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

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641–650 of 873 posts

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

#641

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I fully recognize the danger AI presents, and believe that it will mostly likely end up being terrible for humanity. But thanks to my own internal analysis ability and the anonymity of the internet, I am also willing to speak candidly. And I think I speak for many people in the tech community, whether they realize it or not. So here we go: My objective judgement of the situation is heavily adulterated by my incredibl…

Do you regret choosing AI development as a career?

I don't even work in tech much less AI development.

It's just something I have followed closely over the years and tinkered with as it is so fascinating. At it's core I know my passion is driven by a desire to witness/interact with a hyper-intelligence.

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

#642
post #561

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Because he identified the potential risk of superhuman AI 20 years before almost everyone else. Sure, science fiction also identified that risk (as people here seem eager to point out), but he identified it as an actual real-world risk and has been trying to take real-world action on it for 20 years. No matter what else you think about him…

Hal 9000, the malevolent AI in 2001: a space Odyssey, was in one of the most respected films of all time three years before Yudkowsky was born.

Plenty of people have been beating that drum for years.

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

#643

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(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.)

I'm always a bit surprised at how people seem to wish away the destructiveness of nuclear weapons or the likelihood of their use. Another commenter alluded to a "failure of imagination" which seems very applicable here. You would think just watching videos of above-ground tests would cure that but apparently not. [0] [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gZuyPn0_KRE

I don't think I was doing either? Assume they are widely used. Does every human die?

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

#644

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Conversely, why should we expect an expert in "human risk" with no understanding of AI to have anything productive to add to the conversation? We should be looking for people who are well-grounded in both areas, if any exist.

What additional information would understanding AI actually bring to the table? Worst case you just assume the AI can become human-like. Certainly all the vocal AI experts can come up with is things that humans already do to each other already, only noting that AI enables it at larger scale. Clearly there is no benefit in understanding the AI technology with respect to this matter when the only thing you can point to…

That's like saying that you can regulate nuclear materials without input from nuclear physicists or regulate high risk virology without input from virologists.

The goal is (or should be) to determine how we can get the benefits of the new technology (nuclear energy, vaccines, AI productivity boom) while minimizing civilizational risk (nuclear war/terrorism, bioweapons/man-made pandemics, anti-human AI applications).

There's no way this can be achieved if you don't understand the actual capabilities or trajectory of the technology. You will either over-regulate and throw out the baby with the bathwater, stopping innovation completely or ensuring it only happens under governments that don't care about human rights, or you will miss massive areas of risk because you don't know how the new technology works, what it's capable of, or where it's heading.

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

#645

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Humans can and have contained human intelligence ASI is not human intelligence. As a lower bound on what "superintelligence" means, consider something that 1) thinks much faster, years or centuries every second, and 2) thinks in parallel, as though millions of people are thinking centuries every second. That's not even accounting for getting qualitatively better at thinking , such as learning to reliably make the n…

Even for your last example, two hypotheses need to be true: (1) such information exists, and (2) the AI has access to such information/can generate it. EDIT: actually at least three: (3) the human and/or the AI can apply that information. It also unclear to what extent thinking alone can solve a lot of problems. Similar, it is unclear if humans could not contain superhuman intelligence. Pretty unintelligent humans ca…

> Even for your last example, two hypotheses need to be true: (1) such information exists, and (2) the AI has access to such information/can generate it. EDIT: actually at least three: (3) the human and/or the AI can apply that information.

Those trade off against each other and don't all have to be as easy as possible. Information sufficiently dangerous to destroy the world certainly exists, the question is how close AI gets to the boundary of "possible to summarize from existing literature and/or generate" and "possible for human to apply", given in particular that the AI can model and evaluate "possible for human to apply".

> Similar, it is unclear if humans could not contain superhuman intelligence.

If you agree that it's not clearly and obviously possible, then we're already most of the way to "what is the risk that it isn't possible to contain, what is the amount of danger posed if it isn't possible, what amount of that risk is acceptable, and should we perhaps have any way at all to limit that risk if we decide the answer isn't 'all of it as fast as we possibly can'".

