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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

#801

Post by jacquesm »

jcims wrote: post #745
jacquesm wrote: post #499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's just say I'm happy they're my friends and not my enemies :) It's pretty sobering to realize how intellect applied to bad stuff can lead to advancing the 'state of the art' relatively quickly once you drop the usual constraints of ethics and morality. To make a Nazi parallel: someone had to design the gas chambers, someone had to convince themselves that this was all ok and then go home to their wives and kids t…

My favorite part of those conversations is when you decide to stop googling hahaha. >Technology acts as a force multiplier though It really does, and to a point you made elsewhere infrastructure is effectively a multiplication of technology, so you wind up with ways to compound the asymmetric effect in powerful ways. >Without technology that kind of reach would be impossible. I worked for a bug bounty for a while and…

> My favorite part of those conversations is when you decide to stop googling hahaha.

I had to think about that sentence for a bit because as a rule I never start Googling when thinking about stuff like that. If I did I'd be on every watch list available by now. Might be on some of them anyway for some of the chemicals I've ordered over the years.

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

#802

Post by jacquesm »

OkayPhysicist wrote: post #782
TeMPOraL wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. You're forgetting about governments and militaries of major powers. It's not that they want to burn the world for no reason - but they still end up seeking capability to do doomsday levels of harm, by continuously seeking to have margin…

We avoided having them see the light of day because MAD is the single most effective peacekeeping tool ever developed. The fact that both sides had doomsday devices all but guaranteed that they would never be used. People can be evil, but they're selfishly evil.

That works as long as you don't end up with death cults in the possession of those weapons. Long term it is almost guaranteed that you'll lose some control over the weapons or that some country will effectively end up being ruled by such a cult. Then all bets are off because your previous balance (a prime requirement of MAD) is disturbed.

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

#803

Post by ethanbond »

OkayPhysicist wrote: post #783
ethanbond wrote: post #511

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not arguing whatsoever against action on climate change, I'm just articulating actually how bad a nuclear exchange would be. It's far, far, far worse than most people imagine because they (understandably) couldn't fathom how monstrous the actual war plans were (and are , as far as anyone knows). Daniel Ellsberg, the top nuclear war planner at RAND during the Cold War, claims that the Joint Chiefs gave an estimate…

That's not extinction, that's not even close. Maybe, just maybe, it'd be the end of both western and eastern civilization, but it's nowhere near wiping out all life on Earth.

I don’t think anyone suggested it was

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

#804

Post by berniedurfee »

The current reality, is with existing technology, the entirety of the human race will need to, very quickly, learn to treat all text, audio and video as fake unless proven otherwise.

Will we eventually adapt to this new quasi-reality? Probably.

Will we adapt quickly? Maybe?

If not, is it game over? Probably not, but I don't think it's going to be pretty.

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

#805

Post by berniedurfee »

ben_w wrote: post #799
recursive wrote: post #798

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the future we can do that with videos. But it won't be anything new.

I'm not disputing that, I'm saying there's precedent to expect it will wreck societies.

Also, I do think video is _much_ more powerful than the written word.

Literacy is not required.

Watching video is far more engaging and entrancing than reading books to most people.

Video can be broadcast and consumed by huge numbers of people _much_ faster than written text.

Unless someone is reading text out loud, the people around them aren't influenced.

In court, especially the court of public opinion, video is currently infallible.

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

#806

Post by hodgesrm »

cjbprime wrote: post #643
hodgesrm wrote: post #629

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Oh sorry! I meant that the people to whom you referred above focus on the "one true catastrophe" (whatever that is) without truly thinking what it would mean to have a few dozen nuclear weapons used. It's not just the immediate effect of the explosions. It's also the destruction of power distribution, industrial capacity, food and medicine production, and other things that millions of people depend on.

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

#807

Post by firecall »

bnralt wrote: post #561
upupupandaway wrote: post #182

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.

Indeed, that entire tweet was inane.

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

#808

Post by SilasX »

hanspeter wrote: post #789
SilasX wrote: post #767

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I don't see that being different. I would also claim that global restriction is not possible and even in the unlikely scenario that we're able to restrict 90% of world, we're still not better off than if we did nothing.

Still a different argument than one that offhand dismissed the very idea of global restriction at any level. Nothing you’re saying is found anywhere in the original comment.

You have better uses of your time than retroactively rewriting others’ words to be less stupid so you can “refute” valid critiques of their original versions.

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

#809

Post by lobocinza »

babyshake wrote: post #584
sokoloff wrote: post #496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Entropy

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

#810

Post by randomdata »

danenania wrote: post #776
randomdata wrote: post #768

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Well, to state the obvious, a model trained on much of the internet by a giant cluster of silicon GPUs is fundamentally different than a biological brain trained by a billion years of evolution. I'm not sure why anyone should expect them to be similar? There may be some surface-level similarities, but the behavior of each is clearly going to diverge wildly in many/most situations. I wouldn't really say an AI beat a h…

> but the behavior of each is clearly going to diverge wildly in many/most situations.

I expect something akin to "Why the fuck did he do that?" is a statement every human has uttered at some point. In other words, human behaviour can be a complete mystery to the outside observer. Your suggestion that an AI model will diverge in a way that a human would not is reasonable, but as outside observers are we able to tell the difference between an AI model going off the rails and a human going off the rails? I suspect not. At least not when AI is at a sufficiently advanced level.

> Is that "intelligence"?

No. But it is what is labelled artificial intelligence – AI for short. Maybe someday we'll be able to create machines that are intelligent, but that's still on the level of complete science fiction. Our best work thus far is just computers running particular algorithms that appear to exhibit some limit qualities that are similar to qualities that we consider to be a product of intelligence in humans. Hence the artificial moniker.

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