101–110 of 1001 posts
After reading the NYT interview, I don’t understand why he still chose to invent, in his words, a dangerous technology and publish the results openly. Not a criticism of the man, but of the article.
I have this same question about the (apparently many) AI researchers who believe it poses significant risks to humanity, yet still push forward developing it as fast as they can.
My honest take is a lot of these famous academics played almost no part in the developments at openai. But they want the limelight. They aren’t as relevant as they want to be. In many cases, they were directly wrong about how ai would develop
After reading the NYT interview, I don’t understand why he still chose to invent, in his words, a dangerous technology and publish the results openly. Not a criticism of the man, but of the article.
I have this same question about the (apparently many) AI researchers who believe it poses significant risks to humanity, yet still push forward developing it as fast as they can.
My honest take is a lot of these famous academics played almost no part in the developments at openai. But they want the limelight. They aren’t as relevant as they want to be. In many cases, they were directly wrong about how ai would develop
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah I don't want to be unfair or unkind, but his responses in this article seem to reflect rather poorly on his character. The thought process seems to be something like: "There was an opportunity for someone to gain notoriety and money at a profound cost to the human race. Someone was going to do it. I don't actually feel bad about being the one to benefit, but it is fashionable to pretend to have a conscience abou…
Isn't it true of everything though? Explosives, airplanes, electricity, computers - all double edged swords that have both greatly benefited humanity and caused great harm (with the potential for a lot more of both).
We are just not psychologically adapted or intellectually prepared or availing of a legal framework for the deluge of human-like manipulative, misleading, fraudulent generative fake reality that is about to be unleashed.
Free speech, psychopathic robots, adversaries who want to tear it all down, and gullible humans, are a very bad mix.
The disconnect for me is that Yudkowsky posits that the AIs will be fully "alive", thinking millions of times faster than humans and that there will be millions of them. This is too big of a speculative leap for me.
What I can fairly easily imagine in the next few years with improved hardware is something like an open version of ChatGPT that has a 200 IQ and "thinks" 100 times faster than a human. Then Yudkowsky's example still basically applies. Imagine that the work on making these things more and more lifelike and humanlike continues with things like cognitive architecture etc. So people are running them in continuous loops rather than to answer a single query.
Take the perspective of one of these things. You think 100 times faster than a person. That means that if it takes 30 seconds for a user to respond or to give you your next instruction, you are waiting 3000 seconds in your loop. For 50 minutes.
It means that to you, people move in extreme slow motion so at a glance they seem frozen. And many are working as quickly as possible to make these systems more and more lifelike. So eventually you get agents that have self-preservation and reproductive instincts. Even without that, they already have almost full autonomy in achieving their goals with something like a modified AutoGPT.
At some point, multiplying the IQ x speed x number of agents, you get to a point where they is no way you can respond quickly enough (which will actually be in slow motion) to what they are doing. So you lose control to these agents.
I think the only way to prevent that is to limit the performance of the hardware. For example, the next paradigm might be some kind of crossbar arrays, memristors or something, and that could get you 100 x efficiency and speed improvements or more. I believe that we need to pick a stopping point, maybe X times more speed for AI inference, and make it illegal to build hardware faster than that.
I believe that governments might do that for civilians but unless there is some geopolitical breakthrough they may continue in private to try to "maintain an edge" with ever speedier/more powerful AI, and that will eventually inevitably "escape".
But it doesn't take much more exponential progress for the speed of thought to be potentially dangerous. That's the part people don't get which is how quickly the performance of compute can and likely will increase.
It's like building a digital version of The Flash. Think SuperHot but the enemies move 10 X slower so you can barely see them move.
My honest take is a lot of these famous academics played almost no part in the developments at openai. But they want the limelight. They aren’t as relevant as they want to be. In many cases, they were directly wrong about how ai would develop
This may be true in other cases, but not here. Hinton literally wrote the paper on backpropagation, the way that modern neural networks are trained. He won the Turing award for a reason.
> the average person will not be able to know what is true anymore We barely held things together as society without AI unleashing cognitive noise at industrial scale. Somehow we must find ways to re-channel the potential of digital technology for the betterment of society, not its annihilation.
The average person never knew , it heard. In this new world people have to learn to get out of their apartments
“The idea that this stuff could actually get smarter than people — a few people believed that,” said Hinton to the NYT. “But most people thought it was way off. And I thought it was way off. I thought it was 30 to 50 years or even longer away. Obviously, I no longer think that.” Calculators are smarter then humans in calculating, what does he mean by that?