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Statement on AI Risk

safe.ai

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Re: Statement on AI Risk

#311

Post by mordae »

sebzim4500 wrote: post #60
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.

General research into AI alignment does not require that those models are controlled by few corporations. On the contrary, the research would be easier with freely available very capable models. This is only helpful in that a superintelligence well aligned to make Sam Altman money is preferable to a superintelligence badly aligned that ends up killing humanity. It is fully possible that a well aligned (with its creat…

If you consider a broader picture, unleashing a paperclip-style cripple AI (aligned to rising $MEGACORP profit) on the Local Group is almost definitely worse for all Local Group inhabitants than annihilating ourselves and not doing that.

Re: Statement on AI Risk

#312

Post by ericb »

skepticATX wrote: post #72
apsec112 wrote: post #51

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?

What? ChatGPT 4 can already pass the bar exam and is fluent in every language. It is super intelligent. Today.

No human can do that, the system is here, and so is an architecture.

As for the existential risk, assume nothing other than evil humans will use it to do evil human stuff. Most technology iteratively gets better, so there's no big leaps of imagination required to imagine that we're equipping bad humans with super-human, super-intelligent assistants.

Re: Statement on AI Risk

#313

Post by duvenaud »

jvanderbot wrote: post #283
duvenaud wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see what you mean - for a while, the best chess was played by humans aided by chess engines. But that era has passed, and now having a human trying to aid the best chess engines just results in worse chess (or the same, if the human does nothing). But whether there a few humans in the loop doesn't change the likely outcomes, if their actions are constrained by competition. What abilities do humans have that AIs wil…

Well, in this case, we have the ability to invent chess (a game that will be popular for centuries), invent computers, and invent chess tournaments, and invent programs that can solve chess, and invent all the supporting agriculture, power, telco, silicon boards, etc that allow someone to run a program to beat a person at chess. Then we have bodies to accomplish everything on top of it. The "idea" isn't enough. We ha…

Again, are you claiming that it's impossible for a machine to invent anything that a human could? Right now a large chunk of humanity's top talent and capital are working on exactly this problem.

As for your second point, human cities also require a lot of infrastructure to keep running - I'm not sure what you're arguing here.

As for your third point - would a horse or chimpanzee feel that "we" were unbeatable in physical fights, because "we" now have guns?

Re: Statement on AI Risk

#314

Post by enord »

duvenaud wrote: post #231
Infernal wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Humans are going to be outcompeted by AI” is the concrete bit as best I can tell. Historically humans are not outcompeted by new tools, but humans using old tools are outcompeted by humans using new tools. It’s not “all humans vs the new tool”, as the tool has no agency. If you meant “humans using old tools get outcompeted by humans using AI”, then I agree but I don’t see it any differently than previous efficiency…

I see what you mean - for a while, the best chess was played by humans aided by chess engines. But that era has passed, and now having a human trying to aid the best chess engines just results in worse chess (or the same, if the human does nothing). But whether there a few humans in the loop doesn't change the likely outcomes, if their actions are constrained by competition. What abilities do humans have that AIs wil…

Chess is many things but it is not a tool. It is an end unto itself if anything of the sort.

I struggle with the notion of AI as an end unto itself, all the while we gauge its capabilities and define its intelligence by directing it to perform tasks of our choosing and judge by our criteria.

We could have dogs watch television on our behalf, but why would we?

Re: Statement on AI Risk

#315

Post by Planktonne »

qt31415926 wrote: post #299
Planktonne wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

She's a professor of computer linguistics; it's literally her field that's being discussed. The list of signatories includes people with far less relevant qualifications, and significantly greater profit motive. She's an informed party who doesn't stand to profit; we should listen to her a lot more readily than others.

Her field has also taken the largest hit from the success of LLMs and her research topics and her department are probably no longer prioritized by research grants. Given how many articles she's written that have criticized LLMs it's not surprising she has incentives.

LLMs are in her field; they are one of her research topics and they're definitely getting funding.

