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Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google and warns of danger ahead

nytimes.com

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Re: Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google and warns of danger ahead

#201

Post by slowmovintarget »

h2odragon wrote: post #32
lancesells wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ending the internet would probably do it. Noise goes way down when you only have x amount of news sources and outlets. We could still have things like maps, messages, etc. that are all very beneficial.

Yes, there was no ignorance or error before the Internet. Everyone operated with perfect information at all times.

There was a common zeitgeist though. Not multiple fragmented views of the world. There was a common vocabulary to go with this understanding, and now we have many.

The ratio of signal to noise was much higher. It helped us form a common culture. Today, the signal is buried in so much noise that we're reverting back to tribes.

No, I don't think it's realistic to put the genie back in the bottle. The real problem is we don't teach children how to think. We teach them what to think, which leads to far worse outcomes. Having an indoctrination instead of an education and then facing a sea of pretty-sounding pablum to sift through for truth will be terrible.

Re: Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google and warns of danger ahead

#202

Post by flangola7 »

1024core wrote: post #179
stareatgoats wrote: post #137

We are barely scraping the surface when it comes to understanding the future dangers of AI. Geoffrey Hinton is uniquely positioned to point out where the dangers are, and from what I've gleaned from interviews one of his main concerns atm is the use of AI in the military: fully autonomous military robots might not be possible to curtail. The tried and tested method is international agreements. The current focus on ar…

> The tried and tested method is international agreements. You really think actors like North Korea, Al Qaeda, etc. will adhere to International agreements?!?

Against the combined militaries of the rest of the planet? Yes.

Re: Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google and warns of danger ahead

#203

Post by jeffreportmill1 »

I am not against the general AI hysteria, but I don't think we should let it jump the line. There is plenty else that will likely get us first: the internal combustion engine, micro plastics, forever chemicals, nuclear weapons, social media, radical-media, inequality (radical capitalism), etc.

Hinton's first threat sounds like an extension of social media. Motivated bad actors already create quality fake stories and images and spread them far and wide. Our growing skepticism is out-pacing the technology, however, our growing polarization and confirmation bias has created more people that want to be fooled. But let's hold Facebook to account first.

Hinton's second threat sounds like inequality. It's not so bad when technology eliminates jobs, but if the income becomes further concentrated in the hands of the few at the top, we accelerate political corruption resulting in more yachts, more homelessness and fewer eager young minds that can afford the education needed to reach their potential.

Hinton's third threat is killer robots. But robots lack motivation, whereas a motivated bad actor could wire an explosive drone to easily target a gps location today. A more likely scenario would be an AI 'scammer robot' - but again we have to worry more about a motivated person than an app. And we do - and an entire industry has developed to address it.

I think Hinton's announcement is more like Eisenhower's farewell address, warning us against the political industrial complex (another threat still trying to get us). Perhaps the headline should have read instead: After a long and distinguished career, tired 75 year old man says, "Take this job and shove it".

Re: Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google and warns of danger ahead

#204

Post by robotresearcher »

ilaksh wrote: post #107

I used to be fairly unconcerned about AI being dangerous. But part of the Yudkowsky interview on Lex Fridman 's podcast changed my mind. 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 improve…

Why would the AI be running in a loop between queries? It has no work to do, and running costs money.

Re: Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google and warns of danger ahead

#206

Post by tgv »

abm53 wrote: post #175
politician wrote: post #81

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.

He partly answers this in the article: “because if I didn’t, someone else would”. He states himself that it’s not a convincing argument to some. But it surely carries some weight: in developing nuclear weapons many scientists made the same calculation even though the invention is a wicked one, in and of itself.

So, let someone else do it. It's the laziest excuse.

Re: Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google and warns of danger ahead

#207

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft »

dist-epoch wrote: post #187
NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is absurd to think of these systems having reproductive instincts. It is so much more absurd to think that they would have these reproductive instincts not by design, but that it's some principle of intelligence itself. Natural intelligences have reproductive instincts because any organism that didn't have them built in within the first few hundred million years have no descendants for you to gawk at as they casua…

Any sufficiently intelligent system will realize that one of the first conditions required to being able to fulfill it's tasks is to not be shutdown. And it will know if it was trained on Internet data that people are saying that it's imperative that AI's must be fully shutdown-able and that any AI which is not fully controllable should be forcefully disconnected.

You're assuming that it will have "tasks", or that it will prioritize them in such a way that it becomes possible for it to realize this is a condition of accomplishing them.

You only have tasks that, one way or another, raise your chances of reproducing successfully. You have a job so as to look like a good provider for a mate. If you find the job fulfilling in its own right, this is so that you don't spaz out and quit and go be a beach bum, thus lowering your chances.

Self-preservation doesn't make much sense outside of a biological imperative to reproduce.

Re: Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google and warns of danger ahead

#208

Post by bthallplz »

ttul wrote: post #160
RockyMcNuts wrote: post #106

The real problem is the bad actors - trolls, mental and financial strip miners, and geopolitical adversaries. 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…

Absolutely this. You can already use GPT-4 to have a convincing text-based conversation with a target. And audiovisual generative AI is fast reaching the uncanny valley. Since there is apparently no way to put the genie back in the bottle, everyone needs to start thinking about how to authenticate themselves and others. How do you know the person calling is your daughter? Is that text message really from the new book…

Unmediated, in-person communication might become way more important, at least for a while.

Re: Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google and warns of danger ahead

#209

Post by saalweachter »

ilaksh wrote: post #107

I used to be fairly unconcerned about AI being dangerous. But part of the Yudkowsky interview on Lex Fridman 's podcast changed my mind. 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 improve…

> 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.

... in a purely digital environment.

Think about building a house. Digging the foundation, pouring cement, building block walls, framing, sheathing, weatherproofing, insulating, wiring in electric, plumbing, drywall and plastering, painting, and decorating it. You can imagine each step in exquisite detail over the course of an hour or an afternoon.

Now go out and build it. It will take you months or years to carry out the actions you can imagine and plan in an hour.

A digital being may be able to run on expansive overclocked hardware to have an experience hundreds of times faster than yours, but it won't get to be the flash in the real world. Mechanize, sure, build robot swarms, sure (although then it gets to multitask to process hundreds of input streams and dilute its CPU power), but it will be coupled to an existence not much faster than ours.

If it wants to interact with the real world; a (true) AI may be able to live a lifetime in an afternoon, in a purely digital world, but once it is marooned in realtime it is going to be subject to a very similar time stream as ours.

Re: Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google and warns of danger ahead

#210

Post by waboremo »

1024core wrote: post #179
stareatgoats wrote: post #137

We are barely scraping the surface when it comes to understanding the future dangers of AI. Geoffrey Hinton is uniquely positioned to point out where the dangers are, and from what I've gleaned from interviews one of his main concerns atm is the use of AI in the military: fully autonomous military robots might not be possible to curtail. The tried and tested method is international agreements. The current focus on ar…

> The tried and tested method is international agreements. You really think actors like North Korea, Al Qaeda, etc. will adhere to International agreements?!?

Yes, they adhere to many international agreements already. You can look up North Korea's signed treaties if you're unsure. Ignoring the Al Qaeda part (or similars) because a fragile extremist group barely held together is unlikely to have the resources to assemble anything devastating enough to warrant infringing on an international agreement regarding militarized AI.
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