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Statement on AI Risk

safe.ai

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Re: Statement on AI Risk

#211

Post by kalkin »

b3nji wrote: post #77

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!

This could be Google's motivation (although note that Google is not actually the market leader right now) but the risk could still be real. Most of the signatories are academics, for one thing, including two who won Turing awards for ML work and another who is the co-author of the standard AI textbook (at least when I was in school).

You can be cynical about corporate motives and still worried. I personally am worried about AI partly because I am very cynical about how corporations will use it, and I don't really want my atoms to be ground up to add storage bits for the number that once represented Microsoft's market cap or whatever.

But even cynicism doesn't seem to me to give much reason to worry about regulation of "next to no cost" open source models, though. There's only any chance of regulation being practical if models stay very expensive to make, requiring specialized hardware with a supply chain chokepoint. If personal devices do catch up to the state of the art, then for better or worse regulation is not going to prevent people from using them.

Re: Statement on AI Risk

#212

Post by wrycoder »

api wrote: post #174
aero-deck wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's too early to say definitively but it's possible that the atomic bomb dramatically reduced the number of people killed in war by making great power conflicts too damaging to undertake: https://kagi.com/proxy/battle_deaths_chart.png?c=qmSKsRSwhgA... The USA and USSR would almost certainly have fought a conventional WWIII without the bomb. Can you imagine the casualty rates for that...

So far.

Re: Statement on AI Risk

#213

Post by pixl97 »

valine wrote: post #140
patrec wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

It's not clear at all that we have an avenue to super intelligence. I think the most likely outcome is that we hit a local maximum with our current architectures and end up with helpful assistants similar in capability to George Lucas's C3PO. The scary doomsday scenarios aren't possible without an AI that's capable of both strategic thinking and long term planning. Those two things also happen to be the biggest limit…

>It's not clear at all that we have an avenue to super intelligence.

All problems in reality are probability problems.

If we don't have a path to superintelligence, then the worst problems just don't manifest themselves.

If we do have a path to super intelligence then the doomsday scenarios are nearly a certainty.

It's not really any different than saying "A supervolcano is unlikely to go off tomorrow, but if a supervolcano does go off tomorrow it is a doomsday scenario".

>We simply don't know how to build a system like that.

You are already a superintelligence when compared to all other intelligences on earth. Evolution didn't need to know how to build a system like that, and yet it still reached this point. And there is not really any to believe humanity is the pinnacle of intelligence, we are our own local maxima of power/communication limitations. An intelligence coupled with evolutionary systems design is much more apt to create 'super-' anything than the random walk alone.

Re: Statement on AI Risk

#214

Post by kalkin »

aero-deck wrote: post #154
aceon48 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"nuclear weapons are no big deal actually" is just a wild place to get as a result of arguing against AI risk. Although I guess Eliezer Yudkowsky would agree! (On grounds that nukes won't kill literally everyone while AI will, but still.)

Re: Statement on AI Risk

#215

Post by lb4r »

clnq wrote: post #185
lb4r wrote: post #145

Earlier 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?

In retrospective, the internet has done a lot to stifle human progress or thriving through proliferation of extremist ideas and overwhelming addictiveness. Just take the recent events alone - COVID-19 would not have been as much of a threat to humanity if some people wouldn't have built echo chambers on the internet with tremendous influence over others where they would share their unfounded conspiracy theories and m…

I think your comment more or less summarizes and combines Scott Alexander's 'Meditations on Moloch', and Yuval Noah Harari's 'Sapiens.' Humans were arguably the happiest as hunter-gatherers according to Harari, but those who survived and thrived were those who chose a more convenient and efficient way of living, at the cost of happiness and many other things; you are either forced to participate or get left behind.

Re: Statement on AI Risk

#216

Post by [deleted] »

vesinisa wrote: post #53
skepticATX wrote: post #37

I suspect that in 5 years we’re going to look back and wonder how we all fell into mass hysteria over language models. This is the same song and dance from the usual existential risk suspects, who (I’m sure just coincidentally) also have a vested interest in convincing you that their products are extremely powerful.

Yeah, like I fail to see how would an AI even cause human extinction? Through some Terminator style man-robot warfare? But the only orgnizations that would seem capable of building such killer robots are governments that already possess the capacity to extinguish the entire human race with thermonuclear weapons - and at a considerably lower R&D budget for that end. It seems like hysteria / clever marketing for AI pro…

[deleted]

Re: Statement on AI Risk

#217

Post by randomdata »

pixl97 wrote: post #208
randomdata wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear missiles present an obvious danger to the human body. AI is an application of math. It is not clear how that can be used directly to harm a body. 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.

