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White House Secures Commitments from Leading AI Companies to Manage AI Risks

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Re: White House Secures Commitments from Leading AI Companies to Manage AI Risks

#41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If (and it's a huge if that we are no where near) we created a super intelligent, general ai, how would you keep it from accessing things it shouldn't? It would be smarter than the world's best hacking team and work 24/7. That's sort of the deus ex machina of AI...

With a Hollywood style big red emergency stop button protected by plastic shield to prevent accidental pressing that is also protected by a lock where the person in charge has the key around their neck. Or a giant knife switch on the wall that makes that huge clunk noise when turned to the off position, and everyone hears the sound effect of the power shutting down. We've had computers in charge of so much for so lon…

You can't fit a manual override to these systems any more than you can a person.

Re: White House Secures Commitments from Leading AI Companies to Manage AI Risks

#43
This reeks of ass-covering so we everyone can later say "We are sorry. We tried." followed by some more innocuous PR lingo

Great for voters to sleep better at night. Useless for actually "managing AI risks"

Not that those risks can seriously be managed long-term, IMHO. The prisoner's dilemma between nation states and corporations ensures someone will defect.

Re: White House Secures Commitments from Leading AI Companies to Manage AI Risks

#44

Looks like the companies all agreed to do what they were doing already. Nothing about training data transparency , nothing about a common definition of risk or standards for compliance. The public have all heard “AI is going to destroy humanity” but those statements have been short on specifics. I have been asked by many people to explain how AI could kill us all. How about some clarity for common people.

> I have been asked by many people to explain how AI could kill us all.

"Colossus The Forbin Project", "Terminator"

I.e. giving control of weapons to an AI.

Re: White House Secures Commitments from Leading AI Companies to Manage AI Risks

#45

Looks like the companies all agreed to do what they were doing already. Nothing about training data transparency , nothing about a common definition of risk or standards for compliance. The public have all heard “AI is going to destroy humanity” but those statements have been short on specifics. I have been asked by many people to explain how AI could kill us all. How about some clarity for common people.

>I have been asked by many people to explain how AI could kill us all. How about some clarity for common people. There are countless resources to find this stuff out. To be clear there may not be a level at which common people understand why e.g. Fission Chain Reactions are dangerous but they can grok why a giant bomb that spreads radiation is bad. For Starters: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uMQ3cqWDPHhjtiesc/agi-r…

[deleted]

Re: White House Secures Commitments from Leading AI Companies to Manage AI Risks

#46

Looks like the companies all agreed to do what they were doing already. Nothing about training data transparency , nothing about a common definition of risk or standards for compliance. The public have all heard “AI is going to destroy humanity” but those statements have been short on specifics. I have been asked by many people to explain how AI could kill us all. How about some clarity for common people.

It is likely to be similar to humans vs. other primates. Step 1 is establish a position of complete military dominance through superior communication, resource utilisation and technology. Step 2 is wipe out anyone who competes for resources.

Basically the argument is if anyone, anywhere creates an AI that has the same basic drives as a human (preserve yourself, replicate, preserve things that look like you) it'll start competing with us for resources. AIs have demonstrated the ability to crush humans at every competitive game we can play with them, so they'll crush us at that game too. It looks a bit far fetched in 2023 but it is actually pretty easy to see it happening. Hardware progresses exponentially for a few more years. Some war-torn state gets desperate, starts deploying military AIs to try and get an edge, loses control, yada yada. Or economic pressure starts engineering humans out of the loop in one too many places and evolutionary pressures happen by accident to develop an intelligent autonomous agent that wants to replicate.

Humans struggled with a cold virus recently and couldn't stamp it out. Something that can outdo us research-wise would not be something we can handle. Whether humanity has control of corporations is an open question given the number of people who get killed if it is profitable to do so. We've been luck that corporations need people to act as a brain. AIs don't need that.

Re: White House Secures Commitments from Leading AI Companies to Manage AI Risks

#47

Looks like the companies all agreed to do what they were doing already. Nothing about training data transparency , nothing about a common definition of risk or standards for compliance. The public have all heard “AI is going to destroy humanity” but those statements have been short on specifics. I have been asked by many people to explain how AI could kill us all. How about some clarity for common people.

>I have been asked by many people to explain how AI could kill us all. How about some clarity for common people. There are countless resources to find this stuff out. To be clear there may not be a level at which common people understand why e.g. Fission Chain Reactions are dangerous but they can grok why a giant bomb that spreads radiation is bad. For Starters: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uMQ3cqWDPHhjtiesc/agi-r…

You have to find a different preacher than Yud, he has zero capacity to explain himself to skeptics.

Re: White House Secures Commitments from Leading AI Companies to Manage AI Risks

#48
post #37
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What the fuck even is "AI" anyway? Indeed. For most lay people I've talked to -- family, friends, and acquiescence outside of tech -- the answer ultimately boils down to "automation that can do my job or can do the job of people I care about or can do the job of people who would then compete for my job". Sometimes also "algorithms" a la social media feeds and so on. Ie, the lay answer to "what is AI?" has recently…

For sure. AI is a marketing term. But in some sense, so it "tech". The paperclip is a highly evolved technology, for example, [1], but working on those doesn't mean you work "in tech". Tech meant something like, "the new stuff that is impacting our lives but we don't know how to handle". So a CTO's job generally doesn't include the paperclips, the copiers, or the company cars, however technological they are. And as w…

I think a good definition of AI might be things that can’t be done (or at least we don’t know how to do them) with traditional deterministic programming techniques (that is, humans write code that directly tells the computer what to do).

Things like traditional chess programs (i.e., those that don't use neural networks/ML) are maybe a borderline case, as while they are just tree search with a bunch of human-tuned evaluation heuristics, the search depth is so huge that it's difficult for humans to explain why they take certain actions.

Re: White House Secures Commitments from Leading AI Companies to Manage AI Risks

#49

[flagged]

Do you have a better physical world analogy than a "series of tubes" to describe bandwidth and latency?

https://www.pcmag.com/news/a-remembrance-and-defense-of-ted-...

Comment in context:

"They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the Internet. And again, the Internet is not something that you just dump something on. It's not a big truck. It's a series of tubes. And if you don't understand, those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it's going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Series_of_tubes

Re: White House Secures Commitments from Leading AI Companies to Manage AI Risks

#50

Looks like the companies all agreed to do what they were doing already. Nothing about training data transparency , nothing about a common definition of risk or standards for compliance. The public have all heard “AI is going to destroy humanity” but those statements have been short on specifics. I have been asked by many people to explain how AI could kill us all. How about some clarity for common people.

> The public have all heard “AI is going to destroy humanity” but those statements have been short on specifics.

Honestly, my understanding is that's mainly a distraction from the much more realistic:

> AI is going to take your job and impoverish your family while making the rich even richer. But cheer up! You'll be able to talk to a chatbot therapist about your problems, from your cardboard home under a bridge, so it's progress! In the past, not even kings had chatbot therapists! You'll have it better than a king!

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