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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

#131

Post by Dig1t »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #121
rolisz wrote: 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…

Are you really suggesting drone striking data centers? What about running AI models on personal hardware? Are we going to require that everyone must have a chip installed in their computer that will report to the government illegal AI software running on the machine?

You are proposing an authoritarian nightmare.

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

#132

Post by melvinmelih »

aeternum wrote: post #63
PeterStuer wrote: post #48

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…

> Suppose we did have an AI model that could with near certainty predict both the future cash flows of a company and future interest rates. You could very easily calculate the discounted cash flow and determine the fair share price today or at any point in the future.

The thing about trading is that, ultimately, prices are not determined by information, but how the hive mind interprets that information. And in practice, that is not always a 1:1 relationship (see the meme stock hypes). As Keynes* famously said: the markets can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent, is exactly the reason why even having access to perfect information will not make you necessarily successful.

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

#133

Post by torginus »

PeterStuer wrote: post #61
logicchains wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

If I watch my kids and you watch yours, our contribution to GDP is 0$. If I babysit your kids and you pay me 1.000.000$, and you watch my kids and I pay you 1.000.000$, we just created 2.000.000$ in GDP. Were we not in abundance the day before but now we are? What changed?

I'm ignorant about economics, but that sounds wrong - if I offered my services as a babysitter, my contribution to GDP wouldn't be zero. If then I took the earnings from that job and hired a babysitter I would be at the same place.

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

#134

Post by RandomLensman »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #121
rolisz wrote: 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…

No-one wants a nuclear war over imaginary risks, so not happening.

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

#135

Post by brutusborn »

jdhendrickson wrote: post #104
brutusborn wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What makes it unlikely?

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

#136

Post by vidarh »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #121
rolisz wrote: 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…

> With threat of military intervention.

We've seen how hard it is to do that when the fear is nuclear proliferation. Now consider how hard it is to do that when the research can be done on any sufficiently large set of computational devices, and doesn't even need to be geographically concentrated, or even in your own country.

If I was a country wanting to continue AI research under threat of military intervention, I'd run it all in cloud providers in the country making the threat, via shell companies in countries I considered rivals.

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

#138

Post by logicchains »

00strw wrote: post #116
logicchains wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I can't recall a time where the general populace was this vulnerable, ill-informed, traumatized and submissive. I don't know why you think this is the case; the general populace seems less submissive now than ever before. Consider how much opposition there is to Israel's bombing of Gaza among the western populace, even though almost all the elites support it. Or how the uptake rate for the latest covid vaccine boost…

A lot less than there was to the invasion of Iraq. People forget that the largest antiwar marches happened and were not covered by the media of the time: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protests_against_the_Iraq_Wa... It was surreal watching the news spend 5 minutes on a protest that went on all day in front of their offices. By comparison is there a million man march against Israel today?

>A lot less than there was to the invasion of Iraq

In that case the US was an active participant. There aren't American "boots on the ground" in Israel/Palestine, the US is just providing support.

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

#139

Post by RandomLensman »

troupo wrote: post #123
lazzlazzlazz wrote: post #35

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…

AI not being allowed in high-risk applications is a bad idea, same for explicable in human terms (cannot do that now for human decisions anyway). The latter would kind of rule out any quantum computing, too, as the only real explanation there is through maths, not words.

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

#140

Post by RandomLensman »

vidarh wrote: post #136
TeMPOraL wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> With threat of military intervention. We've seen how hard it is to do that when the fear is nuclear proliferation. Now consider how hard it is to do that when the research can be done on any sufficiently large set of computational devices, and doesn't even need to be geographically concentrated, or even in your own country. If I was a country wanting to continue AI research under threat of military intervention, I'…

At least nuclear weapons pose an actual existential risk as opposed to AI - and even then we don't just go to war.
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