881–890 of 964 posts
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Do you remember the days the computing power that's in your pocket took up an entire floor of a building? Because I do. If that is somehow the only barrier between humanity and annihilation, then things don't bode well for us.
Sure. Despite all that progress, computers still have an off switch and power efficiency still matters. It actually matters more now than in the past.
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.
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> 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.
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One does not need to be have super-human capabilities to foresee potential risks of the technology one is an expert in. Yes, the current version of AI is not capable of large scale harm by itself yet, but the plausible trajectory is worth warning about. Gordon Moore did make fairly accurate predictions after all.
> One does not need to be have super-human capabilities to foresee potential risks of the technology one is an expert in You are right. And no one is arguing the contrary We can all see the risks The thing is, what do we do about it Regulating AI will only serve to help the big players and keep others out
I do agree that the likelihood of regulatory capture in this arena is very high.
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> borderline offensive to question them I would be happy to politely discuss any proposition regarding AI Risk. I don't think any claim should go unquestioned. I can also point you to much longer-form discussions. For example, this post, which has 670 comments, discussing various aspects of the argument: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uMQ3cqWDPHhjtiesc/agi-ruin-a...
That link is about the risks of AGI, which doesn't exist, and there's no reason to believe that it ever will exist. (If I'm wrong about AGI then I'm open to being convinced, but that's a different conversation as the topic here is non-general AI, is it not?)
The topic here is human extinction caused by AI. I don't know of any serious argument for why a non-general intelligence (really a system less intelligent than a human) would pose an extinction risk to humanity.
Plus, my background understanding of the people who signed this is that they're worried about AGI, not present-day systems, but that's an inference.
I’ll leave it to the reader to guess which names belong to which group.
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Thanks for the link, I read it with interest but philosophically it is a flawed argument (IMHO). It's a nonsequitur or something, for the following two reasons. First, I'm inclined to think that longtermism is an invalid and harmful ideology, but also acknowledge that AGI / existential risk is something that needs looking at seriously. The external factors, such as corporate interests and 1% wealthy interests/prejudi…
> First, I’m inclined to think that longtermism is an invalid and harmful ideology It is, but (aside from as a sort of sociological explanation of the belief in AGI risk) that’s mostly beside the point when discussing the problems AGI x-risk. The problem of AGI x-risk is that it is an entirely abstract concern which does not concrete flow from any basis in material reality, cannot be assessed with the tools of assess…
This isn't about logical debate. This is about reasonable, non-sophistic writing at the college level or higher. And there are basic standards, like if they don't know the future then they must explicitly acknowledge that. Not rhetorically "do that" in the essay. Literally write it out in sentences. They didn't.
I can think of 3 examples where such explicitness was done. Chomsky's letter gave explicit reasons why AGI is a false issue (and he was pilloried for it). My computer science professors literally, in their deep learning class and in their theoretical machine learning research seminars, have literally acknowledge that we don't know almost anything about the fundamentals nor the future. That scientific humility and level of intellectual conscientiousness is needed. That is absent in this discourse between the experts. And note, by that, I also include the 22-word "letter" which doesn't actually explain why Hinton and the rest of the signatories think AGI is an existential risk, what their specific reasons (your "material evidence") for that are.
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Again since these are almost the top cream of all ai researchers there is a global conspiracy to scare the public right? Has it occurred to you what happens if you are wrong, like 10% chance you are wrong? Well it's written in the declaration.
No, lots of important AI researchers are missing and many of the signatories have no relevant AI research experience. As for being the cats whiskers in developing neural architecture or whatever, so what? It gives them no particular insight into AI risk. Their papers are mostly public, remember. > Has it occurred to you what happens if you are wrong? Has it occurred to you what happens if YOU are wrong? AI risk is th…
If you are wrong there are no humans left.
If I am wrong,inequality,societies will suffer like they have always in the hands of the strong.
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All academics and researchers from different parts of the world reek marketing? Conspiracy theorists are strong
Academia and scientific research has changed considerably from the 20th century myths. It was claimed by capitalism and is very much run using classic corporate-style techniques, such as KPIs. The personality types it attracts and who can thrive in this new academic system are also very different from the 20th century. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/06/peter-higgs-...