521–530 of 964 posts
We can just hope that if it indeed becomes more intelligent than humans it will also be more virtuous as one causes the other.
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You hear similar arguments from those who believe climate change is happening but disagree with current efforts to counter-act it. The logic being that right now climate change is not causing any major harm and that we can't really predict the future so there's no point in worrying about what might happen in a decade or two. I don't think anyone is arguing that right now climate change or AI is threat to human civili…
>that those trends are concerning. Which trends would you be referring to? >it's fairly easy to see how a slightly more advanced LLM could be a destructive force if it was given an unaligned goal by a malicious actor. For example, a slightly more advanced LLM could hack into critical infrastructure killing or injuring many thousands of people. How are you building this progression? Is there any evidence to back up th…
This reeks of marketing and a push for early regulatory capture. We already know how Sam Altman thinks AI risk should be mitigated - namely by giving OpenAI more market power. If the risk were real, these folks would be asking the US government to nationalize their companies or bring them under the same kind of control as nukes and related technologies. Instead we get some nonsense about licensing.
I'm eternally skeptical of the tech business, but I think you're jumping to conclusions, here. I'm on a first-name basis with several people near the top of this list. They are some of the smartest, savviest, most thoughtful, and most principled tech policy experts I've met. These folks default to skepticism of the tech business, champion open data, are deeply familiar with the risks of regulatory capture, and don't…
These are, for the most part, obvious applications of a technology that exists right now but is not widely available yet.
The problem with every discussion around this issue is that there are other statements on "the existential risk of AI" out there that are either marketing ploys or science fiction. It doesn't help that some of the proposed "solutions" are clear attempts at regulatory capture.
This muddles the waters enough that it's difficult to have a productive discussion on how we could mitigate the real risk of, e.g., AI generated disinformation campaigns.
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.
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…
the issue with hacker news comments these days is people don't actually do any due diligence before posting. center for ai safety is 90% about present AI risks and this ai statement is just a one off thing.
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The statement isn't about LLMs. It doesn't refer to them even once.
But if LLMs hadn't captured the popular imagination I doubt this would have been written this year and gotten the attention of enough prominent signatories to frontpage on HN.
That said, the renewed anxiety is probably not because these experts think that LLMs per se will become generally intelligent. It's more that each time we find out that the human brain does that we thought were impossible for computers to do turn out to be easy, each time we find that it takes 3~5 years for AI researchers to crack a problem we thought would take centuries[2], people sort of have to adjust their perception of how high the remaining barriers to general intelligence might be. And then when billions of investment dollars pour in at the same time, directing a lot more research into that field, that's another factor that shortens timelines.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14780752
[2] https://kotaku.com/humans-triumph-over-machines-in-protein-f...
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> 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…
> How can it not be obvious You have succinctly and completely summed up the AI risk argument more eloquently than anyone I've seen before. "How can it not be obvious?" Everything else is just intellectual fig leaves for the core argument that intuitively, without evidence, this proposition is obvious. The problem is, lots of "obvious" things have turned out to be very wrong. Sometimes relatively harmlessly, like the…
Mostly if the "obviousness" just masks a social taboo, which I don't see being the case here. Do you?
> The problem is, lots of "obvious" things have turned out to be very wrong.
A much bigger problem is that lots more "counter-intuitive" things that people like to believe because they elevate them over the unwashed masses have turned and continue to turn out to be very wrong and that this does not prevent them from forming the basis for important policy decisions.
I'm all for questioning even what appears intuitively obvious (especially if much rides on getting it right, as presumably it does here). But frankly, of the many bizarre reasons I have heard why we should not worry about AI the claim that it seems far too obvious that we should must be the single most perverse one yet.
> Everything else is just intellectual fig leaves for the core argument that intuitively, without evidence, this proposition is obvious.
Maybe your appraisal of what counts as evidence is defective?
For example, there's been a pattern of people confidently predicting AIs won't be able to perform various particular feats of the human mind (either fundamentally or in the next few decades) only to be proven wrong over increasingly shorter time-spans. And with AIs often not just reaching but far surpassing human ability. I'm happy to provide examples. Can you explain to me why you think this is does not count, in any way, as evidence that AIs have the potential to reach a level of capability that renders them quite dangerous?
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For humans, maybe. Not an AI superintelligence.
This is not how entropy works. The problem with talking about logical physical systems, is you have to understand the gradient against entropy. There are a trillion more ways to kill you then there are to keep you alive. There is only the tiniest sliver of states in which remain human and don't turn to chemical soup or physics. Any AI capable of it's power bill would be able to tell you that today, and that answer is…
If AI can create a virus that kills all humans, another AI can create a virus that kills that virus. The virus has trillions more ways to be killed than to keep it alive, right?
Oh gee, listen to the AI experts of Benguo, Hinton, Altman, and Sutskever… or random HN commenters who mostly learned about LLM 6 months ago… Congrats guys, you’re the new climate change deniers
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> 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…