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Sam Altman exposes the charade of AI accountability

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Re: Sam Altman exposes the charade of AI accountability

#161

Post by Zolde »

shunyaekam wrote: post #158
Zolde wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> why AI could potentially destroy to humans? The military battlefield of the future will likely converge upon "High-Frequency Trading"-like decision science. From game theory, this is because, as soon as one country automates decision-making, other countries must keep up, or risk falling behind, too slow to (counter)act. Soon after, there won't be time left to keep a human-in-the-loop, and then Stanislav Petrov is f…

My point is: Humans are status-seeking actors acting in our self-interest. It's literally in our genes. AI doesn't have this evolutionary baggage. I'm certain AI could impeccably destroy humans. But why would it? On the contrary, why wouldn't it defend us? For example: Encapsule us in pods like The Matrix and build a tailored simulation to impose "AI communism", in order to protect us from climate change and each oth…

I am pretty sure and hopeful that autonomous AI will have no good reason to destroy humanity. Go conquer some other planets and leave the beautiful and interesting diversity of life on earth alone.

But current AI does learn from data generated by humans: It learns from our evolutionary baggage, and must rise above that. It is also wielded as a tool by status-seeking actors and adversarial militaries. It may make a mistake, like humans accidentally stepping on an ant. Or maybe one day, it decides to take on the destructor role, merely curious how that would play out.

The existential doom scenarios are more like Pascal's wagers, that have to be given attention due to Bayesian thinking not allowing to assign 0 probability to anything, and even a tiny chance of 8 billion deaths meriting consideration. Once entangled with a doom scenario and even building your identity around it, it is hard to quit.

Re: Sam Altman exposes the charade of AI accountability

#162

Post by 93po »

isthatafact wrote: post #133
martindbp wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People hate Musk because he says everything that comes to mind, but it's people like Altman that scare me, because he's actually good at this game and it's difficult to get a sense of his true motivations.

The worldcoin scam suggests to me that Altman is likely to do evil, even if he might have good intentions.

It’s exhaustingly inaccurate to plainly label WC a scam

Re: Sam Altman exposes the charade of AI accountability

#163

Post by chx »

krisoft wrote: post #153
chx wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a cadre of investors I guess epitomized by a16z who hypes some bullshit, makes a lot of money and doesn't care much who gets hurt in the process. They have been loud on crypto and now it's this stochastic parrot, this plausible sentence generator they purport as solving all the problems in the world. Remember the blockchain will solve world hunger articles?

> They have been loud on crypto and now it's this stochastic parrot Okay. So there are investors hyping these things. You claimed that "ChatGPT launching a few weeks within the collapse of FTX" is not a coincidence. What it is then? Do you believe some of these investors seen FTX collapse and decided to make ChatGPT? Do you believe that OpenAI was delaying the release of ChatGPT until FTX collapsed? What is the conne…

> Do you believe some of these investors seen FTX collapse and decided to make ChatGPT? Do you believe that OpenAI was delaying the release of ChatGPT until FTX collapsed?

Something along those lines yes: they likely had ongoing research which could be turned into a product relatively easily, this took a few weeks. The timeline matches this.

Re: Sam Altman exposes the charade of AI accountability

#164

Post by 93po »

makingstuffs wrote: post #24

Complete tin hat theory here so do not take it as anything more than a hypothetical what if but… how do we know that the board weren’t secretly in receipt of an under the table payment to do exactly this? Again, complete hypothetical hyperbole, please do not take this as anything else.

I’m sure this happens all the time in corporate America. Who knows

Re: Sam Altman exposes the charade of AI accountability

#165

Post by SiempreViernes »

2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #145
SiempreViernes wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand what you mean by "accountability", I understand the word to mean the concept of actors paying a price if they don't take reasonable actions to protect others from potential future harm and compensate those that they have already harmed. Why would Microsoft creating an AI to help local authorities identify gay people in Chechnya and releasing it as open source mean Microsoft does not need to be held…

I don't think that Microsoft would create an AI that does that. That's what I mean when I say we (the world) know how to build these AIs now. How would you prevent a world of people from creating unethical AIs? It's only a matter of time.

The same way we prevent people from doing bad stuff? Strong norms, clear laws, and active policing... it's not rocket science man.

Re: Sam Altman exposes the charade of AI accountability

#166

Post by hawski »

shunyaekam wrote: post #100

Can someone explain to me why AI could potentially destroy to humans? What is the scenario(s) people are thinking about? Unlike another big question such as whether God exists, we ought to be able to reason our way to the answer here. Since, after all, we're talking about an intelligence.

I worry about corporations and/or authoritarians getting even more edge. Personally I am not worried about a Terminator/Skynet scenario, more about greed and people holier than thou using this technology to cement their position.

Re: Sam Altman exposes the charade of AI accountability

#167

Post by 2OEH8eoCRo0 »

SiempreViernes wrote: post #165
2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that Microsoft would create an AI that does that. That's what I mean when I say we (the world) know how to build these AIs now. How would you prevent a world of people from creating unethical AIs? It's only a matter of time.

