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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

#131

Post by pixl97 »

RandomLensman wrote: post #86
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 hu…

Why is it that AI can only be used in detrimental ways? Surely, AI could also be used to counter, for example, 2 and 4. Claiming a net negative effect of AI isn't a trivial thing.

Think about it this way... AI will be used for all things, some good, some bad. Also remember that AI isn't free, it at least for some time will require a lot of resources poured into it to run.

Now with this constraint, who is going to be running AI? Large corporations, and do any corporations do stuff for the good of humanity, or is it for the greedy pocketbooks of their investors?

Regulations will be required, but governments tend to lag. Further in the US the corporations will fight tooth and nail to prevent regulations around AI.

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

#132

Post by pixl97 »

z3c0 wrote: post #43
dwallin wrote: 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…

Astroturfing, psyops, and disruption of general trust (commercially and maliciously, both domestic and foreign) It is disturbing to me how unconcerned everybody is with this over what is still only a hypothetical problem. States and businesses have been long employing subversive techniques to corral people towards their goals, and they all just got an alarmingly useful tool for automated propaganda. This is a problem…

I mean it's not hypothetical, there are shit loads of bots on social media already causing problems. Now the bots these days have a human controller but we can see strife they cause in politics already.

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

#133

Post by pixl97 »

NoZebra120vClip wrote: post #124
stanislavb wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...and that's when it gets scary :/

I predict that there will be a new class of homeless/street people growing in our midst: people who became utterly dependent on computers and Internet in every way, and then simply glitched out, and a house of cards collapsed beneath them, leaving them no way to access their bank funds, their employment, or housing, and denied access to any and all personal devices, they have no way to live the life they had been acc…

How to die by Google AI

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

#134

Post by pixl97 »

killjoywashere wrote: post #80
m4rtink wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That's actually why it's urgent to set this up outside of government, like the browser CA system, and develop methods to issue verification of "human" while preserving other aspects of anonymity.

There is no outside of government, they hold a monopoly in violence.

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

#135

Post by Hasu »

pixl97 wrote: post #119
SanderNL wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using this logic, flexible, self-healing, marathon running, juggling and childbearing robots that run on the occasional pizza are just around the corner, because, nature. It might us a thousand years to get anywhere close? I don’t see the good arguments for all of this happening soon.

So with your closing comment you're arguing it is possible, now you're just talking about time frames. All I have to say is that in 1900 many thought flights by heavier than aur craft were tens of thousands of years away. 3 years later it was achieved.

Of course in the 1950s many thought that computer vision and artificial intelligence were only a few months to years away, and here we are 70 years later and we're still working on those problems.

Predicting the future is hard. Some problems are harder than expected, others are easier than expected. But generally I'd say history favors the pessimists, the cases where a problem gets solved suddenly and there's a major breakthrough get a lot of press and attention, but they're a minority in the overall story of technological progress. They're also unpredictable black swan events - someone might crack AGI or a unified theory of physics tomorrow, or it might not happen for ten thousand years, or ever.

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

#136

Post by pixl97 »

nradov wrote: post #48
afpx wrote: 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 .

What does that mean exactly?

In theory with the internet I have access to most of the data humanity created. But that's not much different than throwing me on a raft in the middle of the ocean and going 'here, all the water you want.

Especially with search just getting so crappy and seo spam filled. It's something I can use to refine the knowledge I have by helping to focus the torrent.

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

#137

Post by voidhorse »

circuit10 wrote: post #23
dwallin wrote: 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…

> There is no evidence that a runaway artificial intelligence is even plausible Really? There is a lot of theory behind why this is likely to happen and if you want a real example there is a similar existing scenario we can look at, which is how humans have gone through an exponential runaway explosion in capabilities in the last few hundred years because of being more intelligent than other species and being able to…

You do realize the "AI" we're talking about here is just LLMs, right?

Language is a huge part of being human, so that's a good elements but:

1. There's no evidence that these LLMs have any sort of actual understanding of what they produce. 2. Being human is a lot more than just linguistic capability. We are embodied in a certain way, can interact with environments, have rich, multi-sensory experiences etc.

tbh I think anyone that believes AGI can arise from an LLM is extremely naive and has basically no idea of the history of this track of research or how it works.

To assert that LLMs will be capable of achieving consciousness is equivalent to asserting that human consciousness is reducible to statistical inference, which is palpably not true. (see. e.g. deductive logic).

The only reason people even fall into the trap of thinking computers are remotely close to getting to AGI is because it became very popular to reason about the brain using analogies from computer science in the 50s, despite the fact that this was completely unjustified, and people glob on to the metaphors and then have the mypoia to actually think the human brain (which is exceedingly complex) is reducible to a freakin' von neuman architecture, lol.

Biological systems and inorganic systems are fundamentally different.

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

#138

Post by spookie »

pixl97 wrote: post #119
SanderNL wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using this logic, flexible, self-healing, marathon running, juggling and childbearing robots that run on the occasional pizza are just around the corner, because, nature. It might us a thousand years to get anywhere close? I don’t see the good arguments for all of this happening soon.

So with your closing comment you're arguing it is possible, now you're just talking about time frames. All I have to say is that in 1900 many thought flights by heavier than aur craft were tens of thousands of years away. 3 years later it was achieved.

I firmly believe that we are severely underestimating the problem space. Given there are a multitude of scientific areas focusing on human nature, and even then, they've shown difficulty on explaining each of its parts.

Look, we can make assumptions given a much simpler technology, and the outcomes of our past selves. But, while the physics for those wings was pretty much good enough at the time, the aforementioned scientific areas aren't. And we know it.

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

#139

Post by XorNot »

verall wrote: post #114
usaar333 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

#1 has high focus more due to impact than high probability. #2 doesn't seem talked about much at this point and seems to be pivoting more to #3. #2 never had much of a compelling argument given auditability. #3 gets mainly ignored due to Luddite assumptions driving it. I'm dubious myself over the short term - humans will have absolute advantage in many fields for a long time (especially with robotics lagging and bein…

> #2 never had much of a compelling argument given auditability. There are already AI systems which generate "scores" based on likelyhood to commit another crime (used in parole cases) and likelyhood to be a "good tenant" (used by landlords). Don't underestimate the difficulty to fix something when the people in charge of that thing do not want it fixed.

The problem is that's still not an "AI" problem: it's a "for some reason a court can decide to use a privately supplied black box decision making system".

Like, the ludicrous part is that sentence - not that it's an AI, but that any system at all is allowed to be implemented like this.

Not to mention the more serious question as to whether it can even be allowed to apply personal penalty based on statistical likelihood like this: i.e. if a recidivism rate from a white-box system was calculated at 70%, does that mean the penalty to be applied to the specific individual under question is justified?

Now that's an actual, complicated question: i.e. while no system based on demographic statistics should be used like that, what about a system based on analysis of the individuals statements and behaviors? When a human makes a judgement call that's what we're actually doing, but how do you codify that in law safely?

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

#140

Post by killjoywashere »

pixl97 wrote: post #134
killjoywashere wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's actually why it's urgent to set this up outside of government, like the browser CA system, and develop methods to issue verification of "human" while preserving other aspects of anonymity.

There is no outside of government, they hold a monopoly in violence.

Ah, there are definitely constructs that governments find more useful. Plenty of companies, for example, managed to operate on both sides of both world wars.
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