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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

#731

Post by troupo »

RandomLensman wrote: post #591
troupo wrote: post #532

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Because (1) it holds AI to higher standard than humans,

It doesn't

> 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.

Ah yes, better decisions for racial profiling, social credit, housing permissions etc. Because we all know that AI will never be used for that.

Again:

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. etc.

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

#732

Post by hanspeter »

SilasX wrote: post #616
jeffparsons wrote: post #194

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.

But it will work fine for limiting GHG or CFC emissions?

It will not.

The difference is that reducing emissions just 10% is still better than 0% while stopping 90% from doing AI advancements is not better than 0% (it might actually be worse).

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

#733

Post by troupo »

RandomLensman wrote: post #498
troupo wrote: post #484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

You want a correct explanation, not some made up ex-post stuff. Incorrect. High-risk systems indeed include certain machinery and processes, for example, in transport or in medical devices as well as operating critical infrastructure ( https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/headlines/society/202... ).

> You want a correct explanation, not some made up ex-post stuff.

Yes, and yes.

What's so difficult to understand about that?

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

#734

Post by oceanplexian »

dghlsakjg wrote: post #642
bondarchuk wrote: post #632

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…

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.

Mary Shelly wrote about the same philosophical issue in 1818 when she wrote Frankenstein. My take is that AI influencers don’t read a lot of books, because if they did they’d have much more intelligent commentary.

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

#735

Post by pixl97 »

RandomLensman wrote: post #680
ben_w wrote: post #666

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First, how is the Khmer Rouge an example of containment, given that regime fell? Second, even if your argument is "genocide of anyone who sounds too smart was the right approach and they just weren't trying hard enough ", that only really fits into "neither alignment nor containment, just don't have the AGI at all". Containment, for humans, would look like a prison from which there is no escape; but if this is suppos…

It means intelligence can be killed (and the Khmer were brought down externally). We might not even need to contain, all hypothetical.

We don't have an answer yet to what the form factor of AGI/ASI will be, but if it's anything like current trends the idea of 'killed' is laughable.

You can be killed because your storage medium and execution medium are inseparable. Destroy the brain and you're gone, and you don't even get to copy yourself.

With AGI/ASI if we can boot it up from any copy on a disk if we have the right hardware then at the end of the day you've effectively created the undead as long as a drive exists with a copy of it and a computer exists than can run it.

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

#736

Post by cma »

RandomLensman wrote: post #619
hackinthebochs wrote: post #598

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 vario…

I don't agree with the uniqueness of AI risk. A large asteroid impacting earth is a non-hypothetical existential risk presently out of our control. We do not currently plan on spending trillions to have a comprehensive early detection system and equipment to control that risk. The differentiating thing here is that blocking hypothetical AI risk is cheap, while mitigating real risks is expensive.

We have a decent grasp of the odds of an asteroid extinction event in a way that we don't for AI.

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

#737

Post by pixl97 »

toth wrote: post #301
nazka wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Getting uranium, the hardware to have nukes, and all the research and production around it is hard without being detected. Starting to code AI on a Mac and a few good GPUs or even a cluster without being detected is crazy easy. Even if they start to treat the most powerful GPUs as small nukes and only a few can have them it’s super easy to steal, transport, store, use… Nukes not so much.

For frontier AI models you don't need a few GPUs or a small cluster. You need thousands of them, you need them all connected with high bandwidth and you need a lot of power. It's not something you can do in your garage or undetected. There is some risk that over time people will be able to do more with less, and eventually you can train an AGI with a few dozen A100s. If that happens I agree there's nothing you can do…

What is the difference between a weather model, a nuclear bomb simulation, and training a LLM?

At the end of the day all these are just calculations, of which you need thousands of processors to do with high accuracy. Pretty much what you're suggesting is a global police force to ensure we're performing the 'correct calculations'. Having to form an authoritarian world computer police isn't much of a solution to the problem either. This just happens to work well in the nuclear world because it's hard to shield and the average person doesn't have a need for uranium.

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

#738

Post by thomastjeffery »

This article would be so much more clear and focused without the hullabaloo about "AI" and "Godfathering".

I get that you want people reading your article, but I am absolutely exhausted with the sensationalist (and misleading) narrative that is "Artificial Intelligence". What is it going to take to convince writers to use accurate nomenclature? AI does not exist.

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

#739

Post by pixl97 »

calgoo wrote: post #218
jstanley wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only thing that can stop a bad guy with AI is a good guy with AI.

AI's for everyone!!!! It's actually a scare but possible future. Everyone has to carry personal security AI that you rent from some Corpo, and if you don't you will be endlessly hacked and harassed in IRL just like we are online these days.

Heh, sounds like we're reading Diamond Age again.

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

#740

Post by cma »

breuleux wrote: post #672
JoshTriplett wrote: post #523

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…

> 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. I'm fairly certain that what you describe is physically impossible. Organic brains may not be fully optimal, but they are not that many orders of magnitude off.

Something much smarter may be able to make GOFAI or a hybrid of it work for reasoning, where we failed to, and be much more efficient.

We know simple examples like exact numeric calculation where desktop grade machines are already over a quadrillion times faster than unaided humans, and more power efficient.

We could plausibly see some >billion-fold difference in strategic reasoning at some point even in fuzzy domains.

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