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The illusion of AI’s existential risk

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Re: The illusion of AI’s existential risk

#91

Post by garyNeedsa »

ineedasername wrote: post #51
jiggawatts wrote: post #34

I’m just re-reading Blindsight by Peter Watts, a novel that is amazingly prescient in — amongst other things — its predictions of this coming economic upheaval. Speaking of… one scene in the book has humans communicating with an alien that appears to have “learned” human speech by training a non-sentient LLM on human ship-to-ship transmissions, and then “fine tuned” it to achieve the desired communication goal withou…

>This is a book from 2006 accurately using the salient features of LLMs popularised in the 2020s I'm a huge fan of Peter Watts' work, but to be fair that is at the very least a close-cousin to the Chinese Room thought experiment that's been around for a while.

Yeah that’s the thing; LLMs like all software are just the latest codification of existing theories and memes, that’s exactly what they’re trained on. That’s exactly the path we envisioned to create them decades ago.

The concept wasn’t new in 2006 either.

Not really seeing the “now that’s sci fi!” emotion here.

Most of our historical compute problems were coupled to network reliability, performance. Those bottlenecks are largely solved; oh wow explosion in AI progress.

This isn’t new it’s more like the Higgs; just needed to wait for hardware.

Re: The illusion of AI’s existential risk

#92

Post by zirgs »

cjbprime wrote: post #83

This is a truly awful article. I'm mildly positive towards AI because I think people tend to react with fear and examine the risks without equivalently examining the rewards, and I think that's happening here and the rewards seem amazing. But the arguments of risk are serious and plausible and this article is just lazily dismissive of them. > AI is not competing for resources with human beings. A superintelligence wo…

It's very hard to transport humans to other planets, but a bunch of robots are already exploring Mars. I see no reason why a superintelligence would want to confine itself to Earth.

Why compete with humans on Earth if there's the whole Solar system to exploit?

Re: The illusion of AI’s existential risk

#93

Post by spacebanana7 »

janalsncm wrote: post #7

I don’t understand why economic disruption and human obsolescence isn’t considered an existential risk. We could end up in a world where 99.99% of people are redundant and useless cost centers for our GDP maximizing economic paradigm. In that case, you don’t need killer robots in order to push humanity towards near-extinction. The invisible hand will smite them. But don’t worry, TED Talk attendee. The obsoletariat mo…

There was a time when 90% of the labour force worked in agriculture. If I lived in the 1600s I'd be terribly concerned that mass unemployment would coincide with large increases in agricultural productivity.

However, when the agricultural sector became more productive the 'winners' wanted bigger houses, travel, education, healthcare etc and this provided enough opportunity for the displaced workers to find jobs. These new sectors, over time, even offered more wealth and better working conditions to their workers than the old agricultural sector.

Re: The illusion of AI’s existential risk

#94

Post by reducesuffering »

seiferteric wrote: post #47
version_five wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Introducing the AI Mirror Test, which very smart people keep failing" https://www.theverge.com/23604075/ai-chatbots-bing-chatgpt-i...

99% of what people do day to day is repetitive/unoriginal so it is not too surprising that this is happening, but I wonder if we are really any closer to an AI that can develop a novel and important scientific theory or mathematical result for instance? When can we expect AI to resolve the quantum gravity issue? If it can't do that, but eventually humans do, what does that say about AI I wonder?

"Mathematicians at the University of Oxford used the AI to discover a surprising connection between algebraic and geometric invariant knots, establishing a completely new theorem in the field."[0]

The goalposts will continue moving until morale impairs.

[0] https://news.sky.com/story/mathematicians-hail-breakthrough-...

Re: The illusion of AI’s existential risk

#95

Post by radicalace »

Aerroon wrote: post #53
MattPalmer1086 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, no. The goal is to maximise profit. One way to do that is to minimise labour costs. But at the extreme, if there are then no consumers who can buy your goods there is no profit...

> The goal is to maximise profit No, it isn't. Profit is meaningless, money is inherently worthless. Capitalism exists to encourage the production of (new) goods and services. The system is set up to encourage people to take their capital and invest it for this purpose. Investments help business ideas that would otherwise never have been made, because the person with the idea couldn't afford it. In return the investo…

the purpose of an economy is to support and ensure the existence of its host organism, its country. there is no rule that says any specific amount of human labour has to be involved.

Re: The illusion of AI’s existential risk

#96

Post by LatteLazy »

janalsncm wrote: post #7

I don’t understand why economic disruption and human obsolescence isn’t considered an existential risk. We could end up in a world where 99.99% of people are redundant and useless cost centers for our GDP maximizing economic paradigm. In that case, you don’t need killer robots in order to push humanity towards near-extinction. The invisible hand will smite them. But don’t worry, TED Talk attendee. The obsoletariat mo…

FYI, the employment rate in the west in between 50% and 75%.

Re: The illusion of AI’s existential risk

#97

Post by gpderetta »

jhbadger wrote: post #66
jiggawatts wrote: post #34

I’m just re-reading Blindsight by Peter Watts, a novel that is amazingly prescient in — amongst other things — its predictions of this coming economic upheaval. Speaking of… one scene in the book has humans communicating with an alien that appears to have “learned” human speech by training a non-sentient LLM on human ship-to-ship transmissions, and then “fine tuned” it to achieve the desired communication goal withou…

A much more interesting set of books (I've never managed to finish Blindsight due to Watts writing) is Ian Banks' Culture series.

They are very different kind of authors. Watts writes hard sci-fi, Banks wrote (extremely good) space-opera.

Re: The illusion of AI’s existential risk

#98

Post by gpderetta »

jiggawatts wrote: post #34

I’m just re-reading Blindsight by Peter Watts, a novel that is amazingly prescient in — amongst other things — its predictions of this coming economic upheaval. Speaking of… one scene in the book has humans communicating with an alien that appears to have “learned” human speech by training a non-sentient LLM on human ship-to-ship transmissions, and then “fine tuned” it to achieve the desired communication goal withou…

> non-sentient LLM

I don't think it is described as non-sentient in the book, but only as lacking consciousness.

Consciousness not being required for sentience is one of the two major themes of the book (the other being that consciousness is an evolutionary dead end).

Still your example is very relevant. I very much believe that ChatGPT, for example, is not conscious. The question is if it has some amount of sentience.

Re: The illusion of AI’s existential risk

#99

Post by gpderetta »

lostmsu wrote: post #60
eulgro wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And so it is said in the book.

And since the book itself is a work of fiction, it doesn't really tell us what will reality look like.

Of course it doesn't, but it is a thought experimented presented as a novel.

Re: The illusion of AI’s existential risk

#100

Post by radicalace »

zirgs wrote: post #92
cjbprime wrote: post #83

This is a truly awful article. I'm mildly positive towards AI because I think people tend to react with fear and examine the risks without equivalently examining the rewards, and I think that's happening here and the rewards seem amazing. But the arguments of risk are serious and plausible and this article is just lazily dismissive of them. > AI is not competing for resources with human beings. A superintelligence wo…

It's very hard to transport humans to other planets, but a bunch of robots are already exploring Mars. I see no reason why a superintelligence would want to confine itself to Earth. Why compete with humans on Earth if there's the whole Solar system to exploit?

you completely fail to understand it. when you understand it you wont use the word compete — thats like saying the AI will have to compete with an inanimate object. there will be no competition, no struggle and no choice in the matter. if the singularity kicks off, humans will be rendered completely helpless. you clearly dont realize this because of the ridiculous notion that you harbor of humans competing with machines. trying to predict their motives is totally useless — you cant do it.
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