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

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481–490 of 873 posts

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

#481

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…

True. We receive warnings all the time but I think what these people are afraid of is actually losing their power.

Until these same people start being concerned about DIY CRISPR kits, I do not take them seriously:

https://www.the-odin.com/diy-crispr-kit/

This is dangerous in ways that require no leaps of logic or hypothetical sci-fi scenarios to imagine. I studied biology as an undergrad and can think of several insanely evil things you could do with this plus some undergrad-level knowledge of genetics and... not gonna elaborate.

But no we are talking about banning math.

This is a combination of cynical people pushing for regulatory capture and smart people being dumb in the highly sophisticated very verbose ways that smart people are dumb.

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

#482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My estimation of Eliezer Yudkowsky just dropped a notch — not because I don't take the existential threat posed by AI seriously — but because he seems to think that global coordination and control is an even remotely possible strategy.

He actually doesn't think it's viable, but thinks its the only card left to play. He's pretty sure that human civilization will be extinct this century.

If humans go extinct it sure as hell won't be AI that does it, but rather good old human ignorance and aggression.

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

#483

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…

lmao you have to be kidding me

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

#484
post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AI not being allowed in high-risk applications is a bad idea wat > same for explicable in human terms (cannot do that now for human decisions anyway). What? Human decisions can be explained and appealed. Good luck proving something when a blackbox finds you guilty of anything.

You can have ex-post narratives for what humans do, but that is not the same as an actual explanation. Actual human cognition is a black box as of now. The issue of appeals processes is totally separate. That doesn't mean we handover everything to AI, but the idea that we understand human decisions cannot be the reason for that. For some high risk things like controlling certain complex machinery or processes AI migh…

> You can have ex-post narratives for what humans did, but that is not the same as an actual explanation. Actual human cognition is a black box as of now. The issue of appeals processes is totally separate.

Demagoguery.

Already right now you have police accusing innocent people because some ML system told them so, and China running the world' largest social credit system based on nothing.

> For some high risk things like controlling certain complex machinery or processes AI might indeed be needed because control is beyond human understanding.

Ash. I should've been more clear. That's not the high-risk systems the EU AI Act talks about. I will not re-type everything, but this article has a good overview: https://softwarecrisis.dev/letters/the-truth-about-the-eu-ac...

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

#485
post #409

"AI Godfather" is... pretty fucking ludicrous. Prominent figure, notable researcher? Sure. But it's like calling Neil deGrasse Tyson (who I enjoy a lot; Astrophysics for People In A Hurry was great) the "Godfather of Physics". Both "there's not one" and "anyway, if there were, he wouldn't be it" apply.

Idk inventing convolutions and a bunch of other stuff we use everyday is somewhat significant. Machine learning, if we call it a field, is a whole lot newer than physics, and so a few people have contributed quite a bit in recent memory.

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

#486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think we're off track at all. You made the claim that human cognition is a black box. That's not true. We have valid causal explanations for human cognition /and/ human behavior. Just because we don't have explanations at every level of abstraction does not prevent us from having them at some levels of abstraction. We very well may find ourselves in the same situation with regard to AI. It's not going beyond,…

I disagree: for anything beyond basal stuff, we have hypotheses for causal explanations of human cognition, not full theories. For example, we cannot explain the mental process how someone came up with a new chess move and check the validity in that case. We can have some ideas how it might happen and that person might also have some ideas how, but then we back to hypotheses.

All this is demagoguery.

If a bank denies you credit, it has to explain why. Not "AI told us so".

If police arrests you, they have to explain why, not "AI told us so".

If your job fires you, it has to explain why, not "AI told us so".

etc.

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

#487
post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no scenario where climate change leads to human extinction. Worst case scenario is global population goes down by a single digit percentage. Horrible, horrible stuff, but not extinction. And most likely scenarios are not nearly that bad. Nuclear war, if the worst nuclear winter predictions are correct, could be a lot worse but there would still be some survivors. Unaligned ASI though, could actually make us…

There is a scenario. The climate has been buffering global warming, and as its ability to do that fails, the rate of temperature increase accelerates along with many extreme climate events. This rapid acceleration and series of catastrophes causes a combination of mass migrations along with unprecedented crop failures. First world countries are destabilized by sky high food prices and the mass influx of migrants, lea…

I don’t think they are arguing that this can’t happen, but that it is unlikely to kill every single human. I mean climate spans very very long time frames, so certainly if we can’t find a way to hang on by a thread and keep reproducing, it will spell the end.

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

#488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> how to kill everyone and it patiently and expertly walks them through how to create a global pandemic. There are thousands of people around the globe working in labs every day that can do this.

And how many of them are radical religious nutjobs? I think it is plausible that "can spend decades learning a scientific craft" and "wants to kill everyone on the planet" are mutually exclusive personality traits.

there is no OR gates in biology, only mutable distributions. the probability might be small for the two traits to appear, the overlap will occur with some frequency over billions of people. Also, and more importantly, the first condition is pretty heavily biological, the second is more of a social consequence. Just take a genius, give him internet and a healthy dollop of trauma, push the mysanthropism to 11 and watch the fireworks.

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

#489
While I wholeheartedly agree here, LeCun is employed by one of the largest and most wide ranging surveillance apparatuses ever devised

He has no standing here to say anything to anyone else about Corporate interests in owning the "Means of production" of AI

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

#490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree: for anything beyond basal stuff, we have hypotheses for causal explanations of human cognition, not full theories. For example, we cannot explain the mental process how someone came up with a new chess move and check the validity in that case. We can have some ideas how it might happen and that person might also have some ideas how, but then we back to hypotheses.

Once again, you are raising the bar artificially high by pointing to examples where we fail to have reasonable casual accounts. But you are conveniently ignoring the mountain of reasonable accounts that we employ all day long simply to navigate our human world.

I think this is confusing a certain predictability with having a correct explanation (again, we are beyond basal things like being hungry leading to eating). Those two things are not the same.
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