The difference between "90% likely" and "20% likely" and "1% likely" and "0.01% likely" is really not relevant at all when the other factor being multiplied in is "existential risk to humanity". That number needs a lot more zeroes.

It's perfectly reasonable for people to disagree whether the number is 90% or 1%; if you think people calling it extremely likely are wrong, fine. What's ridiculous is when people either try to claim (without evidence) that it's 0 or effectively 0, or when people claim it's 1% but act as if that's somehow acceptable risk, or act like anyone should be able to take that risk for all of humanity.

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

#647
post #341
post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are right, but "human civilization will be extinct" is an awkward phrase. Human extinction via climate change is off the table. The end of human civilization? Depends on what one means by it. If it means we'll go back to being hunter gatherers it's ridiculous. Some civilizational wide regression is not impossible, but even the direst IUPAC scenario projects only a one digit drop in global GDP (of course, that's t…

Sorry, I meant IPCC (International Panel on Climate Change). I don't think IUPAC (International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry) has come out with views on impact of global warming :)

They can’t be doing any worse than APS

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

#648

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What additional information would understanding AI actually bring to the table? Worst case you just assume the AI can become human-like. Certainly all the vocal AI experts can come up with is things that humans already do to each other already, only noting that AI enables it at larger scale. Clearly there is no benefit in understanding the AI technology with respect to this matter when the only thing you can point to…

That's like saying that you can regulate nuclear materials without input from nuclear physicists or regulate high risk virology without input from virologists. The goal is (or should be) to determine how we can get the benefits of the new technology (nuclear energy, vaccines, AI productivity boom) while minimizing civilizational risk (nuclear war/terrorism, bioweapons/man-made pandemics, anti-human AI applications).…

Experts are not lawmakers. We aren't looking for them to craft regulation, we're looking to hear from them about the various realistic scenarios that could play out. But we're not hearing anything.

...probably because there isn't much to hear. Like, Hinton's big warning is that AI will be used to steal identities. What does that tell us? We already know that identity isn't reliable. We've known that for centuries. Realistically, we've likely known that throughout the entirety of human existence. AI doesn't change anything on that front.

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

#649

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Every time I see Yudkowsky’s writing I wonder why people take him seriously. Because he identified the potential risk of superhuman AI 20 years before almost everyone else. Sure, science fiction also identified that risk (as people here seem eager to point out), but he identified it as an actual real-world risk and has been trying to take real-world action on it for 20 years. No matter what else you think about him…

But it’s not a real world risk. Arguably, it’s even less of a real world risk because it’s a common sci-fi trope. The whole concept is farcical.

"Hacking" is also a common sci-fi trope, I don't think you can infer much from it appearing in sci-fi beyond "it makes for good sci-fi".

As for real world risk… well, an AI with some kind of personality disorder might not be much of a realistic risk today, but even assuming it never is, there are still plenty of GOFAI that have gone wrong, either killing people directly when their bugs caused them to give patients lethal radiation doses, or nearly triggering WW3 because they weren't programmed to recognise the moon wasn't a Soviet bomber group, or causing economic catastrophes because the investors all reacted to the phrase "won the Nobel prize for economics" as a thought-terminating cliché, or categorising humans as gorillas if they had too much melanin[0], or promoted messages encouraging genocide to groups vulnerable to such messages thanks to a lack of oversight and a language barrier between platform owners and the messages in question.

[0] Asimov's three laws was a plot device, and most of the works famously show how they can go wrong. Genuine question as I've not read them all: did that kind of failure mode ever come up in his fiction?

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

#650
post #561

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Because he identified the potential risk of superhuman AI 20 years before almost everyone else. Sure, science fiction also identified that risk (as people here seem eager to point out), but he identified it as an actual real-world risk and has been trying to take real-world action on it for 20 years. No matter what else you think about him…

Twenty years ago was 2003. There are dozens of examples of AI x-risk thought experiments dating back to 1960.

As far as I can tell, all he did was open a forum for people to write fanfic about these earlier ideas.

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