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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

#551

Post by hackinthebochs »

vidarh wrote: post #454
TeMPOraL wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How do you intend to prevent people from carrying out general purpose computation? Ask MAFIAA, and Intel, and AMD, and Google, and other major tech companies, and don't forget the banks too. We are already well on our way to that future. Remember Cory Doctorow's "War on general-purpose computation"? It's here, it's happening, and we're losing it. Therefore, out of many possible objections, this one I wouldn't put m…

I don't think you understand how little it takes to have Turing complete computation, and how hard it is to stop even end-users from accessing it, much less companies or a motivated nation state. The "war on general-purpose computation" is more like a "war on convenient general-purpose computation for end users who aren't motivated or skilled enough to work around it". Are you going to ban all spreadsheets? The abili…

>I don't think you understand how little it takes to have Turing complete computation

This is a dumb take. No one's calculator is going implement an AGI. It will only happen in a datacenter with an ocean of H100 GPUs. This computing power does not materialize out of thin air. It can be monitored and restricted.

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

#552

Post by randomdata »

hollerith wrote: post #471
m_a_g wrote: post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you explain to me how AGI is an existential threat to humanity? All the arguments I've read so far feel so far-fetched it's unbelievable. It's in the order of making an AGI and making it control the Pentagon (!?).

The AGI does not need to control the Pentagon. It might for example invent novel technologies that you and I cannot even imagine because we are much less capable at inventing new technologies than the AGI will be. If members of an alien civilization much more advanced than our own suddenly appeared in orbit around Earth, would that not be dangerous?

The aliens wouldn't be dangerous. There is no motivation for them to be. There is an opportunity cost for them to come here. To arbitrarily harm the human population is not a good justification to incur that cost.

The human would probably become dangerous. We get kind of stupid when we're scared. But AGI would be of our own creation. Why do we need to fear our own child?

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

#553

Post by bonton89 »

varjag wrote: post #328
ben_w wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China sure, to a degree (though they also make a lot of the phones and therefore just get shipped tons of chips), but wasn't Russia so short they stole washing machines for the chips? Or was that just war propaganda?

It was a meme. You can buy the kind of chips that go into washing machines completely legally and unrestricted from multiple vendors anywhere in the world, and transporting them into russia isn't an issue.

I also remember hearing American companies were doing the same thing with washing machines just to get the chips for higher value products in the chip shortage.

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

#554

Post by ta1243 »

csomar wrote: post #272
jeffparsons wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, I think that kind of "coordination" is a little more credible than what I thought Eliezer was proposing. Maybe I just didn't read carefully enough. One big difference here, however, is that the barrier to entry is lower. You can start doing meaningful AI R&D on existing hardware with _one_ clever person. The same was never true for nuclear weapons, so the pool of even potential players was pretty shallow for a…

I think in a few years you'll only be able to run signed software. And maybe any code you write will be communicate to some government entity somewhere to check for terrorism-impact? Well, the future is going to be very fun.

> I think in a few years you'll only be able to run signed software

Frank Martucci will sort you out with an illegal debugger. Sure he'll go to jail for it when he's caught, but plenty of people risk that now for less.

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

#555

Post by civilitty »

hodgesrm wrote: post #521
concordDance wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> He's pretty sure that human civilization will be extinct this century. This is certainly possible, but if so extinction seems far more likely to come from nuclear warfare and/or disasters resulting from climate change. For example, it's become apparent that our food supply more brittle than many people. Losing access to fertilizers, running out of water, or disruptions in distribution netorks can lead to mass starv…

Is it really possible? Perhaps it's a failure of imagination but the only things I can think of that would guarantee human extinction are impacts from massive asteroids or nearby gamma ray burst or supernova.

There are two billion poor subsistence farmers largely disconnected from market economies who aren't dependent on modern technology so the likelihood of them getting completely wiped out is very remote.

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

#556

Post by veidr »

m3kw9 wrote: post #546
homefree wrote: post #70

I think Yann is probably wrong. He refuses to engage earnestly with the “doomer” arguments. The same type of motivated reasoning could also be attributed to himself and Meta’s financial goals - it’s not a persuasive framing. The attempts I’ve seen from him to discuss the issue that aren’t just name calling are things like saying he knows smart people and they aren’t president - or even that his cat is pretty smart an…

Yet nobody has a clear practical and reasonable scenario where an AI will cause human extinction. Pls don’t say AI will control the launch codes and start firing randomly.

AI will control the launch codes and start firing nonsensically/idiotically

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

#557

Post by SkyMarshal »

jebarker wrote: post #539
jefftk wrote: post #527

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people think continued existence of humanity is good, which includes environmentalists. But there are some people who either think (a) avoiding suffering is overwhelmingly important, to the extent that a universe without life is ideal or (b) the world would be better off without humans because of the vast destruction we cause. I'm not claiming this is a common view, but it doesn't have to be a common view to res…

This doesn't really answer my question. These are arguments for why threat actors might hold the belief that "humanity is cancer", but it doesn't actually provide evidence that this is a credible threat in the real world.

Elon Musk and Joe Rogan were just complaining about one of them on Rogan’s podcast a day or two ago. He was on the cover of Time magazine, but I can’t find it on Time’s site. If you dig up that podcast on YT you should be able to see it.

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

#558

Post by [deleted] »

ryanklee wrote: post #517
troupo wrote: post #486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm totally lost as to how any of that is relevant to anything I've said. The claim I am rebutting is that we can't expect to say anything about AI causality because we can't even say anything about human causality.

[deleted]

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

#559

Post by randomdata »

peterth3 wrote: post #119

Can we stop labeling prominent AI researchers as “AI Godfather”? It’s so silly and barely truthful. The concept of AI has been around since Turing and if anyone deserves a title like “Father of AI” it’s him. LeCun is Chief AI Scientist at Meta. They can just leave it at that.

According to the dictionary, godfather is defined as: "a man who is influential or pioneering in a movement or organization"

Are these prominent AI researches not seen as being prominent exactly because they influenced movement in relation to AI?

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

#560

Post by slashdev »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #52
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…

> 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 a fantasy pretty much prohibited by game theory in a world with multiple competing states. It’s not going to happen.
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