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Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google and warns of danger ahead

nytimes.com

231–240 of 1001 posts

Re: Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google and warns of danger ahead

#231

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…

Let's hope we don't get to Horizon Zero Dawn too soon.

Re: Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google and warns of danger ahead

#232

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.

Untamed nature is far more dangerous to humanity than human technology. As recently as in the 1900s, the average life expetency at birth was 30-40 years.

We're shooting guns, nuking nukes and engineering viruses, and still, on average, we're better off with all that than without it.

Re: Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google and warns of danger ahead

#233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would you curtail their use when any military that commits to using them will have a huge advantage ? This isn’t like nuclear weapons where any use is curtailed by the apocalyptic outcomes. Killer robots are the way we will fight in the future and any military which refuses to deploy them will find themselves facing defeat.

> How would you curtail their use I'm just hoping people and nations might come to their senses. People smarter than me need to figure out how. I'm not going to say that "it is not possible" however, that would be assuming way too much.

Guess what happens when 99% of people are sensible and 1% have AI murderbots.

Re: Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google and warns of danger ahead

#234
post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would you curtail their use when any military that commits to using them will have a huge advantage ? This isn’t like nuclear weapons where any use is curtailed by the apocalyptic outcomes. Killer robots are the way we will fight in the future and any military which refuses to deploy them will find themselves facing defeat.

> any military that commits to using them will have a huge advantage ? I don't think that's true. If autonomous weapons are deployed, the advantage will go to whoever has the best hackers.

White hat and black hat. If you’ve got the best pentesters then your systems are going to be harder to break into, giving you the advantage.

Re: Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google and warns of danger ahead

#235

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

It sounds like you’re biased against academics. Not only did Hinton develop some of the fundamental ideas behind AI (winning the Turing award) but also one of his PhD students is now the CTO at OpenAI.

In case anyone is curious, this appears to refer to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilya_Sutskever who was a PhD student of Geoffrey Hinton's and is now Chief Scientist at OpenAI.

The CTO at OpenAI is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mira_Murati who does not have a PhD.

Re: Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google and warns of danger ahead

#236

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

We are talking about a Turing Award winner known as one of the "godfathers of AI" and your take is that this is just about taking the limelight? The level of cynicism on HN never fails to surprise me.

Re: Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google and warns of danger ahead

#237
post #222
post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is such a blurry line for autonomous munitions. militaries used dumb imprecise munitions for decades - then precision weapons. A2A missiles used to lock on radar signature leading to huge risks related to accidentally shooting airliners/friendly craft. Now antiship missiles dynamically select their target over 300km away to maximize the chance of hitting a big ship. During the war on terror, ML models would dec…

The line already drawn, no indiscriminate killings of civilians, all this technology only minimizes civilian suffering, furthermore it is more humane to use terminators instead of 20 years olds clearing buildings and autonomous tanks/tracks driving though IEDs filled streets. War is deeply in human nature, it is not going away, question is; how to make it more humane and minimize indiscriminate killings and suffering…

"The line already drawn, no indiscriminate killings of civilian"

In modern warfare, civilians have always been the main casualties of war. Whether this really counts as "indiscriminate" is for war lawyers to argue over, but the fact remains that the civilian toll far exceeds the military toll, and for the victims and their families it matters little whether their deaths were "justified" to some lawyer or politician.

As technology advances, more and more power is going to be concentrated in the hands of individuals, many of whom won't be bothered by niceties such as the Geneva convention, and will target those they hate, be they civilian or military. High tech weapons will only make this easier.

We are headed for a very dark time.

Re: Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google and warns of danger ahead

#238
post #80

See his response on twitter. https://twitter.com/geoffreyhinton/status/165299357072121037...

somebody has a no disparage

Cade Metz is the same muckraker who forced Scott Alexander to preemptively dox himself. I don’t know Hinton apart from the fact that he’s a famous AI researcher but he has given no indication that he’s untrustworthy.

I’ll take his word over Metz’s any day of the week!

Re: Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google and warns of danger ahead

#239

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

> they want the limelight

Maybe, but there is another force at play here too. It's that journalists want stories about AI, so they look for the most prominent people related to AI. The ones who the readers will recognize, or the ones who have good enough credentials for the journalists to impress upon their editors and readers that these are experts. The ones being asked to share their story might be trying to grab the limelight or be indifferent or even not want to talk so much about it. In any case I argue that journalism has a role. Probably these professional journalists are skilled enough that they could make any average person look like a 'limelight grabber' if the journalist had enough reason to badger that person for a story.

This isn't the case for everyone. Some really are trying to grab the limelight, like some who are really pushing their research agenda or like the professional science popularizers. It's people like Gary Marcus and Wolfram and Harari and Lanier and Steven Pinker and Malcolm Gladwell and Nassim Taleb, as a short list off the top of my head. I'm not sure I would be so quick to put Hinton among that group, but maybe it's true.

Re: Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google and warns of danger ahead

#240

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…

Yeah, this seems like more of a problem than vague statements about AGI. We're still in the scope of ML - ChatGPT can't play chess, for example, and a self driving model can't write Haiku. An AGI would be able to do all of them. It seems much more likely that a fleet of autonomous (in the name of cutting costs) war machines will be created with relatively simple ML models that work in intended (or otherwise) ways to…

> ChatGPT can't play chess, for example

Do you really expect this claim to age well? I wouldn't be at all surprised if GPT5 could play chess quite well.

The time to worry about AGI...well, was 20 years ago when Yudkowsky started talking about it, but the worst possible time to start worrying about it is when we unquestionably have it. Because the whole point is that that is too late.

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