Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google and warns of danger ahead • Hacker News Board

Re: Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google and warns of danger ahead

#731

Post by baby » Tue, May 02, 2023, 1:26 PM UTC

mFixman wrote: post #692

> His immediate concern is that the internet will be flooded with false photos, videos and text, and the average person will “not be able to know what is true anymore.” Isn't this the case already? I expect every post I see in large social media sites posted by somebody I don't personally know to be non-organic feedback by a social media expert. People are doomsaying over a scenario that's identical to the present wo…

I think this quote is exactly what people are afraid of with the advances of ML, and I think anyone with a bit of mileage browsing the web should be scared as well. It’s a legitimate downside of the tech. It’ll reach a point where you won’t know if the picture you’re looking at, or the voice you’re listening to, or the book you’re reading, or the video you’re watching, is real or generated by AI.

Re: Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google and warns of danger ahead

#732

Post by whynotmaybe » Tue, May 02, 2023, 1:29 PM UTC

FarMcKon wrote: post #722

whynotmaybe wrote: post #702

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did we have some ethics discussion when the lightbulb was invented? Or when the car was invented? No, and if we did, we couldn't have foreshadowed all the positive and negative impacts. My grandfather always told me that back in the days, "smart" people said that no train should be allowed to go faster than 50km/h because the heart would explode. Nobody here can say that he wasn't impressed by ChatGPT. How could we e…

> Did we have some ethics discussion when the lightbulb was invented? Or when the car was invented? Yes, yes we did. We debated photos, voice recording, radio waves, TV shows. Every innovation spawns years of Ethics discussion. Weird to see someone on this site, presumably in tech, who hasn't been taught or learned that yet.

Yes, you're right, there were many studies made by the companies building those and the companies against those.

And now that you mention it, I remember a class I had called "Ethics & computer science".

I guess I should have thought more about expressing my idea that whatever ethics work we might setup "now", we won't be able to predict the advantage & disadvantage of any technology in the future.

Whatever restriction we'll set in place would be based on our actual cultural situation.

Re: Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google and warns of danger ahead

#733

Post by TechBro8615 » Tue, May 02, 2023, 1:32 PM UTC

JeremyNT wrote: post #290

neatze wrote: post #99

“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?

This quote is the first thing I've seen that really makes me worried. I don't think of ChatGPT as being "smart" at all, and comparing it to a human seems nonsensical to me. Yet here is a Turing award winning preeminent expert in the field telling me that AI smarter than humans is less (implied: much less) than 30 years away and quitting his job due to the ramifications.

The guy is well past retirement age, so is "quitting his job" evidence of taking an unusually meaningful stance?

Re: Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google and warns of danger ahead

#734

Post by jongjong » Tue, May 02, 2023, 1:33 PM UTC

These days the internet is just a handful of corporate projects in a vast sea of spam. I suspect AI will exacerbate that. I have a feeling that eventually, we may figure out what websites to visit from our real-world interactions. Everything we know as the internet today will be seen as junk/spam. Nobody will use search engines for the same reason that nobody reads junk mail.

Re: Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google and warns of danger ahead

#735

Post by KirillPanov » Tue, May 02, 2023, 1:36 PM UTC

whywhywhywhy wrote: post #706

mise_en_place wrote: post #694

It's important to have a discussion about AI safety, and the ethics surrounding LLMs. But I'm really tired of all this sensationalism. It completely muddies the waters; it almost seems intentional at this point.

It’s been intentional for a while and serves multiple purposes Promotion: “the thing we’re working on is so powerful it’s actually dangerous” Restrict who can compete: “the model is too dangerous to release, here’s how you make it but no you have to train it yourself for X millions cost in compute time” Vendor lock-in: “the thing we’re working on is so dangerous we can’t let it off our servers, so you must use our se…

Explain the coming economic depression: sorry buddy, AI took your job. Really, it's not the fault of the government or the corporations. Blame the AI. Now please move your tent; there's no camping in public here.

Re: Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google and warns of danger ahead

#736

Post by 5040 » Tue, May 02, 2023, 1:38 PM UTC

zikduruqe wrote: post #716

whynotmaybe wrote: post #702

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did we have some ethics discussion when the lightbulb was invented? Or when the car was invented? No, and if we did, we couldn't have foreshadowed all the positive and negative impacts. My grandfather always told me that back in the days, "smart" people said that no train should be allowed to go faster than 50km/h because the heart would explode. Nobody here can say that he wasn't impressed by ChatGPT. How could we e…

> that no train should be allowed to go faster than 50km/h "There was some wonderful stuff about [railway trains] too in the U.S., that women's bodies were not designed to go at 50 miles an hour. Our uteruses would fly out of our bodies as they were accelerated to that speed." https://www.wsj.com/articles/BL-TEB-2814

The book Spinal Catastrophism has a great section on "railway spine"--really weird stuff.

