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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

#141

Post by dwallin »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #117
dwallin wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The theories all inevitably rely on assumptions that are essentially the equivalence of spherical cows in a frictionless universe. All evidence is that costs for intelligence likely scale superlinearly. Each increase in intelligence capability requires substantially more resources (Computing power, training data, electricity, hardware, time, etc). Being smart doesn’t just directly result in these becoming available w…

> Each increase in intelligence capability requires substantially more resources (Computing power, training data, electricity, hardware, time, etc). Being smart doesn’t just directly result in these becoming available with no limit. Any significant attempts to increase the availability of these to a level that mattered would almost certainly draw attention. We know that "intelligence" can devise software optimization…

I would say that if we experienced that, we would likely experience societal collapse far before the singularity became a problem. At which point the singularity could be just as likely to save humanity as it would be to doom it.

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

#142

Post by crooked-v »

rnd0 wrote: post #109
jupp0r wrote: 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.

>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. No -they won't. Legislation will be written which will forbid companies such as github and gitlab to host models or any sort of AI building programs or data. Think of the ban on cryptography in the 70's up to the 90's, but on steroids (with the very rich in on the ban, and…

> Legislation will be written which will forbid companies such as github and gitlab to host models or any sort of AI building programs or data.

Too late. That's stuff's already everywhere on the Internet. It would be about as effective as attempts at banning piracy already are.

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

#143

Post by arisAlexis »

RandomLensman wrote: post #85
arisAlexis wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Common people thought nuclear weapons not dangerous? When was that?

Many of the academics and physicists (aka software developer in this example) thought nukes are impossible. Look it up)

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

#144

Post by DirkH »

throwaway9274 wrote: post #100
circuit10 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Is there really “a lot of theory” that says runaway AI is possible? In the sense of empirical fact-based peer reviewed machine learning literature? Because if so I must have missed it. It seems more accurate to say there is quite a bit of writing done by vocal influencers who frequent a couple online forums.

There was also only "a lot of theory" and zero empirical evidence that nuclear bombs were possible not that long ago. Theoretical fact-based peer reviewed literature often (though not always) precedes empirical evidence.

We shouldn't jump the gun and say runaway AI is inevitable just because there is fact-based theory on its possibility. Just like it would have been dumb to just look at E=mc^2 and conclude nuclear weapon development is 100% inevitable.

But in the same breath we shouldn't say it's impossible just because we don't have empirical evidence either.

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

#145

Post by defrost »

arisAlexis wrote: post #143
RandomLensman wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Common people thought nuclear weapons not dangerous? When was that?

Many of the academics and physicists (aka software developer in this example) thought nukes are impossible. Look it up)

US physicists largely thought they were infeasible, sure.

They were focused on power generation.

But the bulk of world physicists ( the MAUD committee et el ) thought they were feasible to construct and the Australian Oliphant convinced the US crowd of that.

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

#146

Post by DirkH »

mmaunder wrote: post #31
circuit10 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Humans evolved unsupervised. AI is highly supervised. The idea that an AI will enslave us all is as absurd as suggesting “computers” will enslave us all merely because they exist. Models are designed and operated by people for specific use cases. The real risks are people using this new tool for evil, not the tool itself. AI sentience is a seductive concept being used by self professed experts to draw attention to th…

Nobody said the AI needs to be sentient to enslave us all. Highly supervised AI systems mess up all the time and we often have no idea why. It "enslaving" us or whatever the overly extreme paperclip analogy is that is the current hot thought-experiment of the week is usually just talking about a mismatch between what we want and what the AI does. This is already a huge problem and will simply become a bigger problem as AI gets more powerful and complex.

Imagine you asked GPT-7 to execute your business plan. What it does is so complex you can't know whether its plan will violate any laws. Let's say you're not an evil corporation and want to do good, but that it is impossible to compete without also using AI.

At some point these systems may well become so complex we have no idea what they're actually doing. But empirically they seem to do what we want most of the time so we don't care and use them anyway.

The problem is not only people using this new tool for evil. The problem is also the tool itself. Because it might be defective.

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

#147

Post by throwaway9274 »

DirkH wrote: post #144
throwaway9274 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there really “a lot of theory” that says runaway AI is possible? In the sense of empirical fact-based peer reviewed machine learning literature? Because if so I must have missed it. It seems more accurate to say there is quite a bit of writing done by vocal influencers who frequent a couple online forums.

There was also only "a lot of theory" and zero empirical evidence that nuclear bombs were possible not that long ago. Theoretical fact-based peer reviewed literature often (though not always) precedes empirical evidence. We shouldn't jump the gun and say runaway AI is inevitable just because there is fact-based theory on its possibility. Just like it would have been dumb to just look at E=mc^2 and conclude nuclear we…

Prior to the development of nuclear weapons, there was well-grounded peer reviewed theory in the physics literature.

There were predictions that could be made by the theoretical frameworks, and experiments to confirm those predictions.

The literature well described the composition of atoms, the decay of radioactive elements, the concept of fission, and the conversion of mass to energy.

No such groundwork exists to substantiate the claim that runaway AI is possible.

LessWrong, the so-called Alignment Forum, and similar Internet groups propose thought experiments. They couch these thought experiments in the guise of inevitable outcomes.

The prophesies of the influencers originating there have no more relationship to the truth than the average enthusiast’s daydreams.

The content there fills a role similar to science fiction in the atomic age: fanciful speculation on the properties of imaginary systems.

Over time, the bad content is forgotten, and a handful of items survive and look prescient via selection bias.

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

#148

Post by flangola7 »

voidhorse wrote: post #137
circuit10 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 thi…

I don't think anyone is talking about consciousness here. Consciousness is tangential to safety concerns.

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

#149

Post by jabradoodle »

williamtrask wrote: post #115
PeterisP wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way I see it, it's clear that human-level intelligence can be achieved with hardware that's toaster-sized and consumes 100 watts, as demonstrated by our brains. Obviously there is some minimum requirements and limitations, but they aren't huge, there are no physical or info-theoretical limits that superhuman intelligence must require a megawatt-sized compute cluster and all the data on the internet (which obvious…

> there are no physical or info-theoretical limits that superhuman intelligence must require a megawatt-sized compute cluster and all the data on the internet (which obviously no human could ever see). Much of your "intelligence" is a function of natural selection. This is billions of years X bajillions of creatures in parallel, each processing tons of data at a crazy fast sampling rate in an insanely large/expensive…

Evolved creatures are somewhat handicapped by needing to make only incremental changes from one form to the next, and needing to not be eaten by predators while doing so.

That isn't strong evidence of what would be required by a well engineered system with none of those constraints.

Intelligence is not the end of goal of evolution, it is a by product.

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

#150

Post by gmerc »

dontupvoteme wrote: post #94
gmerc wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s only one competitive GPU company in town. Ids actually supremely easy to enforce it for any of 3 governments in the world. US, TW, CN

What about all those GPUs they've already made?

That’s not how growth works. The moment the current subsidized growth stops the ecosystem would come to a screeching halt.
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