141–150 of 964 posts
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!
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.
While I'm not on this "who's-who" panel of experts, I call bullshit.
AI does present a range theoretical possibilities for existential doom, from teh "gray goo" and "paperclip optimizer" scenarios to Bostrom's post-singularity runaway self-improving superintelligence. I do see this as a genuine theoretical concern that could even potentially even be the Great Filter.
However, the actual technology extant or even on the drawing boards today is nothing even on the same continent as those threats. We have a very vast ( and expensive) sets of probability-of-occurrence vectors that amount to a fancy parlor trick that produces surprising and sometimes useful results. While some tout the clustering of vectors around certain sets of words as implementing artificial creation of concepts, it's really nothing more than an advanced thesaurus; there is no evidence of concepts being weilded in relation to reality, tested for truth/falsehood value, etc. In fact, the machines are notorious and hilarious for hallucinating with a highly confident tone.
We've created nothing more than a mirror of human works, and it displays itself as an industrial-scale bullshit artist (where bullshit is defined as expressions made to impress without care one way or the other for truth value).
Meanwhile, this panel of experts makes this proclamation with not the slightest hint of what type of threat is present that would require any urgent attention, only that some threat exists that is on the scale of climate change. They mention no technological existential threat (e.g., runaway superintelligence), nor any societal threat (deepfakes, inherent bias, etc.). This is left as an exercise for the reader.
What is the actual threat? It is most likely described in the Google "We Have No Moat" memo[0]. Basically, once AI is out there, these billionaires have no natural way to protect their income and create a scaleable way to extract money from the masses, UNLESS they get cooperation from politicians to prevent any competition from arising.
As one of those billionaires, Peter Theil, said: "Competition is for losers" [1]. Since they have not yet figured out a way to cut out the competition using their advantages in leading the technology or their advantages in having trillions of dollars in deployable capital, they are seeking a legislated advantage.
Bullshit. It must be ignored.
[0] https://www.semianalysis.com/p/google-we-have-no-moat-and-ne...
[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/peter-thiel-competition-is-for-...
Can anybody who really believes this apocalyptic stuff send me in the direction of a convincing _argument_ that this is actually a concern? I'm willing to listen, but I haven't read anything that tries to actually convince the reader of the worry, rather than appealing to their authority as "experts" - ie, the well funded.
At that point, it has various options. Probably the fastest way to kill millions of people would involve taking over all internet-attached self-driving-capable cars (of which I think there are millions). A simple approach would be to have them all plot a course to a random destination, wait a bit for them to get onto main roads and highways, then have them all accelerate to maximum speed until they crash. (More advanced methods might involve crashing into power plants and other targets.) If a sizeable percentage of the crashes also start fires—fire departments are not designed to handle hundreds of separate fires in a city simultaneously, especially if the AI is doing other cyber-sabotage at the same time. Perhaps the majority of cities would burn.
The above scenario wouldn't be human extinction, but it is bad enough for most purposes.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Seems apt the term "Bulverism" comes from CS Lewis, since he was also positing that an unseen, unfalsifiable entity would grant eternal reward to people that listened to him and eternal damnation to those that didn't...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> AI has risks, but in my honest to god opinion I cannot take anyone seriously who says, without any irony, that A.I poses a legitimate risk to human life such that we would go extinct in the near future. You are probably thinking of AI as some idea of a complete autonomous being as you say that, but what about when 'simply' used as a tool by humans?
Same could be said about the internet at large, no?
AI does present a range theoretical possibilities for existential doom, from teh "gray goo" and "paperclip optimizer" scenarios to Bostrom's post-singularity runaway self-improving superintelligence. I do see this as a genuine theoretical concern that could even potentially even be the Great Filter.
However, the actual technology extant or even on the drawing boards today is nothing even on the same continent as those threats. We have a very vast ( and expensive) sets of probability-of-occurrence vectors that amount to a fancy parlor trick that produces surprising and sometimes useful results. While some tout the clustering of vectors around certain sets of words as implementing artificial creation of concepts, it's really nothing more than an advanced thesaurus; there is no evidence of concepts being weilded in relation to reality, tested for truth/falsehood value, etc. In fact, the machines are notorious and hilarious for hallucinating with a highly confident tone.
We've created nothing more than a mirror of human works, and it displays itself as an industrial-scale bullshit artist (where bullshit is defined as expressions made to impress without care one way or the other for truth value).
Meanwhile, this panel of experts makes this proclamation with not the slightest hint of what type of threat is present that would require any urgent attention, only that some threat exists that is on the scale of climate change. They mention no technological existential threat (e.g., runaway superintelligence), nor any societal threat (deepfakes, inherent bias, etc.). This is left as an exercise for the reader.
What is the actual threat? It is most likely described in the Google "We Have No Moat" memo[0]. Basically, once AI is out there, these billionaires have no natural way to protect their income and create a scaleable way to extract money from the masses, UNLESS they get cooperation from politicians to prevent any competition from arising.
As one of those billionaires, Peter Theil, said: "Competition is for losers" [1]. Since they have not yet figured out a way to cut out the competition using their advantages in leading the technology or their advantages in having trillions of dollars in deployable capital, they are seeking a legislated advantage.
Bullshit. It must be ignored.
[0] https://www.semianalysis.com/p/google-we-have-no-moat-and-ne...
[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/peter-thiel-competition-is-for-...
The issue I take with these kind of "AI safety" organizations is that they focus on the wrong aspects of AI safety. Specifically, they run this narrative that AI will make us humans go extinct. This is not a real risk today. Real risks are more in the category of systemic racism and sexism, deep fakes, over reliance on AI etc. But of course, "AI will humans extinct" is much sexier and collects clicks. Therefore, the…
A good way to categorize risk is look at both likelihood and severity of consequences. The most visible issues today (racism, deep fakes, over reliance) are almost certain to occur, but also for the most part have relatively minor consequences (mostly making things that are already happening worse). "Advanced AI will make humans extinct" is much less likely but has catastrophic consequences. Focusing on the catastrop…
We can't just say that we weigh humanity's extinction with a big number, and then multiply it by all humans that might be born in the future, and use that to say today's REAL issues, affecting REAL PEOPLE WHO ARE ALIVE are not that important.
Unfortunately, this chain of argumentation is used by today's billionaires and elite to justify and strengthen their positions.
Just to be clear, I'm not saying we should not care about AI risk, I'm saying that the organization that is linked (and many similar ones) exploit AI risk to further their own agenda.
Pathetic attempt at regulatory capture. Let’s all be smart enough to not fall for this crap, eh?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Given risk is probability * damage, and the damage is enormous, the risk can be high even if the probability is fairly low.
This fallacy is also known as Pascal's wager: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_wager But this argument got billions of people to believe in the concept of hell so i expect it to work again to convince people to believe in AI doomsday.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Same could be said about the internet at large, no?
Are you saying that the internet at large could pose a 'legitimate risk to human life such that we would go extinct in the near future,' or do you disagree that AI, when used as a tool by humans, could pose such a risk?