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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

#181
post #120

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 think we’ve already been aware of the limitations of ML models in the financial world. Historical financial data only predicts so well. If there was a way to make a money printing machine with ML it would’ve happened already. It’s a much easier problem space than language or image generation.

Financial data is not enough to describe the financial world. To predict the movement of meme stock, you'd need Reddit/Twitter/what have you data. It's not a limitation of ML per se, but a limitation on how much data we can feed the ML model.

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

#182

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…

The fact that anyone may be taking Eliezer Yudkowsky seriously on this topic is mind-blowing to me. Simply mind-blowing. To imagine that anybody, including the UN, would have any power to collective put a stop to the development of AI globally is a laughable idea. The UN cannot agree to release a letter on Israel-Hamas, imagine policing the ENTIRE WORLD and shutting down AI development when necessary.

We can't stop countries from developing weapons that will destroy us all tomorrow morning and take billions of USD to develop, imagine thinking we can stop matrix multiplication globally. I don't want to derail into an ad hominem, but frankly, it's almost the only option left here.

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

#183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 practi…

it's a Keynes quote, but yeah.

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

#185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think these attempts will simply point out that math is a higher power than law. If something becomes possible, and becomes easy, there is nothing law can do to stop it. Just look at the attempts to stop drugs in North West Europe. Huge sentences (so huge they are in fact never fully carried out), tens of dead police officers on a yearly basis, triple that in civilian victims and drugs are easier to get than ever b…

The aim is to stop it from becoming easy. The drug war would look very different if good cocaine was only produced in one country with extremely costly chemistry machines from one company.

If good cocaine was only produced in one country with extremely costly machines, a good-enough alternative would appear almost immediately. This has happened millions of times in the history of humanity, I refuse to believe that people haven't learned this lesson.

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

#186

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.

Blackrock already "owns" society.

People get fixated on mindless algorithms when the real deal is always between humans. Software algorithms, no matter how sophisticated, are just another pawn in the human chess.

In some very remote future there might be silicon creatures that enter that chess game on their own terms. Using that remote possibility to win advantage here and now is a most bizarre strategy. Except it seems to work! It shows we are really just low IQ lemming collectives, suckers for a good story no matter how ungrounded.

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

#187

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…

> "Stop" is not regulatory capture. "Stop" is a fiction that exists exclusively inside your head. Unless your solution anticipates a planet wide GULAG system run by a global government your "stop" is infeasible.

His solution -- assuming it's the same as the one proposed by Yudkowsky, who he quotes -- is launching air strikes against data centers hosting AI computation.

So yeah, imaginary.

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

#189
post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 commun…

Oh, I don't think my post was advocating anybody give anything away. But if we just arrived there, magically, it would be pretty great, from a utilitarian point of view. But thanks for the knee-jerk anti-communist rant, it's really great that we're back to that. Life was great in the 50s.

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

#190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That is a surprisingly high figure though for 18k a year you could clothe, feed yourself and have shelter especially considering healthcare is cheap or free in most of the world. That’s way better than I thought the world was doing.

That's mean vs median for you. In this[1] analysis, average is £12k, but median global per-capita household income is under $3k: 50 percent of humans earn less than that (to be fair, it's actually rising quite fast and steadily since the 90s).

Not sure where PPP puts it but the median figure will be lower because you can get a lot richer than you can get poorer.

1: https://www.zippia.com/advice/average-income-worldwide/

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