Live data from Hacker News

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

businessinsider.com

581–590 of 873 posts

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

#581
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.

I made no such claim. My claim is that it might not be useful to hold AI to a higher standard as humans. With humans we accept certain "whims" in decisions, which is the same as having some unexplainable bit in an AI decision.

EDIT: it might not even be useful to insist on explainability if the results are better. We did not and do not do that in other areas.

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

#582
post #564

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Basically, climate change would creates lots of problems, lots of hungry immigrants. And right now we are already close to a nuclear war, so climate change would not directly wipe out humanity.

Warming the climate would increase the amount of arable land. Sea level rise happens very slowly, so most people don’t need to travel abroad to avoid it.

It can also lead to more desertification and erosion, which I believe is rather the current trend.

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

#584
post #482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I think the probability of humans eventually going extinct is 1. Avoiding it requires almost unimaginable levels of cooperation and technical advances.

The end of human civilization as we know it doesn't mean extinction. Why is extinction unavoidable?

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

#585
post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The resources are also asymmetrical. The number of people who want to do doomsday levels of harm is small and they are poorly resourced compared to people who want benevolent outcomes for at a minimum their own groups. There are no guarantees obviously, but we have survived our technological adolescence so far largely for this reason. If the world were full of smart comic book nihilists we would be dead by now. Even…

I've recounted this before on HN, but a decade and a bit ago I was visiting friends in the Rocky Mountains, they're interesting and clever people, a bit out of the ordinary and somewhat isolated. Somehow the discussion turned to terrorism and we started to fantasize 'what if we were terrorists' because we all figured that we were quite lucky that in general the terrorists seem to be not all that smart when it comes t…

You're arguing against your previous point.

I contemplated the same before. How can I cause maximum panic (not even death!) that would result in economic damages and/or anti-freedom policy changes, for least amount of money/resources/risk of getting caught.

Yet here we are, peaceful and law-abiding citizens, building instead of destroying.

The ultimate truth is, if you don't like "The System", destroying it won't make things better. You need to put effort into building which is really hard!

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

#586
post #20

The moat he describes the one-percenters might aquire is government regulation. Creating an environment where only an exclusive club of companies is able to work on AI. Is that possible? Has that happened in any other industry? I can imagine it happening in a single country. But wouldn't research route around that country then? How is the situation in Europe, China, India, Canada, Japan ... ?

It's not all or nothing. For example, software patents are legal in some parts of the world and not in others - that doesn't mean they don't have value in creating an artificial barrier to entry / moat. The same is true of regulation.

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

#587

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's also no reason to agree that AI will be aligned and everything will be fine. The question is what should our default stance be until proven otherwise? I submit it is not to continue building the potentially world-ending technology. When you see a gun on the table, what do you do? You assume its loaded until proven otherwise. For some reason, those who imagine AI will usher in some tech-utopia not only assume…

Your existentially risky AI is imaginary, it might not exist. Who would check an imaginary gun on a table?

Yes, AGI doesn't exist. That doesn't mean we should be blind to the possibility. Part of the danger is someone developing AGI by accident without sufficient guardrails in place. This isn't farfetched, much of technological progress happened before we had the theory in place to understand it. It is far more dangerous to act too late than to act too soon.

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

#588
post #561

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

Every time I see Yudkowsky’s writing I wonder why people take him seriously. Just a couple of months back he was duped by a fake story about an airforce AI deciding to kill it’s operators in a simulation. It turned out the whole thing was thought experiment. Asking Yudkowsky what we should do about AI is like asking Green Peace what we should do about nuclear power.

> Every time I see Yudkowsky’s writing I wonder why people take him seriously.

Its a perfect thing for rich, extremely privileged people to grab onto as a cause to present thenselves as (and maybe even feel like they are, depending on their capacity for self-delusion) “doing something for humanity” while continuing to ignore the substantive material condition of, as a first order approximation, everyone in the world, and their role in perpetuating it.

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

#589

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN wIlegh tlhInganpu', Human.

wait do you actually speak Klingon?

HISlaH, tlhIngan Hol jIjatlh.

(A little anyway. I'm still in the rookie lessons on Duolingo.)

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

#590
post #561

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

Every time I see Yudkowsky’s writing I wonder why people take him seriously. Just a couple of months back he was duped by a fake story about an airforce AI deciding to kill it’s operators in a simulation. It turned out the whole thing was thought experiment. Asking Yudkowsky what we should do about AI is like asking Green Peace what we should do about nuclear power.

They will come to it...

"Co-Founder of Greenpeace Envisions a Nuclear Future" - https://www.wired.com/2007/11/co-founder-of-greenpeace-envis...

Post reply on HN