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Statement on AI Risk

safe.ai

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Re: Statement on AI Risk

#271

Post by deltaninenine »

sebzim4500 wrote: post #55
a_bonobo wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it simply raises awareness I don't think it simply raises awareness - it's a biased statement. Personally, I don't think the advocated event is likely to happen. It feels a bit like the current trans panic in the US: you can 'raise awareness' of trans people doing this or that imagined bad thing, and then use that panic to push your own agenda. In OpenAI's case, they seem to push for having themselves be in control…

In what sense is this a 'biased statement' exactly? If a dozen of the top climate scientists put out a statement saying that fighting climate change should be a serious priority (even if they can't agree on one easy solution) would that also be 'biased'?

It is technically biased. But biased towards truth.

Re: Statement on AI Risk

#273

Post by ericb »

SanderNL wrote: post #114

I'm not sure they can keep claiming this without becoming concrete about it. Nuclear weapons are not nebulous, vague threats of diffuse nature. They literally burn the living flesh right off the face of the earth and they do it dramatically. There is very little to argue about except "how" are we going to contain it, not "why". In this case I truly don't know "why". What fundamental risks are there? Dramatic, loud, l…

Agreed that it should be spelled out, but...

If a superintelligence can be set on any specific task, it could be any task.

- Make covid-ebola

- Cause world war 3

You may have noticed that chatgpt is sort of goal-less until a human gives it a goal.

Assuming nothing other than it can become superintelligent (no one seems to be arguing against that--I argue that it already is) which is really an upgrade of capability, then now the worst of us can apply superintelligence to any problem. This doesn't even imply that it turns on us, or wants anything like power or taking over. It just becomes a super-assistant, available to anyone, but happy to do anything, including "upgrading" your average school-shooter to supervillain.

This is like America's gun problem, but with nukes.

Re: Statement on AI Risk

#275

Post by oytis »

max_ wrote: post #260
tasubotadas wrote: post #236

If only we would fight for the real issues like climate change, instead of fantasies that would be great.

Things like extreme poverty already kill many people today. The risk of individuals suddenly falling into extreme poverty is a very real one. But none wants to talk about how to mitigate that problem.

Is AI going to replace the lowest paid jobs though? I imagine, it rather has potential to move the white collar workers down the social ladder, which is unfortunate, but wouldn't cause extreme poverty.

Re: Statement on AI Risk

#276

Post by ly3xqhl8g9 »

Can anyone try to mitigate? Here I go:

Mitigating the risk of extinction from very few corporations owning the entire global economy should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.

Just to take an example from something inconsequential: the perfume industry. Despite the thousands of brands out there, there are in fact only 5 or so main synthetic aromatics manufacturers [1]. We, however this we is, were unable to stop this consolidation, this "Big Smell". To think we, again this we, will be able to stop the few companies which will fight to capture the hundreds of trillions waiting to be unleashed through statistical learning and synthetic agents is just ridiculous.

[1] Givaudan, International Flavors and Fragrances, Firmenich, Takasago, Symrise, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfume#:~:text=The%20majority...>

Re: Statement on AI Risk

#277

Post by HereBePandas »

tasubotadas wrote: post #236

If only we would fight for the real issues like climate change, instead of fantasies that would be great.

> If only we would fight for the real issues like...

I've heard these arguments many times and they never make sense to me. Most of the people I know working on AI do so precisely because they want to solve the "real issues" like climate change and believe that radically accelerating scientific innovation via AI is the key to doing so.

And some fraction of those people also worry that if AI -> AGI (accidentally or intentionally), then you could have major negative side effects (including extinction-level events).

Re: Statement on AI Risk

#278

Post by NathanFulton »

SpaceManNabs wrote: post #237
skepticATX wrote: post #72

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?

> They can’t point to an existing system that poses existential risk, because it doesn’t exist. There are judges using automated decision systems to excuse away decisions that send people back to jail for recidivism purposes. These systems are just enforcing societal biases at scale. It is clear that we are ready to acquiesce control to AI systems without much care to any extra ethical considerations.

Absolutely. These are the types of pragmatic, real problems we should be focusing on instead of the "risk of extinction from AI".

(The statement at hand reads "mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.")

Re: Statement on AI Risk

#279

Post by ff317 »

seydor wrote: post #246

> Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war. I don't care about the future of the human species as long as my mind can be reliably transferred into an AI. In fact i wouldn't mind living forever as a pet of some superior AI , it's still better than dying a cruel death because cells are unable to maintain themselves. Why…

I think at the heart of that debate, there lies a kernel of the essential progressive vs conservative debate on "progress" (and I mean these terms in the abstract, not as a reference to current politics). Even if you buy into the idea that the above (living forever as an AI / cyborg / whatever) is a good outcome, that doesn't mean it will work as planned.

Maybe society bets the farm on this approach and it all goes horribly wrong, and we all cease to exist meaningfully and a malevolent super-AI eats the solar system. Maybe it does kinda work, but it turns out that non-human humans end up losing a lot of the important qualities that made humans special. Maybe once we're cyborgs we stop valuing "life" and that changes everything about how we act as individuals and as a society, and we've lost something really important.

Progress is a good thing, but always be wary of progress that comes too quickly and broadly. Let smaller experiments play out on smaller scales. Don't risk our whole future on one supposedly-amazing idea. You can map the same thing to gene editing quandries. If there's a new gene edit available for babies that's all the rage (maybe it prevents all cancer, I donno), we really don't want every single baby for the next 20 years to get the edit universally. It could turn out that we didn't understand what it would do to all these kids when they reached age 30 and it dooms us. This is why I rail against the overuse of central planning and control in general (see also historical disasters like China's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward ).

Re: Statement on AI Risk

#280

Post by deltaninenine »

shafyy wrote: post #32

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…

Don't characterize the public as that stupid. The current risks of AI are startling clear to a layman.

The extinction level even is more far fetched to a layman. You are the public and your viewpoint is aligned with the public. Nobody is thinking extinction level event.

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