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

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

#81
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Being superhuman at producing art is not existentially threatening. Being superhuman about convincing people or writing code would be.

>Being superhuman about convincing people

I don't think there's much public info available on it, but Facebook built an AI that plays very competitively in a strategy game built on negotiation and manipulation.

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

#82
post #5

If anyone can't get the article, this one is by Eliezer Yudkowsky. He has pretty much devoted his life to thinking about how to not let AI get powerful and destroy all humans, and now there is this wild race among the largest corporations and possibly governments to be the first to get the most powerful superhuman AI system. Obviously he is disturbed by such a development.

This is the one moment he has been waiting his entire life for. He literally waited his entire life for this moment, obviously he's gonna milk it to every drop.

"he's gonna milk it to every drop" is such an odd take.

eliezer has long been concerned about AI and the risks it poses to humanity. and for just as long people have called him crazy and made hand-waving arguments for why we shouldn't be concerned.

now we're in the midst of an AI arms race and we don't have any good idea how this tech works. it progresses at a truly astonishing rate, where it's become sport to find instances of people saying "AI will never be capable of X" and showing them the latest AI doing X with ease.

i think his concern is real and justified. you might disagree, but i don't understand why think he's milking recent developments.

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

#83

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.…

> Also: imagine the year is 1900. You are saying that steam power and electricity is causing way too many changes way too fast so they put a moratorium on it until the year 2500. Great analogy. About a decade later, the world was fighting World War I on the back of the technological advances of the turn of the century. It was war on a scale never seen before. Literally orders of magnitude deadlier, bigger, more trans…

>I like to think we (and our organic matter relatives) are hard to kill. Or at least to completely eradicate... so we will be around, or some proxy for us.

What is your hard evidence or reasoning for this? As I see it humans are quite vulnerable and will be as trivial to inadvertently eradicate as the dodo bird.

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

#84

I've used GPT-4, and while extremely impressive, it doesn't feel like we're all that much closer to super-intelligent AI than we were last month or last year. It feels like Google on steroids, but the gap between GPT-4 and AGI still feels massive. This seems like so much putting the cart way ahead of the horse.

The pen is mightier than the sword. And now we've got semiautomatic submachinepens.

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

#85

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…

Funny enough, this is roughly the premise of the Mass Effect series

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

#86
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.

if you had a major concern that you felt many people a) weren't aware of, or b) were aware of but not treating seriously, and you had the resources to voice your concerns in a major publication like Time, would you not do that?

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

#87
The rich aren’t going to stop until all the workers are replaced and there’s no one left to buy the products that their companies offer. People have been retraining for centuries, getting more complicated workloads the whole time. Eventually there won’t be hardly anything humans can do that machines can’t do better.

The most merciful thing you can do for your offspring is to not have them in the first place.

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

#88
post #79

The danger is not that AI will kill us (as insignificant ants), but that we will entrust our own governance to it. Increasingly, groups of highly vocal people will use it to oppress the rest of us with their fearmongering, like this article does. We will end up with Big Brother

There can be more than one danger.

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

#89

The rich aren’t going to stop until all the workers are replaced and there’s no one left to buy the products that their companies offer. People have been retraining for centuries, getting more complicated workloads the whole time. Eventually there won’t be hardly anything humans can do that machines can’t do better. The most merciful thing you can do for your offspring is to not have them in the first place.

Why wouldn't I want my offspring to live in a world where dangerous, monotonous, degrading labor is no longer required to live?

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

#90
post #16

I think we are trying to solve impossible scenarios and it simply is not productive. Alignment will be impossible. It is based on a premise that is a paradox itself. Furthermore, even if it were possible, there will be a hostile AI built on purpose because humanity is foolish enough to do it. Think military applications. I've written in detail about this topic FYI - https://dakara.substack.com/p/ai-singularity-the-hu…

> Alignment will be impossible. > we probably should start thinking more about defensive AI Isn’t this a paradox?

Alignment is necessary for AGI, but not always for narrowly scoped AI for specific purposes. However, it may be completely ineffective in that capacity.
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