We absolutely should not be ignoring research that doesn't support popular narratives; dismissing her work because it is critical of LLMs is not reasonable.

Re: Statement on AI Risk

#316

Post by juve1996 »

ericb wrote: post #273
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,…

Sure, and you can set another superintelligence on another task - prevent covid ebola.

See the problem with these scenarios?

Re: Statement on AI Risk

#317

Post by mlinsey »

tasubotadas wrote: post #236

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

Not sure what you mean, the movement to combat climate change is orders of magnitude bigger than the movement to combat AI risk - in terms of organizations dedicated to it, dollars donated, legislation passed, international treaties signed, investment in technologies to mitigate the risk.

Of course, the difference is that the technologies causing climate change are more deeply embedded throughout the economy, and so political resistance to anti-climate change measures is very strong as well. This is one reason in favor of addressing risk earlier, before we make our civilization as dependent on large neural nets as it currently is on fossil fuels. A climate change movement in the mid-1800s when the internal combustion engine was just taking off would also have been seen as quixotic and engaging in sci-fi fantasies though.

Re: Statement on AI Risk

#318

Post by arp242 »

kypro wrote: post #307
tasubotadas wrote: post #236

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

What's the point in dismissing the need for AI safety? Are you guys Russian bots, or do you genuinely see no reason to worry about AI safety? But since I see these kinds of snarky responses often – we obviously do worry about climate change and various other issues. Continued advancements in AI is just one of many issues that face us which humanity should be concerned about. Few concerned about AI would argue it come…

This page talks about "extinction from AI". I'm sorry, but I think that's a complete non-issue for the foreseeable future. I just don't see how that will happen beyond spectacular science fiction scenarios that are just not going to happen. If that makes me a Russian bot then, well, хорошо!

The risks from AI will be banal and boring. Spam, blogspam, fake articles, fake pictures, what-have-you. Those things are an issue, but not "extinction" issues.

Re: Statement on AI Risk

#319

Post by duvenaud »

AlotOfReading wrote: post #292
duvenaud wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see what you mean - for a while, the best chess was played by humans aided by chess engines. But that era has passed, and now having a human trying to aid the best chess engines just results in worse chess (or the same, if the human does nothing). But whether there a few humans in the loop doesn't change the likely outcomes, if their actions are constrained by competition. What abilities do humans have that AIs wil…

Chess is just a game, with rigidly defined rules and win conditions. Real life is a fuzzy mix of ambiguous rules that may not apply and can be changed at any point, without any permanent win conditions. I'm not convinced that it's impossible for computer to get there, but I don't see how they could be universally competitive with humans without either handicapping the humans into a constrained environment or having g…

Yes, I agree real life is fuzzy, I just chose chess as an example because it's unambiguous that machines dominate humans in that domain.

As for being competitive with humans: Again, how about running a scan of a human brain, but faster? I'm not claiming we're close to this, but I'm claiming that such a machine (and less-capable ones along the way) are so valuable that we are almost certain to create them.

Re: Statement on AI Risk

#320

Post by mitthrowaway2 »

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…

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

Yes, but ten years ago, we also simply didn't know how to build systems like the ones we have today! We thought it would take centuries for computers to beat humans at Go[1] and at protein folding[2]. We didn't know how to build software with emotional intelligence[3] and thought it would never make jokes[4]. There's been tremendous progress, because teams of talented researchers are working hard to unlock more aspects of what the human brain can do. Now billions of dollars are funding bright people to look for ways to build other kinds of systems.

"We don't know how to do it" is the security-through-obscurity argument. It means we're safe only as long as nobody figures this out. If you have a security mindset, it's not enough to hope that nobody finds the vulnerability. You need to show why they certainly will not succeed even with a determined search.

[1] https://www.wired.com/2014/05/the-world-of-computer-go/

[2] https://kotaku.com/humans-triumph-over-machines-in-protein-f...

[3] https://www.jstor.org/stable/24354221

[4] https://davidol.medium.com/will-ai-ever-be-able-to-make-a-jo...

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