Live data from Hacker News

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

time.com

371–380 of 414 posts

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

#371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The thing is, there's no evidence that the current path will lead to superintelligence. It could be the case that despite feeding a trillion dollars in compute / data to a model, that we still need to hold it's hand to do anything useful. He jumped the gun and he's really tarnished his reputation. How can anyone take him seriously after the insane rhetoric and hyperbole of this article?

[flagged]

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

#372

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.…

I’ll just be quick.

Powerful international coalition is def plausible because

This isn’t steam. The mere existence of this technology poses a threat to all humans and their countries. There is no analogous tech, not even nukes

You’re the naive one. There is no future for us if AGI is unleashed. It’s candles or extinction.

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

#373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These types of arguments-- "if you actually believed X, you'd be doing Y"-- always ring false to me. If you genuinely believed that the death of all biological life was imminent and the only way to forestall it was to bomb data centers and you were a normal, functional human being who did not want to bomb data centers, you'd probably sink into hopeless depression. Which is, in fact, exactly what Eliezer has done - if…

I think you underestimate the motivating power of an overwhelming belief. This is a story about a very ordinary guy who decided that it was in fact time to start bombing data centers and turned it into a project. https://leftcoastrightwatch.org/articles/he-went-to-the-capi...

You’re just rationalizing because you don’t want to accept that he’s right. People keep doing this to me. One person I know keeps coming up to me, initiating the conversation about ai just to assert over and over again how it’s not a problem. And I’m just sitting there. And it’s like, dude, you’re in complete denial. Most people are having an emotional block right now. They spew bad faith arguments and make tons of noise about how much this isn’t a problem. Just accept it. We are in trouble right now.

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

#374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Take a smart human and speed up their thinking a billion times, you get the time for free. What takes humanity a decade of effort could happen in a day (or faster) that's the nature of thinking faster. People often mistakenly model a smart human compared to a dumb human, but the actual spectrum of capability is way wider than that. Lack of knowledge could be another way of saying "not aligned" which is the core issue…

that's the thing though, I don't believe superintelligence can possibly work like that. I think it's a logical fallacy to treat superintelligences like hypercomputers. they're constrained by existing on classical computers. like, as a trivial counterexample, I can speak at 500 wpm. let's say that ChatGPT can generate 500 words per second for a single thread of conversation - I think that's a generous overestimate. no…

By that logic, we should have never broken the sound barrier because we're under the same physics constraints as other biological organisms. The key difference is that this new intelligence is not constrained by having to slowly pump ions across cell membranes in order to internally generate power for computation.

Silicon transistors are much more efficient at computation than the human brain just as a jet engine is superior to to a peregrine falcon.

ChatGPT could absolutely generate thousands of words per second on existing hardware.

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

#375
post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Point 2 does not logically follow from point 1. That's the entire problem here. Between point 1 and 2 there must be quite a few other steps, causally linked, otherwise it's just a massive imaginary leap based on assumptions that nobody is explaining. > The dismissals from Tyler Cohen and Pinker are mostly just relying on heuristics which are often right, but even if they're right 999 out of 1000 times, if that 1 in 1…

Agreed point 2 seems to be the crux. An important concept behind this is Omohundro's Basic Drives. Any maximizing agent with a goal will try to acquire more resources, resist being shut off, resist having its goal changed, create copies of itself, and improve its algorithm. If it is possible to maximize its goal in a way that will not guarantee humanity's flourishing, then we all die, guaranteed. If you want somethin…

Yes point 2 is the weak one.

Aren't humans/biological life a counterexample? Simple bacteria are clearly maximizing agents, and cyanobacteria did infact almost destroy all life on earth by filling the entire planet with toxic oxygen.

We've known how to improve ourselves via selective breeding yet vanishingly few humans are proponents. We and other intelligent animals have a wide variety of goals, and even share food across species.

The evidence just doesn't seem to support this concept of Basic Drives. If anything, the evidence (and common sense) seems to suggest that the more intelligent the organism, the more easily and more often it ignores its basic drives.

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

#376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The thing is, there's no evidence that the current path will lead to superintelligence. It could be the case that despite feeding a trillion dollars in compute / data to a model, that we still need to hold it's hand to do anything useful. He jumped the gun and he's really tarnished his reputation. How can anyone take him seriously after the insane rhetoric and hyperbole of this article?

> The thing is, there's no evidence that the current path will lead to superintelligence.

I don't understand how any person paying attention can think this. Just watching the jumps from GPT-2 in 2019 to GPT-4 today makes it clear as day we are rapidly drastically improving capabilities and there's no evidence we will hit a wall any time soon

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

#377
post #174

This is ridiculous. His partner should already be having reservations seeing their daughter lose a tooth in a world with dying oceans, plastic in everything, increasing disparity and rise of authoritarianism, nuclear proliferation, etc. How are humans solving those issues? We're already dead, we just don't know it yet. We're walking around with a terminal diagnosis and we just keep ignoring the doctor's calls pretend…

I'm with you. If it were possible to create apocalyptic doom AGI 150 years after inventing electronics, by basically making a very fancy, procedurally-generated Eliza, then the universe should be full of Berserkers. With septillions of star systems in the universe, the odds of us being the first species in 14 billion years to invent electronics seem remote. Apparently even humans can figure out how to colonize the Mi…

As I see it, the existence of AI is proof we really are alone out here.

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

#378
post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is misinterpreted, he calls for an international treaty backed by military. One sees what he wants to see.

I already mentioned the treaty: > already advocates bombing non treaty participants if they build a datacenter.

You seem to misunderstand what an international ban treaty is. Nuclear proliferation ban included non signatories etc.

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

#379
post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I already mentioned the treaty: > already advocates bombing non treaty participants if they build a datacenter.

You seem to misunderstand what an international ban treaty is. Nuclear proliferation ban included non signatories etc.

Are you talking about the NPT? Can you detail the military strike options it allows if a non-party acquires nuclear weapons?

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

#380

In a world where humans develop superintelligence, what would you predict to see beforehand? Does what we’re seeing look like failure? I’ve always found the dismissals of EY’s arguments to be pretty weak and people rarely engage on the actual arguments, even as his concerns have become more and more relevant with capability (in 2007 people thought AGI was at best 50yrs out and commonly people thought it was impossibl…

EY’s arguments don’t seem to take physics into account. That’s why they are not taken very seriously. To many it sounds like: volcanos are dangerous. What if there were a billion volcanos? We would all die.

Everything individual sentence is true. Volcanos are dangerous. If there were a billion of them the world might be uninhabitable.

The thing preventing a billion volcanos is like… thermodynamics

Post reply on HN