>Of particular interest to me as a Victorianist is Moynihan’s account of “railway spine” or “Erichsen’s disease,” a name for an amorphous set of neurological conditions believed to be caused by the jolting experiences of acceleration during railway travel. When autopsies revealed no somatic sources that could cause such effects like loss of memory, sleep disturbances, or back pain, the condition came under increasing scrutiny as such conditions were being inconsistently claimed by people who were not even present at any railway accidents but were merely witnesses. Used by some to sue the railways and others to claim disability to avoid work, “railway spine” became the center of debates about its veracity, resulting in contrasting theories that modern train travel led to the devolution of the spine itself to its primordial layers or that such conditions were merely another manifestation of hysteria and hypochondria. Given that hysteria was typically associated with women (the disease of the “wandering womb”), “railway spine” became the hysterical condition of men whose traumatic experiences of modernity were leaving them recumbent, as opposed to firm and upright.

https://medicalhealthhumanities.com/2021/11/06/notes-on-spin...

Re: Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google and warns of danger ahead

#737

Post by Vox_Leone » Tue, May 02, 2023, 2:07 PM UTC

A pattern in "AI" articles over the past few months is the almost complete absence of mentions to the labeling process - a vital part of machine learning systems - completely done by flesh-and-blood people [when the system is quality] in a laborious and monotonous process.

The reality of the facts is: the planet is dying and true AI exists only in the dreams of publishers. Rogue AI should be the least of our worries. Wake up.

Re: Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google and warns of danger ahead

#738

Post by cubefox » Tue, May 02, 2023, 2:12 PM UTC

jongjong wrote: post #734

These days the internet is just a handful of corporate projects in a vast sea of spam. I suspect AI will exacerbate that. I have a feeling that eventually, we may figure out what websites to visit from our real-world interactions. Everything we know as the internet today will be seen as junk/spam. Nobody will use search engines for the same reason that nobody reads junk mail.

That's an incredibly unimportant problem compared to what Hinton is worried about.

Re: Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google and warns of danger ahead

#739

Post by whynotmaybe » Tue, May 02, 2023, 2:14 PM UTC

ipython wrote: post #725

whynotmaybe wrote: post #702

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did we have some ethics discussion when the lightbulb was invented? Or when the car was invented? No, and if we did, we couldn't have foreshadowed all the positive and negative impacts. My grandfather always told me that back in the days, "smart" people said that no train should be allowed to go faster than 50km/h because the heart would explode. Nobody here can say that he wasn't impressed by ChatGPT. How could we e…

Heck. Plato and Socrates questioned the value of the written word, arguing that it would impair the shared memory of events and the only way to impart knowledge is by speaking face to face. https://fs.blog/an-old-argument-against-writing/

The loop is almost complete, I say to everyone I can that the only way to be sure you're talking to a human is to be speaking face to face.

Re: Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google and warns of danger ahead

#740

Post by mountain_peak » Tue, May 02, 2023, 2:15 PM UTC

whywhywhywhy wrote: post #706

mise_en_place wrote: post #694

It's important to have a discussion about AI safety, and the ethics surrounding LLMs. But I'm really tired of all this sensationalism. It completely muddies the waters; it almost seems intentional at this point.

It’s been intentional for a while and serves multiple purposes Promotion: “the thing we’re working on is so powerful it’s actually dangerous” Restrict who can compete: “the model is too dangerous to release, here’s how you make it but no you have to train it yourself for X millions cost in compute time” Vendor lock-in: “the thing we’re working on is so dangerous we can’t let it off our servers, so you must use our se…

My youngest child knew the other two could catch-up to him when being chased, so he "threw" stuff in their path and closed doors to slow the others down and stay ahead. Houdini famously started a rumor that he had a natural ability to dislocate his shoulder to discourage competitors. AI corporate moves are obviously littering the path for healthy competition and trying to convince others that the resources required at too great for any other company. People here have claimed that the best way forward would be to develop SETI-like AI shared global compute, but other people are claiming that's impossible. Developing a shared global network of compute may be the only "open" way ahead for many challenges, and it certainly makes for interesting times.