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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

#761

Post by RandomLensman »

troupo wrote: post #731
RandomLensman wrote: post #591

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 explai…

If you claim AI will only be used for evil then sure.

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

#762

Post by ryanklee »

RandomLensman wrote: post #759
ryanklee wrote: post #730

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I noted this elsewhere, but I'll reiterate. I'm confused as to where our disagreement is, because all of that, I agree with. Did I misread your original claims? If so, my apologies for dragging us through the mud.

All good, I think we managed to talk past each other somehow.

Nice, cheers.

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

#763

Post by danenania »

randomdata wrote: post #723
danenania wrote: post #711

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t mean Dwarkesh himself, though he asks great questions. He’s had some very knowledgeable guests. The most recent episode with Paul Christiano has a lot of good discussion on all these topics. I’d suggest evaluating the arguments and ideas more on the merits rather than putting so much emphasis on authority and credentials. I get there can be value there, but no one is really an “expert” in this subject yet and…

> I’d suggest evaluating the arguments and ideas more on the merits rather than putting so much emphasis on authority and credentials. While I agree in general, when it comes to this particular topic where AI presents itself as being human-like, we all already have an understanding at the surface level because of being human and spending our lives around other humans. There is nothing the other people who have the sa…

I disagree that it is “human-like” in any meaningful sense. It’s completely different.

We’ve been trying to build AI for a long time yes, but we only just figured out how to build AI that actually works.

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

#765

Post by pixl97 »

randomdata wrote: post #627
danenania wrote: post #614

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…

Worst case you can expect AI to become alien, becoming human like is probably one of the better outcomes.

We as humans only have human intelligence to reference what intelligence is, and in doing so we commonly cut off other branches of non human intelligence in our thinking. Human intelligence has increased greatly as our sensor systems have increased their ability to gather data and 'dumb' it down to our innate senses. Now imagine an intelligence that doesn't need the data type conversion? Imagine a global network of sensors feeding a distributed hivemind. Imagine wireless signals just being another kind of sight or hearing.

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

#766

Post by hackinthebochs »

vidarh wrote: post #703
hackinthebochs wrote: post #551

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

No one's calculator needs to. The point was to reply to the notion that there is any possible way the "war on general-purpose computation" actually has any shot of actually stopping general-purpose computation to make a point about how hard limiting computation is in general. > 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 monitore…

There are physical limits to what can make an effective and efficient computational substrate. There are physical limits to how fast/cheap these GPUs can be made. It is highly doubtful that some rogue nation is going to invent some entirely unknown but equally effective computational method or substrate. Controlling the source of the known substrate is possible and effective. Most nations aren't in a position to just develop their own using purely internal resources without being noticed by effective monitoring agencies. Any nation that could plausibly do that would have to be a party to the agreement. This fatalism at the impossibility of monitoring is pure gaslighting.

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

#767

Post by SilasX »

hanspeter wrote: post #732
SilasX wrote: post #616

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

That's a different argument than the parent, who claimed that global restriction isn't even possible.

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

#768

Post by randomdata »

danenania wrote: post #763
randomdata wrote: post #723

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I’d suggest evaluating the arguments and ideas more on the merits rather than putting so much emphasis on authority and credentials. While I agree in general, when it comes to this particular topic where AI presents itself as being human-like, we all already have an understanding at the surface level because of being human and spending our lives around other humans. There is nothing the other people who have the sa…

I disagree that it is “human-like” in any meaningful sense. It’s completely different. We’ve been trying to build AI for a long time yes, but we only just figured out how to build AI that actually works.

> It’s completely different.

In what way? The implementation is completely different, if that is what you mean, but the way humans interpret AI it is the same as far as I can tell. Hell, every concern that has ever been raised about AI is already a human-to-human issue, only imagining that AI will take the place of one of the humans in the conflict/problem.

> but we only just figured out how to build AI that actually works.

Not at all. For example, AI first beat a world champion human chess player in 1967. We've had AI systems that actually work for a long, long time.

Maybe you are actually speaking to what is more commonly referred to as AGI? But there is nothing to suggest we are anywhere close to figuring that out.

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

#769

Post by washadjeffmad »

patcon wrote: post #384

I need to resist all this regulatory resistance here, spoken amongst tech people. No, Yann. I am FULLY in support of drastic measures to mitigate and control AI research for the time being. I have no vested stake in any of the companies. I lived for a year in a building that hosted several AI events per week. I'm not ignorant This is the only territory where humanity is mounting a conversation about a REAL response t…

I resist regulation that fails to account for all parties.

Regulation for AI must be engineered within the context of the mechanisms of AI in the language of machines, publicly available as "code as law". It shouldn't necessarily even be human readable, in the traditional sense. Our common language is insufficient to express or interpret the precision of any machine, and if we're already acknowledging its "intelligence", why should we write the laws for only ourselves?

Accepting that, AI is only our latest "invisible bomb that must be controlled by the right hands". Arguably, the greatest mistake of atomic research was that scientists ran to the government with their new discoveries, who misused them for war.

If AI is anticipated be used as an armament, should it be available to bodies with a monopoly on force, or should we start with the framework to collectively dismantle any institution that automates "harm"?

War will be no more challenging to perform than a video game if AI is applied to it. All of this is small, very fake potatoes.

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

#770

Post by breuleux »

Xirgil wrote: post #712
breuleux wrote: post #672

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Not only is such an entity possible, it's already here, the only difference is clock speed. Corportations (really any large organization devoted to some kind of intellectual work, or you could say human society as a whole) can be thought of as a superintelligent entity composed of biological processors running in parallel. They that can store, process, and create information at superhuman speeds compared to the indiv…

The parent was positing, at a minimum, a 30 million fold increase in clock speed. This entails a proportional increase in energy consumption, which would likely destroy any thermal envelope the size of a brain. The only reason current processors run that fast is that there are very few of them: millions of synaptic calculations therefore have to be multiplexed into each, leading to an effective clock rate that's far closer to a human brain's than you would assume.

As for your corporation example, I do not think the effectiveness of a corporation is necessarily bottlenecked by the number or intelligence of its employees. Notwithstanding the problem of coordinating many agents, there are many situations where the steps to design a solution are sequential and a hundred people won't get you there any faster than two. The chaotic nature of reality also entails a fundamental difficulty in predicting complex systems: you can only think so far ahead before the expected deviation between your plan and reality becomes too large. You need a feedback loop where you test your designs against reality and adjust accordingly, and this also acts as a bottleneck on the effectiveness of intelligence.

I'm not saying "superintelligent" AI couldn't be an order of magnitude better, mind you. I just think the upside is far, far less than the 7+ orders of magnitude the parent is talking about.

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