I signed the letter. At some point, humans are going to be outcompeted by AI at basically every important job. At that point, how are we going to maintain political power in the long run? Humanity is going to be like an out-of-touch old person on the internet - we'll either have to delegate everything important (which is risky), or eventually get scammed or extorted out of all our resources and influence.
Statement on AI Risk
151–160 of 964 posts
Re: Statement on AI Risk
#152Pushing hard to convince senile lawmakers that only a select few should be allowed to multiply them matrices?
you are laughing but I've found a matrix that is called an elimination matrix [1]. Are you still laughing now?
Are you absolutely sure that an elimination matrix with 1 Petazillion of elements will not become sentient in a sort of emergent way?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duplication_and_elimination_ma...
Re: Statement on AI Risk
#153How do this people go to bed with themselves every night? On a bed of money I assume
Re: Statement on AI Risk
#154Nonsense, 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!
That moat document was published by a single software engineer, not some exec or product leader. Humans dont really grasp exponential improvements. You wont have much time to regulate something that is improving exponentially.
It doesn't matter who wrote it, it got picked up, had a good argument and affected market opinion. The execs now need to respond to it.
Humans also don't grasp that things can improve exponentially until they stop improving exponentially. This belief that AGI is just over the hill is sugar-water for extracting more hours from developers.
The nuclear bomb was also supposed to change everything. But in the end nothing changed, we just got more of the same.
Re: Statement on AI Risk
#155> Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war. risk of extinction due to AI? people have been reading too much science fiction. I would love to hear a plausible story of how AI will lead to human extinction that wouldn't happen with traditional non-AI tech. for the sake of conversation let's say non-AI tech is any broadly…
> I would love to hear a plausible story of how AI will lead to human extinction that wouldn't happen with traditional non-AI tech. The proposed FOOM scenarios obviously borrow from what we already know to be possible or think it would likely be possible using current tech, given an proposed insanely more intelligent agent than us.
What would be in it for a more intelligent agent to get rid of us? We are likely useful tools and, at worst, a curious zoo oddity. We have never been content when we have caused extinction. A more intelligent agent will have greater wherewithal to avoid doing the same.
'Able to play chess'-level AI is the greater concern, allowing humans to create more unavoidable tools of war. But we've been doing that for decades, perhaps even centuries.
Re: Statement on AI Risk
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
Who in that list are the 'usual existential risk suspects'?
Doomsday prepper Sam Altman[1], for one. [1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/10/sam-altmans-ma...
I think in order to use the plural form you really need to have two examples.
Sam Altman is of course the least convincing signatory (except for the random physicist who does not seem to have any connection to AI).
Re: Statement on AI Risk
#157Pathetic attempt at regulatory capture. Let’s all be smart enough to not fall for this crap, eh?
That might be why Sam Altman signed it but why do you think that all the academics did so as well. Do you think he just bribed them all or something?
Not saying they were, but it's not that expensive, looks like it starts at $50,000
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/09/13/493739074...
Re: Statement on AI Risk
#158Reading into the early comments from this piece, there is a clear divide in opinions even here on HN. 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 la…
I agree that the second question is way more interesting, and I'm glad there's a lot of ongoing discussion and debate about it. And you have some insightful thoughts on it here.
But I disagree with you that this is clearly what the NYT article is about. There is a significant focus on the "industry leaders" who have been most visible in - suddenly! - pushing for regulation. And that's why people are reasonably pointing out that this looks a hell of a lot like a classic attempt by incumbents to turn the regulatory system into a competitive advantage.
If Sam Altman were out there saying "we went too far with gpt-4, we need to put a regulatory ceiling at the gpt-3 level" or "even though we have built totally closed proprietary models, regulation should encourage open models instead". But what all the current incumbents with successful products are actually arguing for is just to make their models legal but any competitive upstarts illegal. Convenient!
Re: Statement on AI Risk
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
I am saying there is no distinction. If AI is a risk to humanity, then the internet in general must be as well.
So if there is no distinction, by your own words, can you take yourself seriously or not? That is, by your own words, both AI and the Internet either pose a risk or they both do not; 'there is no distinction.'
Re: Statement on AI Risk
#160Can 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.
If you assume without evidence that recursively self-improving intelligence massively by thinking is possible, then it follows that severe existential risk from AI is plausible. If a software system did develop independent thought, then found a way to become, say, ten times smarter than a human, then yeah - whatever goals it set out to achieve, it probably could. It can make a decent amount of money by taking freelan…
The idea of a superintelligence becoming a bond villain via freelance software jobs (or, let's be honest, OnlyFans scamming) is not something I consider an existential threat. I can't find it anything other than laughable.
It's like you've looked at the Fermi paradox and decided we need Congress to immediately invest in anti-alien defense forces.
It's super-intelligent and it's a super-hacker and it's a super-criminal and it's super-self-replicating and it super-hates-humanity and it's super-uncritical and it's super-goal-oriented and it's super-perfect-at-mimicking-humans and it's super-compute-efficient and it's super-etcetera.
Meanwhile, I work with LLMs every day and can only get them to print properly formatted JSON "some" of the time. Get real.