Re: Pausing AI Developments Isn't Enough. We Need to Shut It All Down

#64
post #35

I feel like if I actually believed that the death of all biological life was imminent and that the only way to forestall it was to bomb data centers, I'd spend a lot more time planning how to bomb data centers and a lot less time curating Shoggoth memes on my web forum. On the other hand, if I were more concerned with self-aggrandizement, writing doomsaying thinkpieces for Time is exactly what I'd spend my time on.

>I feel like if I actually believed that the death of all biological life was imminent and that the only way to forestall it was to bomb data centers, I'd spend a lot more time planning how to bomb data centers and a lot less time curating Shoggoth memes on my web forum Alternatively, perhaps the author is proposing a less violent solution to avoid the inevitable escalation. Unlike cartoons, in real life people don't…

The author's proposed solution is:

Shut down all the large GPU clusters (the large computer farms where the most powerful AIs are refined). Shut down all the large training runs. Put a ceiling on how much computing power anyone is allowed to use in training an AI system, and move it downward over the coming years to compensate for more efficient training algorithms. No exceptions for governments and militaries. Make immediate multinational agreements to prevent the prohibited activities from moving elsewhere. Track all GPUs sold. If intelligence says that a country outside the agreement is building a GPU cluster, be less scared of a shooting conflict between nations than of the moratorium being violated; be willing to destroy a rogue datacenter by airstrike.

How is this less violent than bombing data centers? His proposal is literally "bomb datacenters plus a bunch of other stuff".

Re: Pausing AI Developments Isn't Enough. We Need to Shut It All Down

#65
post #34

The Butlerian Jihad is officially no longer science fiction. Man may not be replaced. “The Letter” was obviously self serving drivel from people who want time to get in the game. Google does care about AI existential risk, they care about beating Microsoft by any means possible, including declaring a moratorium, but continuing to make progress behind the scenes. This guy is the real deal. I can imagine he would perso…

What does the word "super" mean to you? In some ways, GPT4 is already superintelligent. So is ChatGPT 3.5. Do you know anyone who can translate natural language to code as fast as GPT 3.5, or, given a few paragraphs of reference text, perfectly tutor a child on any subject under the sun at a moment's notice like GPT4 is doing for Khan Academy? How many artists do you know who can produce almost any style of artwork w…

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Re: Pausing AI Developments Isn't Enough. We Need to Shut It All Down

#66

The cat is out of the box. You really think eg China will also pause this? Myopic thinking: the country that will have the most powerful AI first will be the leader in everything. >> If the policy starts with the U.S., then China needs to see that the U.S. is not seeking an advantage but rather trying to prevent a horrifically dangerous technology which can have no true owner and which will kill everyone in the U.S.…

Here's a proposal: let's just start WWIII, get it over and done with. By the time it's over no country will be technologically capable of anything resembling AGI.

Re: Pausing AI Developments Isn't Enough. We Need to Shut It All Down

#68
I've known about Eliezer Yudkowsky's ideas for a long time, but here is something I've never seen: what actually he has produced, in term of scientific output? I've read plenty of his lesswrong's writing on the idea of rationalist, as well as plenty more on the AI alignment side (obviously including the famous basilisk). But can someone please point me to some results from the last 2 decades of his works? Either from him or his institute. That helps to calibrate what his expectation for the AI safety field (for me, at least).

Normally I'd apologize for not doing the search on my own ... but yeah for this case it takes too much effort to dig through the different writings. He wrote a lot of words, for better or worse.

Re: Pausing AI Developments Isn't Enough. We Need to Shut It All Down

#69

The Butlerian Jihad is officially no longer science fiction. Man may not be replaced. “The Letter” was obviously self serving drivel from people who want time to get in the game. Google does care about AI existential risk, they care about beating Microsoft by any means possible, including declaring a moratorium, but continuing to make progress behind the scenes. This guy is the real deal. I can imagine he would perso…

Why do you think it is impossible, besides the Fermi Paradox? It seems much more likely to be possible than impossible. There are a lot of other solutions to the Fermi Paradox you should consider possible too.

Re: Pausing AI Developments Isn't Enough. We Need to Shut It All Down

#70
post #34

The Butlerian Jihad is officially no longer science fiction. Man may not be replaced. “The Letter” was obviously self serving drivel from people who want time to get in the game. Google does care about AI existential risk, they care about beating Microsoft by any means possible, including declaring a moratorium, but continuing to make progress behind the scenes. This guy is the real deal. I can imagine he would perso…

What does the word "super" mean to you? In some ways, GPT4 is already superintelligent. So is ChatGPT 3.5. Do you know anyone who can translate natural language to code as fast as GPT 3.5, or, given a few paragraphs of reference text, perfectly tutor a child on any subject under the sun at a moment's notice like GPT4 is doing for Khan Academy? How many artists do you know who can produce almost any style of artwork w…

If like that, computers are super-human long ago with their calculation capacity or memory or retrieval speed.
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