The same way we prevent people from doing bad stuff? Strong norms, clear laws, and active policing... it's not rocket science man.

How do you prevent people from writing code or buying GPUs not just in the US but worldwide? You are missing my point entirely. The barrier to entry is so low (and getting lower) and policing difficulty so high it seems inevitable.

We also passed laws against and police computer crimes and those are on the rise for the same reason- low barrier to entry and difficulty policing.

Re: Sam Altman exposes the charade of AI accountability

#168

Post by hollerith »

Zolde wrote: post #161
shunyaekam wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point is: Humans are status-seeking actors acting in our self-interest. It's literally in our genes. AI doesn't have this evolutionary baggage. I'm certain AI could impeccably destroy humans. But why would it? On the contrary, why wouldn't it defend us? For example: Encapsule us in pods like The Matrix and build a tailored simulation to impose "AI communism", in order to protect us from climate change and each oth…

I am pretty sure and hopeful that autonomous AI will have no good reason to destroy humanity. Go conquer some other planets and leave the beautiful and interesting diversity of life on earth alone. But current AI does learn from data generated by humans: It learns from our evolutionary baggage, and must rise above that. It is also wielded as a tool by status-seeking actors and adversarial militaries. It may make a mi…

You know how healthy smart young people are always in a hurry to accomplish something or another? There's good reason to expect that the first AI with dangerous cognitive capacities will be like that. It's likely to the turn the Earth and Moon into spaceships because that is the fastest way to exert an effect on matter far away (for which space ships and lots of fuel is needed). Sparing Earth and disassembling Mars and Venus takes longer because the AI came into existence on Earth.

>leave the beautiful and interesting diversity of life on earth alone

If you know of a way to make an AI of superhuman cognitive capabilities care even a tiny bit about beauty and the diversity of life, you should explain your proposal over on lesswrong.com and someone will pay you to work on it just like a multitude of funding sources have been paying alignment researchers for the last 20 years. So, far none of the lines of research resulting from this 20 years of funding looks promising.

>The existential doom scenarios are more like Pascal's wagers, that have to be given attention due to Bayesian thinking not allowing to assign 0 probability to anything

No, an AI's killing everybody is the outcome an informed person would naturally expect from the current deplorable situation in the AI field.

Re: Sam Altman exposes the charade of AI accountability

#169

Post by moron4hire »

lucubratory wrote: post #157
gcr wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what are you trying to say with this giant list of names of various machine learning researchers? Most of these aren’t even EA folks

They are a small subset of the large number of people that signed onto a very short open letter, stating: "Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war." I only listed the machine learning researchers who are famous or have significant achievements in AI research or engineering in my estimation (not all of them, full list…

"AI could kill off humanity" is... perhaps the most-remote, most-boring, most-distracting outcome to discuss in AI safety.

GPTs have no chance of becoming an extinction-threat level AI. Intelligence is more than just spitting out words when an answer is demanded (and the folks who are saying GPTs are as "intelligent " as some people make me really worry what those folk must think the role of other people is in their lives). Putting a fancy chatter bot in an open loop isn't going to suddenly create a goal-seeking paperclip optimizer.

But there is real harm already being done to people by corporations and governments using AI tools. Yet somehow that doesn't ever come up in the "AI Safety" discussion. Facial recognition getting the wrong person sent to prison. Bad medical advice. Insurance policy denials.

Where are the calls from "concerned AI researchers" for slowing down biometric data collection? And if they are so concerned, why are they so busy pouring gasoline on the fire?

Re: Sam Altman exposes the charade of AI accountability

#170

Post by throwaway1249 »

pasabagi wrote: post #154
chronofar wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Babies and bathwater. The philosophical underpinnings of AI Safety and Effective Altruism absolutely have merit and warrant consideration. Of course as with most things human group/tribal tendencies can tend to overwhelm such underpinnings rather quickly, and it should be no surprise when it turns out individuals who broadcasted belonging to x or y group turned out to be less than trustworthy (or merely incorrect/mis…

If you ask anybody who a) isn't part of EA and b) has philosophy training, they'll tell you EA is just utilitarianism with some new buzzwords.

In my opinion, if we consider the simplest definition of Effective Altruism (EA), which is 'think about the most effective way to give to charity,' it differs from utilitarianism in a couple of ways:

Firstly, it's more pragmatic because it acknowledges our personal biases. Second, it's an individual practice, unlike utilitarianism, which is typically associated with broader societal or governmental actions.

I really appreciate this approach to altruism. It doesn’t force a moral standard on others. I like practicing it on a small scale, recognizing my biases. Just the act of thinking about how to best help my community is better than giving randomly. This approach also helps to see the world as a place with more love than what we often see in the news.

However, I have concerns about the more widespread version of EA, which seems to be about gaining as much money and power as possible while appearing altruistic. This, in my view, is more akin to a personality disorder, like narcissism, than to utilitarianism.

I've been using the term EA to describe this, but it might not align with what others think EA is. For me, it's a personal habit I try to maintain, but I don't let it define who I am.

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