821–830 of 964 posts
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It doesn’t matter The point is that this is unstoppable
They aren’t saying that AI needs to stop existing, just that more effort needs to be put towards regulating it, monitoring it, aligning it, etc.
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There's no false dichotomy, but a very real one. One problem is current and pressing, the other is a fantasy. I don't need to support that with any argument: the non-existence of superintelligent AGI is not disputed, nor is any of the people crying doom claim that they, or anyone else, know how to create one. It's an imaginary risk.
I agree that superintelligent AGI does not exist today, and that fortunately, nobody presently knows how to create one. Pretty much everyone agrees on that. Why are we still worried? Because the risk is that this state of affairs could easily change . The AI landscape is already rapidly changing. What do you think your brain does exactly that makes you so confident that computers won't ever be able to do the same thi…
Well, it couldn't. There's no science of intelligence, let alone artificial intelligence. We aren't any more likely to create AGI by mistake without having any relevant science than we would have been able to create the atomic bomb without physics.
I kind of understand why people are all excited, but ChatGPT is not a breakthrough in AI, or even in language modelling. People hear that it's an "AI" and that it has "learned language" but they misunderstand those terms in the common sense, when they are really trade terms that don't have the meaning people give them. For example, "Large Language Models" are models of text, not language.
Another thing to keep in mind is that we have basically gone through the same cycle of hype ever since 2012 and the ImageNet results, except this time the hype has gone viral and reached people who had no idea where the technology was before. Inevitably those people are surprised and misunderstand the capabilities of the technology.
Here's how close we are to AGI. You cannot, today, take a robot, stick an untrained neural net in its "brain", give it a good shove out in the world, and expect that it's going to learn anything at all. First, because most events it observes will happen once, and neural nets don't learn that way. Second because neural nets don't learn that way: you have to carefully train them "in the lab" first, and then use the trained model in whatever environment (i.e. dataset) you choose. And you can't change the environment where the neural net operates or it will simply break.
That's a level of capability as far from AGI as it's from the capability of a simple animal, like a cricket or a cockroach. Spider-level intelligence is right out of the question. Small furry rodent intelligence is a complete fantasy. Everything else is just twitter fodder.
So, no, we're not going to "easily change" the current state of affairs, because we haven't got a clue, we don't have the science and we don't have the tech to do it.
>> What do you think your brain does exactly that makes you so confident that computers won't ever be able to do the same thing?
Who said I think that? Cause I sure didn't.
How can AI be regulated without a single global authority? Or will they propose some single global authority with exclusive access to the AI necessary to police the regulation? Governments will advance AI as fast as positive for their own use, regardless of any international agreement to the contrary. Just like experimenting on deadly pathogens in labs. Do you think criminal organisations will adhere to any laws? So…
Or to use a more successful example, it could look more like our chemical weapons conventions. I'm generally all for democratization of technology, open data etc. but some technology (e.g. bomb design, the smallpox virus, chemical weapons, risky AI experiments) I don't think make sense to democratize. Sometimes regulation is the lesser of two evils.
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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.
Most moral and legal systems hold genocide in a special place, and this is natural, because systematically killing all members of a religious or ethnic group is more damaging than killing some members. Eliminating a disease like smallpox is a much more significant achievement than simply mitigating it or treating it. When we really eliminate a disease it may never come back! This list of experts is worried about us b…
But something like Nuclear War might be.
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Right. It probably needed to be general because there hasn't been enough time to work out sane specific responses, and even if they had, getting buy-in on specifics is a recipe for paralysis by indecision. A credible group of people simply pleading for policy makers, researchers, et. al. to take this seriously will lead to the project approvals, grant money, etc. that will hopefully yield a more sophisticated underst…
Reading the comments here is helping evolve my thinking on the issue for sure. Here's a comment I made in another thread: > As I mentioned in another comment, the listed risks are also notable because they largely omit economic risk. Something that will be especially acutely felt by those being laid off in favor of AI substitutes. I would argue that 30% unemployment is at least as much of a risk to the stability of s…
We seem perfectly resigned to the expansion of an already huge underclass—-with or without the help of LLMs.
Might not AGI help convince our tech savvy aristocracy that one fundamental problem still is better balancing of opportunities and more equitable access to a good education? I see the probability of that happening as precisely 4.6%.
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I'm confused. You agree that we're surround by naturally-arising, self-organizing agents, both biological and institutional. People are constantly experimenting with agentic AIs of all kinds. There are tons of theoretical characterizations of agency and how it's a stable equilibrium. I'm not sure what you're hoping for if none of these are reasons to even worry.
None we have made from unliving things no. «agentic» is a 5$ word of ill construction. The literature is littered with the corpses of failed definitions of «agency», «planning», «goal dorected behavior». ‘Twas the death of the Expert System AI (now it’s just constraint solvers). It will be the death of attention/transformer AI before long, I wonder what banality we will bestow upon it.
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I think it's very unlikely that any of those would lead to human extinction, especially since most of those take decades to unfold, and would still leave large parts of the earth habitable. Toby Ord wrote a book trying to estimate each of these risks, and put AI on top: https://www.amazon.ca/Precipice-Existential-Risk-Future-Huma...
Well, I think paperclip maximizers or 'kill all humans' skynet scenarios are extremely implausible. From the examples we have, intelligence is anticorrelated with sadism and avarice.
The correlation you mention seems noisy enough that I wouldn't want to bet my civilization on it.
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!
All academia and researchers say X. Random redditor/HN lurker declares nonesense I know better! This is how we should bet our future.
We can base our arguments on the unprovable, some specific person's secret intentions, or we engage the their ideas. One is lazy and meaningless, the other actually takes effort.
Then there is this lazy and false equivalency between corporations being interested in market capture and AI risks being exaggerated.
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It’s worth noting also that many academics who signed the statement may face adverse issues like reputational risk as well as funding cut to their research programs if AI safety becomes an official policy. For a large number of them, these risks are worth far more than any possible gain from signing it. When a large number of smart, reputable people, including many with expert knowledge and little or negative incenti…
You're putting a weirdly large amount of trust into, functionally, some dude who posted on lesswrong. Sure he has a PhD and is smart, but so is basically everyone else in the field , not just in alignment, and the median person in the field thinks the risk of "doom" is 2-5% (and that's conditioned on the supposed existence of a high level machine intelligence that the median expert believes might exist in 40 years).…
But this is all a distraction, since unaligned ASI is the default case absent significant efforts (that we aren't currently making), and trying to evaluate risk by averaging out the views of people who haven't actually explored the arguments very carefully (vs. just evaluating the arguments yourself) is a doomed effort.
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You just described literally why we shouldn't Banks and private equity have destroyed democracy
I'm not sure how less banking regulation would improve that situation. Likewise with AI.