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Yann LeCun: AI one-percenters seizing power forever is real doomsday scenario

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Re: Yann LeCun: AI one-percenters seizing power forever is real doomsday scenario

#101
post #94
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seeing the weights is useless for knowing capabilities, and even knowing training data and architecture you still need to interact with it to figure those out, which you can do with cloud AI just as well. The real risk that I see is the use of open source AI by governments, corporations and criminal groups to influence elections through a deluge of bots. Cloud AI can at least be controlled to some degree because ther…

Eh, government regulating AI which is used by people to help them vote? I don't see bots as a huge problem, because it's somewhat easy to verify that someone is a real person, and it would be quite obvious if someone is using lots of bots for their cause.

> I don't see bots as a huge problem, because it's somewhat easy to verify that someone is a real person, and it would be quite obvious if someone is using lots of bots for their cause.

That only works on platforms designed to match user profiles with real-world persons. This platform definitely isn't.

Re: Yann LeCun: AI one-percenters seizing power forever is real doomsday scenario

#102
Ehhh, doomsday is any sizable economic force of nature wielding against the betterment of mankind and forcing socio-political agendas for profit over everyone.

From corporations to countries that you might as well just call corporations. We need international rights and regulations on AI to ensure it isn't used to harm people.

Re: Yann LeCun: AI one-percenters seizing power forever is real doomsday scenario

#103
post #33
post #32

Yeah, it is a true risk. What happens when people start making their voting decisions with AI, asking who to vote? Nothing wrong with that per se, but it gives an ultimate power to the company who developed and hosts the AI, which means the end of democracy. My recommendation for regulation would be to make closed & cloud-hosted AI illegal. Architecture, training data and weights should always be available, and peopl…

This would make AI usage restricted to those who can afford a beefy PC, no?

That would still be a way larger class of people than the top 1%. Even so, capabilities of consumer devices will rise for some more time.

Re: Yann LeCun: AI one-percenters seizing power forever is real doomsday scenario

#104

People focus on LLM's and diffusion models because they are so omnipresent now. But an AI for stock picking and prediction that would be realy next level and outcompete the current ones cosistently would siphon of so much wealth it would basically own society if the operators were clever enough not to get so gready short term that the system would litterally collapse overnight.

I have wondered if this is the risk that Elon is worried about. But he can’t discuss it explicitly because he is working on such a system. If he communicates its existence, then he reveals a huge attack surface and makes his life (and his teams) much more difficult. So he is limited to publically saying that AI is dangerous but not revealing the true failure mode.

I find this comically unlikely.

Re: Yann LeCun: AI one-percenters seizing power forever is real doomsday scenario

#105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have been in a state of abundance for a long time. We just choose not to distribute the abundance.

The global average PPP GDP per capita is 18k USD/year. 18k USD/year is not remotely close to abundance.

I think it's pretty close, actually. Our family could easily live off that. Easily worth it if it got rid of income inequality. And it'd still increase a percent or two, every year, inflation-adjusted! Thanks for the argument.

Re: Yann LeCun: AI one-percenters seizing power forever is real doomsday scenario

#107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>What am I missing? You're missing that intelligence is like magic, and enough of it will allow AI to break the laws of physics, mathematics and computation, apparently.

This is the type of weak dismissal I’m talking about.

A weak dismissal for a weak argument. The strong dismissal is that many processes, even relatively simple ones, are formally chaotic in the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory sense, meaning that predicting how they evolve over time becomes exponentially more difficult the further ahead in time we try to predict. Meaning we quickly get to the point where all the energy in the known universe wouldn't be sufficient to predict the future. This means AI could never be omnipotent to the degree that LW types seem to believe; no amount of "intelligence" can solve in polynomial time problems that have formally been proven to have exponential complexity, which would severely limit the power of any "superintelligence".

Re: Yann LeCun: AI one-percenters seizing power forever is real doomsday scenario

#108
post #101
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, government regulating AI which is used by people to help them vote? I don't see bots as a huge problem, because it's somewhat easy to verify that someone is a real person, and it would be quite obvious if someone is using lots of bots for their cause.

> I don't see bots as a huge problem, because it's somewhat easy to verify that someone is a real person, and it would be quite obvious if someone is using lots of bots for their cause. That only works on platforms designed to match user profiles with real-world persons. This platform definitely isn't.

You can read their profile or read their comment history to verify their humanness. Faking everything wouldn't be impossible, but certainly difficult & take time.

Re: Yann LeCun: AI one-percenters seizing power forever is real doomsday scenario

#109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who do you find persuasive and what material should I read/watch to understand their POV? So far I’ve read a bunch of lesswrong posts and listened to some Eliezer talks but still can’t understand the basis of their arguments or when I do, they seem very vague. The only suggestion that makes sense to me is from the FEP crowd. Essentially if someone sets up at AI with an autopoietic mechanism then it would be able to t…

There’s a decent podcast interview between Sam Harris and Eliezer Yudkowsky (on Sam’s pod), I think that’s a decent introduction and they break down the ideas in a way that’s more approachable for someone curious about it. For my personal quick summary I have earlier comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36104090

Out of curiosity can you point to anyone that makes a “doomer” argument that isn’t Eliezer Yudkowsky or restating his specific points? Refuting the cult of personality counterpoint with “no really this one guy can see the future” is

Re: Yann LeCun: AI one-percenters seizing power forever is real doomsday scenario

#110
post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The global average PPP GDP per capita is 18k USD/year. 18k USD/year is not remotely close to abundance.

I think it's pretty close, actually. Our family could easily live off that. Easily worth it if it got rid of income inequality. And it'd still increase a percent or two, every year, inflation-adjusted! Thanks for the argument.

>Our family could easily live off that. Easily worth it if it got rid of income inequality

Nobody's stopping you giving all your excess income above 18k to charity. If you try to make other people do it, you'll find a lot of people would rather just stop working than give away the majority of their income, which is why the economy collapsed and tens of millions of people starved in China and Russia after their communist revolutions.

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