121–130 of 964 posts
I challenge anyone to come up with a reason why AI should be regulated, but not math in general. After all, that dangerous Linear Al'ge'bra clearly is terrorizing us all. They must be stopped!11 Give me a break.
I have yet to see a solution for “AI safety” that doesn’t involve ceding control of our most powerful models to a small handful of corporations. It’s hard to take these safety concerns seriously when the organizations blowing the whistle are simultaneously positioning themselves to capture the majority of the value.
> It’s hard to take these safety concerns seriously I don't get this mindset at all. How can it not be obvious to you that AI is an uniquely powerful and thus uniquely dangerous technology? It's like saying nuclear missiles can't possibly be dangerous and nuclear arms reduction and non-proliferation treaties were a scam, because the US, China and the Soviet Union had positioned themselves to capture the majority of t…
The assumption seems to be that said math will be coupled with something like a nuclear missile, but in that case the nuclear missile is still the threat. Any use of AI is just an implementation detail.
It’s a win/win/lose scenario. LLM AI businesses benefit because it increases the effort required to compete in the LLM space (the moat). Governments benefit because it increases the power of daddy/mommy government.
Consumers and small businesses lose out due to (1) the more friction the less innovators entering the space and (2) the less innovators in the space the fewer companies get to control more of the money pie.
It’s as ridiculous as governments requiring a license to cut hair.
Nonsense, the industry giants are just trying to scare the law makers to license the technology. Effectively, cutting out everyone else. Remember the Google note circulating saying "they have no moat", this is their moat. They have to protect their investment, we don't want people running this willy nilly for next to no cost on their own devices, God forbid!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Now it is, when climate scientists were first sounding the horn they got the same response that these people are getting now. For example: "This signatory might have alterior motives, so we can disregard the whole statement" "We haven't actually seen a superintelligent AI/manmade climate change due to CO2 yet, so what's the big deal?" "Sure maybe it's a problem, but what's your solution? Best to ignore it" "Let's foc…
That's curiously the standard crackpot line. "They doubted Einstein! They doubted Newton! Now they doubt me!" As if an incantation of famous names automatically makes the crackpot legitimate.
Note, language shift from 'tinfoil hat' ( because tinfoil hat stopped being an appropriate insult after so many of their conspiracy theories - also a keyword - became proven ) to crackpot.
"Please stop us from building this!"
Nonsense, the industry giants are just trying to scare the law makers to license the technology. Effectively, cutting out everyone else. Remember the Google note circulating saying "they have no moat", this is their moat. They have to protect their investment, we don't want people running this willy nilly for next to no cost on their own devices, God forbid!
Humans dont really grasp exponential improvements. You wont have much time to regulate something that is improving exponentially.
The opinions seem to fall into two camps:
1) This is just a move that evil tech companies are making in order to control who has access to AI and to maintain their dominance
2) AI is scary af and we are at a inflection point in history where we need to proceed cautiously.
This NYTimes piece is clearly debating the latter point.
> artificial intelligence technology [that tech companies] are building may one day pose an existential threat to humanity and should be considered a societal risk on par with pandemics and nuclear wars.
To people in the first camp of thinking this may feel like an over-dramatization. But allow me to elaborate. Forget about ChatGPT, Bard, Copilot, etc for a second because those aren't even "true" AI anyway. They simply represent the beginning of this journey towards true AI. Now imagine the end-game, 30 years from now with true AI at our disposal. Don't worry about how it works, just that it does and what it would mean. For perspective, the internet is only about 30 years old (depending on how you count) and it really is only about 20 years old in terms of common household usage. Think about the first time you bought something online compared to now. Imagine the power that you felt the first time you shared an email. Then eventually you could share an entire photo, and now sending multi-hour long diatribes of 4K video are trivial and in the hands of anybody. That was only about 20-30 years. The speed of AI will be 100x+ faster because we already have the backbone of fiber internet, web technologies, smartphones, etc which we had to build from scratch last time we had a pivotal technological renaissance.
It is easy to shrug off rogue-AI systems as "science fiction", but these are legitimate concerns when you fast forward through a decade or more of AI research and advancement. It might seem overly dramatic to fear that AI is controlling or dictating human actions, but there are legitimate and realistic evolutionary paths that take us to that point. AI eventually consuming many or most human jobs does in fact place an existential risk on humanity. The battle for superior AI is in fact as powerful as the threat of nuclear weapons being potentially unleashed on an unruly country at any time.
ChatGPT does not put us at risk of any of these things right now, but it does represent the largest advancement we have seen towards the goal of true AI that we have yet to see. Over the next 12-18 months we likely will start to see the emergence of early AI systems which will start to compound upon themselves (potentially even building themselves) at rates that make the internet look like the stone age.
Given the magnitude of the consequences (listed above), it is worth true consideration and not just shrugging off that I see in many of these comments. That is not to suggest that we stop developing AI, but that we do consider these potential outcomes before proceeding forward. This is a genie that you can't put back in the bottle.
Now who should control this power? Should it be governments, tech companies? I don't know. There is no good answer to that question and it will take creative solutions to figure it out. However, we can't have those discussions until everyone agrees that if done incorrectly, AI does pose a serious risk to humanity, that is likely irreversible.
A lot of the responses to this seem like Bulverism, ie., trying to refute an argument by psychoanalyzing the people who argue it: "Suppose I think, after doing my accounts, that I have a large balance at the bank. And suppose you want to find out whether this belief of mine is "wishful thinking." You can never come to any conclusion by examining my psychological condition. Your only chance of finding out is to sit do…
But what argument is there to refute? It feels like Aquinas “proving” God’s existence by stating that it is self evident. They can’t point to an existing system that poses existential risk, because it doesn’t exist. They can’t point to a clear architecture for such a system, because we don’t know how to build it. So again, what can be refuted?