Germany, for example would disagree with you. They believe violent speech is an act of violence in itself. >AI is an application of math. It turns out that people hook computers to 'things' that exist in the physical world. You know like robot bodies, or 3D printers. And as mentioned above, even virtual things like social media can cause enough problems. People hook AI to tools. And this is just the maybe not quite g…

> It turns out that people hook computers to 'things' that exist in the physical world.

But those physical things would be the danger, at least if you consider the nuclear missile to be the danger. It seems you are trying to go down the "guns don't kill people, people kill people" line of thinking. Which is fine, but outside of the discussion taking place.

Re: Statement on AI Risk

#218

Post by DirkH »

jacurtis wrote: post #129

Reading 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…

Worth adding that there is no contradiction in strongly believing both 1+2 are true at the same time.

I.e. Evil tech companies are just trying to maintain their control and market dominance and don't actually care or think much about AI safety, but that we are nonetheless at an inflection point in history because AI will become more and more scary AF.

It is totally plausible that evil tech got wind of AI Safety concerns (that have been around for a decade as academic research completely divorced from tech companies) and see using it as a golden win-win, adopting it as their official mantra while what they actually just care about is dominance. Not unlike how politicians will don a legitimate threat (e.g. China or Russia) to justify some other unrelated harmful goal.

The result will be people camp 2 being hella annoyed and frustrated that evil tech isn't actually doing proper AI Safety and that most of it is just posturing. Camp 1 meanwhile will dismiss anything anyone says in camp 2 since they associate them with the evil tech companies.

Camp 1 and camp 2 spend all their energies fighting each other while actually both being losers due to a third party. Evil tech meanwhile watches on from the sidelines, smiles and laughs.

Re: Statement on AI Risk

#219

Post by randomdata »

trebligdivad wrote: post #38

There are a bunch of physicists signed up on there; (e.g. Martin Rees) - they don't seem relevant to it at all. There's been a long history of famous physicists weighing in on entirely unrelated things.

Musical artist Grimes is also a signatory. It would seem the real purpose of this is to train an AI agent on appeal to authority.

Re: Statement on AI Risk

#220

Post by falsaberN1 »

patrec wrote: post #58
valine wrote: post #17

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…

And I don't get the opposed mindset, that AI is suddenly going to "become a real boy, and murder us all".

Isn't it a funny coincidence how the popular opinion of AIs aligns perfectly with blockbusters and popular media ONLY? People are specifically wanting to prevent Skynet.

The kicker (and irony to a degree) is that I really want sapient AI to exist. People being so influenced by fiction is something I see as a menace to that happening in my lifetime. I live in a world where the majority is apparently Don Quixote.

- Point one: If the sentient AI can launch nukes, so can your neighbor.

- Point zwei: Redistributing itself online to have unlimited compute resources is a fun scenario but if networks were that good then Stadia wouldn't have been a huge failure.

- Point trois: A distributed-to-all-computers AI must have figured out universal executables. Once we deal with the nuclear winter, we can plagiarize it for ourselves. No more appimage/snap/flatpak discussions! Works for any hardware! No more dependency issues! Works on CentOS and Windows from 1.0 to 11! (it's also on AUR, of course.)

- Point cuatro: The rogue AI is clearly born as a master hacker capable of finding your open ports, figure out any exploits or create 0-day exploits to get in, and hope there's enough resources to get the payload injected, then pray no competent admin is looking at the thing.

- Point go: All of this rides on the assumption that the "cold, calculating" AI has the emotional maturity of a teenager. Wait, but that's not what "cold, calculating" means, that's "hothead and emotional". Which is it?

- Point six: Skynet lost, that's the point of the first movie's plot. If everyone is going to base their beliefs after a movie, at least get all the details. Everything Skynet did after the first attack was full of boneheaded decisions that only made the situation worse for it, to the point the writers cannot figure ways to bring Skynet back anymore because it doomed itself in the very first movie. You should be worrying about Legion now, I think. It shuts down our electronics instead of nuking.

Considering it won't have the advantage of triggering a nuclear attack because that's not how nukes work, the evil sentient AI is so doomed to fail it's ridiculous to think otherwise.

But, companies know this is how the public works. They'll milk it for all it's worth so only a few companies can run or develop AIs, maybe making it illegal otherwise, or liable for DMCAs. Smart business move, but it affects my ability to research and use them. I cannot cure people's ability to separate reality and fiction though, and that's unfortunate.

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