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Licensing is neither feasible nor effective for addressing AI risks

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Re: Licensing is neither feasible nor effective for addressing AI risks

#62
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

but in the future it probably won’t be I see this parroted so often, and I have to ask: Why? What is there outside of the world of SciFi that makes the AGI of the future so nebulous, when humans would have presumably advanced to a point to be able to create the intelligence to begin with. Emergent properties are often as unexpected as they are bizarre, but they are not unexplainable, especially when you understand th…

We can’t even fully explain how our own brains work, never mind a system that’s completely alien to us and that would have to be more complex. We can’t even explain how current LLMs work internally. Maybe we’ll make some breakthrough if we put enough resources into it but if people keep denying the problem there will never be enough resources out into it

> We can’t even explain how current LLMs work internally.

You sure can. They are just not simple explanations yet. But that’s the common course of inventions, which in foresight are mind-bogglingly complex, in hindsight pretty straightforward.

Re: Licensing is neither feasible nor effective for addressing AI risks

#63
The only way to address generative AI is to strongly authenticate human content. Camera manufacturers, audio encoders, etc, should hold subordinate CAs and issue signing certs to every device. Every person should have keys, issued by the current CA system, not the government (or at least not necessarily). You should have a ability, as part of the native UX, to cross-sign the device certificate. Every file is then signed, verifying both the provenance of the device and the human content producer.

You can imagine extensions of this: newspapers should issue keys to their journalists and photographers, for the express purpose of countersigning their issued devices. So the consumer can know, strongly, that the text and images, audio, etc, came from a newspaper reporter who used their devices to produce that work.

Similar for film and music. Books. They can all work this way. We don't need the government to hold our hands, we just need keys. Lets Encrypt could become Lets Encrypt and Sign (the slogans are ready to go: "LES is more", "Do more with LES", "LES trust, more certification").

Doctors already sign their notes. SWEs sign their code. Attorneys could do the same.

I'm sure there's a straight forward version of this that adds some amount of anonymity. You could go into a notary, in person, who is present to certify an anonymous certificate was issued to a real person. Does the producer give something up by taking on the burden of anonymity? Of course, but that's a cost-benefit that both society and the producer would bear.

Re: Licensing is neither feasible nor effective for addressing AI risks

#64
post #20

Any laws should be legislating the downstream effects of AI, not the models themselves. Otherwise we will quickly get to a place where we have a handful of government-sanctioned and white-washed “safe” models responsible for deleterious effects on society, with plausible deniability for the companies abusing them. Legislating around the model is missing the point. There is no evidence that a runaway artificial intell…

Definitely agree. I would summarize it a bit differently, but when people talk about AI dangers they are usually talking about 1 of 4 different things:

1. AI eventually takes control and destroys humans (i.e. the Skynet concern).

2. AI further ingrains already existing societal biases (sexism, racism, etc.) to the detriment of things like fair employment, fair judicial proceedings, etc.

3. AI makes large swaths of humanity unemployable, and we've never been able to design an economic system that can handle that.

4. AI supercharges already widely deployed psyops campaigns for disinformation, inciting division and violence, etc.

The thing I find so aggravating is I see lots of media and self-professed AI experts focused on #1, I see lots of "Ethical AI" people solely focused on #2, but I see comparatively little focus on #3 and #4, which as you say are both happening right now. IMO #3 and #4 are far more likely to result in societal collapse than the first two issues.

Re: Licensing is neither feasible nor effective for addressing AI risks

#65
post #57

To phrase it more succinctly: it's a stupid idea because a 12 year old teenager will be able to train these models on their phone in a few years. This is fundamentally different from enriching Uranium.

Counterpoint: https://www.businessinsider.com/12-year-old-builds-nuclear-r...

Re: Licensing is neither feasible nor effective for addressing AI risks

#66
post #48
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google and others had similar products which were never released. No wonder why. There are literally billions of people that can be empowered by these tools. Imagine what will result when the tens of thousands of “one in a million” intellects are given access to knowledge that only the richest people have had. Rich incumbents have reason to be worried. The dangers of tools like these are overblown. It was already pos…

Those LLM tools are great as productivity enhancers but they don't really provide access to additional knowledge .

I can’t see how that perspective holds. I’ve learned a ton already. Right now, I’m learning algebraic topology. And, I’m in my 50s with a 1 in 20 intellect.

Sure, sometimes it leads me astray but generally it keeps course.

Re: Licensing is neither feasible nor effective for addressing AI risks

#67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We can’t even fully explain how our own brains work, never mind a system that’s completely alien to us and that would have to be more complex. We can’t even explain how current LLMs work internally. Maybe we’ll make some breakthrough if we put enough resources into it but if people keep denying the problem there will never be enough resources out into it

> We can’t even explain how current LLMs work internally. You sure can. They are just not simple explanations yet. But that’s the common course of inventions, which in foresight are mind-bogglingly complex, in hindsight pretty straightforward.

You can explain the high level concepts but it’s really difficult to say “this group of neurons does this specific thing and that’s why this output was produced”, though OpenAI did make some progress in getting GPT-4 to explain what each neuron in GPT-2 is correlated to but we can also find what human brain regions are correlated to but that doesn’t necessarily explain the system as a whole and how everything interacts

Re: Licensing is neither feasible nor effective for addressing AI risks

#68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Theory is not actually a form of evidence.

Theory can be used to predict things with reasonable confidence. It could be wrong, but assuming it’s wrong is a big risk to take. Also I gave a real-world analogy that has actually happened

An accurate theory can be used to predict things with reasonable confidence, within the limits of the theory.

We don't have an accurate theory of intelligence. What we have now is at the "not even wrong" stage. Assuming it's wrong is about like assuming that alchemy is wrong.

Re: Licensing is neither feasible nor effective for addressing AI risks

#69

The only way to address generative AI is to strongly authenticate human content. Camera manufacturers, audio encoders, etc, should hold subordinate CAs and issue signing certs to every device. Every person should have keys, issued by the current CA system, not the government (or at least not necessarily). You should have a ability, as part of the native UX, to cross-sign the device certificate. Every file is then sig…

Seems like something that could be very easily missused for censorship, catching whistleblowers and similar.

Re: Licensing is neither feasible nor effective for addressing AI risks

#70
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"In addition, even for current AI we don’t even fully understand what we are doing" That is the problem, don't you get it?

If that’s your concern than lets direct these government resources into research to improve our shared knowledge about them. If humans only ever did things we fully understood, we would have never left the caves. Complete understanding is impossible so the idea of establishing that as the litmus test is a fallacy. We can debate what the current evidence shows, and even disagree about it, but to act as if only one par…

You know, when nuclear bombs were made and Einstein and Oppenheimer knew about the dangers etc, there were common people like you that dismissed it all. This has been going on for centuries. Inventors and experts and scientists and geniuses say A and common people say nah, B. Well, Bengio, Hinton, Ilya and 350 others from the top AI labs disagree with you. Does it ever make you wonder if you should be so cock sure or this attitude can doom humanity? Curious
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