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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

#591

Post by RandomLensman »

troupo wrote: post #532
ryanklee wrote: post #517

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Context of the discussion matters. "When AI is used, its decisions must be explicable in human terms. No 'AI said so, so it's true'". Somehow the whole discussion is about how human mind cannot be explained either. Yea, the decisions made by the human mind can be explained in human terms for the vast majority of relevant cases.

Because (1) it holds AI to higher standard than humans, (2) it means that even if AI makes better decisions (name your metric), we would deny the use if those decisions if we could not sufficiently explain them. I note, that with certain things we do not do that. For example, with certain pharmaceuticals we were and are quite happy to take the effect even if we do not fully understand how it works.

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

#592

Post by brutusborn »

RandomLensman wrote: post #266
brutusborn wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about a single actor getting rich and leaving everyone else’s certainty unchanged?

Only works with fairly limited riches, otherwise what is happening leaks out (kind of playing out that way already).

How would it leak out?

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

#593

Post by RandomLensman »

hackinthebochs wrote: post #587
RandomLensman wrote: post #574

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There is an infinity of hypothetical dangers. Then at the very least there should be a clear and public discussion as to why the AI danger is more relevant than others than we do not do much about (some not even being hypothetical). That is not happening.

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

#594

Post by soroushjp »

next_xibalba wrote: post #583

The best question to ask the zealot doomers is: “Tell me your understanding of how ‘AI’ works.” Then, discount their claims accordingly.

I'd say that Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, two outspoken proponents of existential AI safety, are pretty familiar with how AI works.

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

#595

Post by hackinthebochs »

Chathamization wrote: post #572
hackinthebochs wrote: post #537

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…

Whenever I see people jump to alignment they invariably have jumped over the _much_more questionable assumption that AGI’s will be godlike. This doesn’t even match what we observe in reality - drop a human into the middle of a jungle, and it doesn’t simply become a god just because it has an intelligence that’s orders of magnitude greater than the animals around it. In fact, most people wouldn’t even survive. Further…

Its interesting seeing the vast range of claims people confidently use to discount the dangers of AI.

Individual humans are limited by biology, an AGI will not be similarly limited. Due to horizontal scaling, an AGI will perhaps be more like a million individuals all perfectly aligned towards the same goal. There's also the case that an AGI can leverage the complete sum of human knowledge, and can self-direct towards a single goal for an arbitrary amount of time. These are super powers from the perspective of an individual human.

Sure, mega corporations also have superpowers from the perspective of an individual human. But then again, megacorps are in danger of making the planet inhospitable to humans. The limiting factor is that no human-run entity will intentionally make the planet inhospitable to itself. This limits the range of damage that megacorps will inflict on the world. An AGI is not so constrained. So even discounting actual godlike powers, AGI is clearly an x-risk.

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

#596

Post by NoGravitas »

sterlind wrote: post #576
JoshTriplett wrote: post #497

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a massive difference between "there are a few thousand people in the world who might have the specialized knowledge to kill billions" and "anyone with a handful of GPUs or access to a handful of cloud systems could have a conversation with LatestAIUnlimited-900T and make a few specialized mail orders". The Venn diagram of "people who could arrange to kill most of humanity without being stopped" and "people w…

there's a much easier way to create a global pandemic: wait for the next Ebola outbreak, hop on a plane, get infected, fly to NYC and spread your bodily fluids everywhere. I was (pleasantly) surprised that ISIL didn't try this. and making a pandemic virus is considerably more involved than making "a few specialized mail orders." and if it becomes easier in the future, far better to lock down the mail orders than the…

Thankfully, Ebola is not a good candidate for a global pandemic for a number of reasons. It is much easier to avoid a virus spread by bodily fluid contact than one which is airborne, and Ebola tends to kill its hosts rather quickly. I'm more excited about SARS-CoV-5 (Captain Trips).

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

#597

Post by IX-103 »

itsoktocry wrote: post #428
devnonymous wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Climate change has compounding effects (eg: water scarcity, leading to political conflict, leading to displacement, leading to pandemics ...and that's just one vector). Real world is real real messy. COViD should have taught people that. Unfortunately, it didn't.

> Climate change has compounding effects Why is the default to assume that every change will be negative?

Because changes in climate mean that the existing infrastructure (in the form of cities, farmland, etc) that are optimized for the current conditions are no longer optimal. Very few cities are designed for conditions below sea level or in a desert, but if the city already exists and the desert and oceans comes to where they are then bad things will happen.

I mean you're right that conditions in some places might get better, but that doesn't help if people have to build the infrastructure there to support a modern settlement in order to take advantage of it. When people talk about the cost of climate change, they're taking about the costs of building or adapting infrastructure.

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

#598

Post by hackinthebochs »

RandomLensman wrote: post #593
hackinthebochs wrote: post #587

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There is an infinity of hypothetical dangers. Then at the very least there should be a clear and public discussion as to why the AI danger is more relevant than others than we do not do much about (some not even being hypothetical). That is not happening.

I'm in favor of public discussions. It's tragic that there is a segment of the relevant powers that are doing their best to shut down any of these kinds of discussions. Thankfully, they seem to be failing.

But to answer the question, the danger of AI is uniquely relevant because it is the only danger that may end up being totally out of our control. Nukes, pandemics, climate change, etc. all represent x-risk to various degrees. But we will always be in control of whether they come to fruition. We can pretty much always short circuit any of these processes that is leading to our extinction.

A fully formed AGI, i.e. an autonomous superintelligent agent, represents the potential for a total loss of control. With AGI, there is a point past which we cannot go back.

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

#599

Post by veidr »

ben_w wrote: post #246
visarga wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet China and Russia are still getting their chips, by smuggling if need be. So much for the power of blocking access.

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?

My recollection is that Russian troops/mercenaries/gunmen/whatever stole washing machines and dishwashers, but it was (presumably) just for regular theft/looting/pillagine purposes.

Separately, during the pandemic, various companies bought various products, including washing machines, to extract the chips within, because the chips were the supply chain bottleneck, so it made economic sense to purchase them at even 10x or 20x the "normal" price.

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

#600

Post by cjbprime »

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…

(Neither nuclear war nor climate change are considered as this-century extinction risks by the singularity-minded side of the existential risk community, just because there would necessarily be pockets of unaffected people.)
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