671–680 of 964 posts
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> We still go to war, eat, sleep and get afraid about things we can't control. If that is your criteria, then nothing has ever changed anything.
you're ignoring religion.
After religion: We still go to war, eat, sleep and get afraid about things we can't control.
So, no change.
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I mean a small group of malicious humans can already bioengineer a deadly virus with CRISPR and open source tech without AI. This is hardly the first time in history a new technological advancement may be used for nefarious purposes. It’s a discussion worth having as AI advances but if [insert evil actor] wants to cause harm there are many cheaper and easier ways to do this right now. To come out and say we need gove…
I’m not sure there is a way for someone to engineer a deadly virus while completely innoculating themselves from it. Short-term AI risk likely comes from a mix of malicious intent and further autonomy that causes harm the perpetrators did not expect. In the longer run, there is a good chance of real autonomy and completely unexpected behaviors from AI.
AI autonomy is a hypothetical existential risk, especially in the short term. There are many non-hypothetical existential risks including actual nuclear proliferation and escalating great power conflicts happening right now.
Again my point being that this is an important discussion but appears overly dramatized, just like there are people screaming doomsday there are also equally qualified people (like Yann LeCun) screaming BS.
But let’s entertain this for a second, can you posit a hypothetical where in the short term a nefarious actor can abuse AI or autonomy results in harm? How does this compare to non-AI alternatives for causing harm?
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…
If you were to take a look at the list of signatories on safe.ai, that's basically everyone who is everyone that works on building AI, what could Emily B Bender a professor of computer linguistics possibly add to the conversation and how would she be able to talk more about the "real AI safety" than any of those people? Edit: Sorry if it sounds arrogant, I don't mean Emily wouldn't have anything to add, but not sure…
Read her statement about that letter (https://www.dair-institute.org/blog/letter-statement-March20...) or listen to some of the many podcasts she’s appeared on talking about this.
I find her and Timnit Gebru’s arguments highly persuasive. In a nutshell, the capabilities of “AI” are hugely overhyped and concern about Sci-Fi doom scenarios is disingenuously being used to frame the issue in ways that benefits players like OpenAI and diverts attention away from much more real, already occurring present-day harms such as the internet being filled with increasing amounts of synthetic text spam.
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.
Seth McFarland wrote a pretty great piece on Star Trek replicators and their relationship to the structure of society. The question it answers is "does the replicator allow for Star Trek's utopia, or does Star Trek's utopia allow for the replicator?" https://www.reddit.com/r/CuratedTumblr/comments/13tpq18/hear... It is very thought provoking, and very relevant.
These are both problems that capitalism solves in a fair and efficient way. I really don’t see how the “capitalism bad” is a satisfying conclusion to draw. The fact that we would use capitalism to distribute the resources is not an indictment of our social values, since capitalism is still the most efficient solution even in the toy example.
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I'm specifically worried that an AGI will conceal some instrumental goal of wiping out humans, while posing as helpful. It will helpfully earn a lot of money for a lot of people, by performing services and directing investments, and with its track record, will gain the ability to direct investments for itself. It then plows a billion dollars into constructing a profitable chemicals factory somewhere where rules are l…
> I disagree Cool, I guess. While I have my opinions too, I'm not about to share them as that would be bad faith participation. Furthermore, it adds nothing to the discussion taking place. What is to be gained by going off on a random tangent that is of interest to nobody? Nothing, that's what. To bring us back on topic to try and salvage things, it remains that it is established in this thread that the objects of de…
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They didn’t become such a wealthy group by letting competition foster. I have no doubt they believe they could be doing the right thing but I also have no doubt they don’t want other people making the rules. Truth be told, who else really does have a seat at the table for dictating such massive societal change? Do you think the copy editor union gets to sit down and say “I’d rather not have my lunch eaten, I need to…
Not all of them are wealthy, a significant number are academics.
It is 2023. The use and abuse of people in the hands of information technology and automation has now a long history. "AI Risk" was not born yesterday. The first warning came as early as 1954 [1].
The Human Use of Human Beings is a book by Norbert Wiener, the founding thinker of cybernetics theory and an influential advocate of automation; it was first published in 1950 and revised in 1954. The text argues for the benefits of automation to society; it analyzes the meaning of productive communication and discusses ways for humans and machines to cooperate, with the potential to amplify human power and release people from the repetitive drudgery of manual labor, in favor of more creative pursuits in knowledge work and the arts. The risk that such changes might harm society (through dehumanization or subordination of our species) is explored, and suggestions are offered on how to avoid such risk
Dehumanization through abuse of tech is already in an advanced stage and this did not require, emergent, deceptive or power-seeking AI to accomplish.
It merely required emergent political and economic behaviors, deceptive and power seeking-humans applying whatever algorithms and devices were at hand to help dehumanize other humans. Converting them into "products" if you absolutely need a hint.
What we desperately need is a follow-up book from Norbert Wiener. Can an LLM model do that? Even a rehashing of the book in modern language would be better than a management consultancy bullet list.
We need a surgical analysis of the moral and political failure that will incubate the next stage of "AI Risk".
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Human_Use_of_Human_Beings
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> 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 Isn’t this to some degree exactly what all of these warnings about risk are leading to? And unlike nuclear weapons, there are massive monetary incentives that are directly at odds with behaving safely, and use cases that involve more than…
> It seems problematic to conclude there is no real risk purely on the basis of how software companies act. That is not the only basis. Another is the fact their lines of reasoning are literal fantasy. The signatories of this "statement" are steeped in histories of grossly misrepresenting and overstating the capabilities and details of modern AI platforms. They pretend to the masses that generative text tools like Ch…
Isn't this also to be expected at this stage of development? i.e. if these concerns were not "fantasy", we'd already be experiencing the worst outcomes? The risk of MAD is real, and yet the scenarios unleashed by MAD are scenarios that humankind has never seen. We still take the the risk seriously.
And what of the very real impact that generative AI is already having as it exists in production today? Generative AI is already upending industries and causing seismic shifts that we've only started to absorb. This impact is literal, not fantasy.
It seems naively idealistic to conclude that there is "no real risk" based only on the difficulty of quantifying that risk. The fact that it's so difficult to define lies at the center of what makes it so risky.
You can either contribute to the conversation of what the regulations will look like, or stay out of it and let others decide for you, but expecting little or no regulation at all is a pipe dream.
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 think you are wrong. The risks are real and, while I am sure OpenAI and others will position themselves to take advantage of regulations that emerge, I believe that the CEOs are doing this at least in part because they believe this. If this was all about regulatory capture and marketing, why would Hinton, Bengio and all the other academics have signed the letter as well? Their only motivation is concern about the r…
Academics get paid (and compete hardcore) for creating status and prominence for themselves and their affiliations. Suddenly 'signatory on XYZ open letter' is an attention source and status symbol. Not saying this is absolutely the case, but academics putting their name on something surrounded by hype isn't the ethical check you make it out to be.