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Statement on AI Risk

safe.ai

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Re: Statement on AI Risk

#831

Post by robwwilliams »

lannisterstark wrote: post #735
chefandy wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>They are some of the smartest, savviest, most thoughtful, and most principled tech policy experts I've met. with all due respect, that's just POV of them or how they chose to present themselves to you. They could all be narcissists for all we know. Further, One person's opinion, namely yours, doesn't exempt them from criticism and rushing to be among the first in what's arguably the new gold rush.

The only name in this list that gives me pause is Daniel Dennett. At least he has a philosopher’s historical perspective on the challenges ahead.

Very few neuroscientists as signers. Perhaps they know better.

For me the basic sociopolitical climate today (and for the last 120 years) is at an existential boil. This is not to say that birthing AGIs is not frightening, but just to say that many real features of today are just as, or even more frightening.

Re: Statement on AI Risk

#832

Post by Willish42 »

> Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.

The comparisons selected here seem off to me.

No mention of climate change? It's a more recent and concrete problem with more hard science (spanning decades) than our current understanding and presumed speculative risk of AI, which governments have also failed spectacularly at curtailing.

The pandemic was similarly mishandled and was not solved with regulation of any sort.

Nuclear war is an arguably apt comparison but happens to have become prioritized by militarization of nuclear resources and research which ... doesn't seem like a good goal here?

Re: Statement on AI Risk

#833

Post by TaylorAlexander »

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…

Yep agree. They talk a big game about how their product is so powerful it will take over the world if we're not careful, but they don't talk about how they are complicit in relatively more mundane harms (compared to AI taking over the world) that are real and happening today thanks to their system design.

They want to promote the idea that their product is all-powerful, but they don't want to take responsibility for dealing with bad assumptions built in to their design.

Re: Statement on AI Risk

#834

Post by pixl97 »

tome wrote: post #762
pixl97 wrote: post #726

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you're arguing is "what is the minimum viable power envelope for a super intelligence". Currently that answer is "quite a lot". But for the sake of cutting out a lot of argument lets say you have a cellphone sized device that runs on battery power for 24 hours that can support a general intelligence. Lets say, again for arguments sake, there are millions of devices like this distributed in the population. Do you…

> lets say you have a cellphone sized device that runs on battery power for 24 hours that can support a general intelligence I can accept that it would be hard to turn off. What I find difficult to accept is that it could exist. What makes you think it could?

You, a general intelligence operate on around 20 watts of power, so we could use that as a base floor. Analog inference is one of the areas being worked on that may massively lower power requirements.

Re: Statement on AI Risk

#835

Post by pixl97 »

juve1996 wrote: post #748
PoignardAzur wrote: post #694

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't follow. It's like saying "if the AI can build a gun that can kill a human, it can build an anti-gun that can stop the gun". There are lots of situations where offense and defense are asymmetrical. So maybe the killer AI would need two months to build a time-delayed super-virus, and the defender AI would need two months to build a vaccine; if the virus takes less than two months to spread worldwide and ac…

> That doesn't follow. It's like saying "if the AI can build a gun that can kill a human, it can build an anti-gun that can stop the gun". Why couldn't it? Metal of X thickness = stopped bullet. Not exactly a hard problem to solve for. Humans managed it quite quickly. But either way it misses the point. > So maybe the killer AI would need two months.. Yes, maybe it would. Maybe it wouldn't. Look at every single one o…

>Why couldn't it

Tank manufacturers want to know your number...

Re: Statement on AI Risk

#836

Post by sour-taste »

No matter what regulatory scheme is invented it seems like it will be hard to enforce. Governments, criminal organizations, and others will have little incentive to follow the regulations. Not that this is a unique problem to ai but it seems somehow harder than other cases.

Re: Statement on AI Risk

#837

Post by oh_sigh »

ericb wrote: post #324
juve1996 wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, and you can set another superintelligence on another task - prevent covid ebola. See the problem with these scenarios?

Yes, I see a huge problem. Preventing damage is an order of magnitude more difficult than causing it.

There are an order of magnitude more people with orders of magnitude more resources who don't want to die than those who do.

Re: Statement on AI Risk

#838

Post by jstarfish »

nico wrote: post #644
chefandy wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Maybe these people have good intentions and are just being naive They might not be getting paid, but that doesn’t mean they are not being influenced AI at this point is pretty much completely open, all the papers, math and science behind it are public Soon, people will have advanced AI running locally on their phones and watches So unless they scrub the Internet, start censoring this stuff, and pretty much ban comput…

> Soon, people will have advanced AI running locally on their phones and watches

Yeah, with drugs being legal now I've been wondering what the next boogeyman we're going to declare war on would be.

Re: Statement on AI Risk

#839

Post by nathansherburn »

thelittleone wrote: post #823
nathansherburn wrote: post #820

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Fair points. I'm skeptical not of the need to prevent certain evil uses, but that regulation will be used to prevent uses critical to freedom.

Yeah I share your worry. It's pretty terrifying for anyone at all to have the power that could come from the next waves of AI.
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