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

businessinsider.com

121–130 of 873 posts

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

#121
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> seize power via regulatory capture Not even a little bit. "Stop" is not regulatory capture. Some large AI companies are attempting to twist "stop" into "be careful, as only we can". The actual way to stop the existential risk is to stop. https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1719777049576128542 > the push to close off AI with farcical licensing and reporting requirements "Stop" is not "licensing and reporting requ…

And... How do you do that? Seriously, people have been talking about stoping CO2 emissions for what, 50 years? We've barely made progress there.

With threat of military intervention.

People have been talking about curtailing carbon emissions for 50 years, but they haven't been serious about it. Being serious doesn't look like saying "oh shoot, we said we will... try to keep emissions down, but we didn't... even try; sorry...". Being serous looks like "stop now, or we will eminent domain your data centre from under you via an emergency court order, or failing that, bomb it to rubble (because if we don't, some other signatory of the treaty will bomb you for us)".

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

#122

The way incumbents are attempting to seize power via regulatory capture, using "X-Risk" and fantastical claims of sudden human extinction is maybe one of the most cynical ploys in the history of tech so far. Open source is one of our greatest gifts, and the push to close off AI with farcical licensing and reporting requirements (which will undoubtedly become more strict) is absurd. The laws we have already cover male…

> seize power via regulatory capture Not even a little bit. "Stop" is not regulatory capture. Some large AI companies are attempting to twist "stop" into "be careful, as only we can". The actual way to stop the existential risk is to stop. https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1719777049576128542 > the push to close off AI with farcical licensing and reporting requirements "Stop" is not "licensing and reporting requ…

You can’t _stop_ it. You can make it illegal in some countries. But outlawing it just means some obvious candidate countries or private actors develop it first instead.

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

#123

The way incumbents are attempting to seize power via regulatory capture, using "X-Risk" and fantastical claims of sudden human extinction is maybe one of the most cynical ploys in the history of tech so far. Open source is one of our greatest gifts, and the push to close off AI with farcical licensing and reporting requirements (which will undoubtedly become more strict) is absurd. The laws we have already cover male…

> The laws we have already cover malevolent and abusive uses of software applications.

They don't. Or not nearly enough. Otherwise you wouldn't have automated racial profiling, en masse face recognition, credit and social scoring etc.

And it's going to get worse. Because AI is infallible, right? Right?!

That's why, among other thing, EU AI regulation has the following:

- Foundation models have to be thoroughly documented, and developers of these modes have to disclose what data they were trained on

- AI cannot be used in high-risk applications (e.g. social scoring etc.)

- When AI is used, its decisions must be explicable in human terms. No "AI said so, so it's true". Also, if you interact with an AI system it must be clearly labeled as such

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

#124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Licensing can definitely turn into regulatory capture if it expands enough. It’s effectively a barrier to entry defined by the incumbent.

They're saying don't do licensing, just make it illegal.

Sorry, who’s “they” here? The incumbents OpenAI / DeepMind / Anthropic?

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

#125
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are already in a post-scarcity world, we have been for decades. The problem is inequalities and the inefficiency of how we use the resources, it doesn't look like we'll change that soon, sadly. I'm more prone to think that in a "virtual" economy we'll still have miserable workers to empty the chamber-pots of the lucky ones who are plugged in the new world.

> We are already in a post-scarcity world, we have been for decades. It's only a post-scarcity world if you define scarcity by absence of enough resources to satisfy the bare-minimum required for existence. People don't want to live at the subsistence level, and we're not evenly remotely close to having enough resources to satisfy everybody's wants.

> It's only a post-scarcity world if you define scarcity by absence of enough resources to satisfy the bare-minimum required for existence.

We have enough food to feed the entire world, and enough clothes to cloth the entire world. It could be a good start

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

#126

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.

> 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

Reminds me of Rehoboam from Westworld: https://youtu.be/SSRZfDL4874

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

#127

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.

Arguably, this has already happened at least twice in the past. One with the discovery of the Black-Scholes model, and arguably again with the advent of HFT (and the ability to basically front-run trades). The interesting thing about markets is you generally can only make money when things are mispriced. This limits the total potential gain even for actors with perfect information. Suppose we did have an AI model tha…

It sounds like you also need an AI to generate that mispricing. Like a form of SEO, the misinformation bots tweet to all the trading bots and try to trick them into mispricing shares, so your trading bots can quickly gain advantage. Corewars using the world economy.

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

#128
post #123

The way incumbents are attempting to seize power via regulatory capture, using "X-Risk" and fantastical claims of sudden human extinction is maybe one of the most cynical ploys in the history of tech so far. Open source is one of our greatest gifts, and the push to close off AI with farcical licensing and reporting requirements (which will undoubtedly become more strict) is absurd. The laws we have already cover male…

> The laws we have already cover malevolent and abusive uses of software applications. They don't. Or not nearly enough. Otherwise you wouldn't have automated racial profiling, en masse face recognition, credit and social scoring etc. And it's going to get worse. Because AI is infallible, right? Right?! That's why, among other thing, EU AI regulation has the following: - Foundation models have to be thoroughly docume…

This type of regulatory would be better than 'stop' or making all kinds of expensive rules that only big corps can follow.

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

#129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 suffici…

Intelligence needed to be existentially threatening to all human life <<<<<<< intelligence necessary to survey the totality of atoms and particles in the universe. The former is still very possible.

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

#130
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And... How do you do that? Seriously, people have been talking about stoping CO2 emissions for what, 50 years? We've barely made progress there.

With threat of military intervention. People have been talking about curtailing carbon emissions for 50 years, but they haven't been serious about it. Being serious doesn't look like saying "oh shoot, we said we will... try to keep emissions down, but we didn't... even try; sorry...". Being serous looks like "stop now, or we will eminent domain your data centre from under you via an emergency court order, or failing…

The problem with that is that the entity supposed to "bomb it to rubble" and the entity pushing for AI development happens to be the same entity.

Maybe the confusion why people can't see this clearly stems from the fact that tech development in the US has mostly been done under the umbrella of a private enterprise.

But if one has a look at companies like Palantir, it's going to become quite obvious what is the main driver behind AI development.

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