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After OpenAI's blowup, it seems pretty clear that 'AI safety' isn't a real thing

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Re: After OpenAI's blowup, it seems pretty clear that 'AI safety' isn't a real thing

#331

Post by jacquesm »

mitthrowaway2 wrote: post #284
jacquesm wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My position is that it is either right around the corner or that it is 50 years and several major tech breakthroughs away. The reason is that there is now so much money poured into this space that you are essentially doing an exhaustive search around the point already reached. As long as that results in more breakthroughs more money will be available. If that stops working for a while then the money dries up and we'r…

If we're just 50 years away from an existential risk, that does strike me as an urgent concern and a narrow timeline.

It is. Show me a single individual with a time horizon that exceeds their own life or that of their children. That means you have to be early 20's or so today (or late teens) and that you are aware enough and capable enough to act on something that is not an immediate concern for decades. I don't see that happening, even if a handful of such individuals exist it won't be enough to make a difference, and that's before we get into cultural differences which undo your efforts because others are going full steam ahead anyway and probably in much larger numbers.

Re: After OpenAI's blowup, it seems pretty clear that 'AI safety' isn't a real thing

#332

Post by [deleted] »

fl7305 wrote: post #249
joe_the_user wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not the (only) problem, it's that no one can describe what AGI will really look like outside of vague and circular definitions The basic description is "a computer system that can do all relevant things a human being can do". And sure, we don't have a very codified definition of what those things are but we, human beings, exist and so even if we can't define our own capacities, we have an strong idea they exis…

> The implicit argument is that one can't engineer something one doesn't understand. Isn't that easy to debunk? I'd be hard pressed to implement an algorithm that can control a double-jointed inverted pendulum without reading up on control theory again. But I can instead read up on neural networks and implement one that can be trained to control the pendulum. For a more advanced example, I would never be able impleme…

[deleted]

Re: After OpenAI's blowup, it seems pretty clear that 'AI safety' isn't a real thing

#333

Post by FartyMcFarter »

jdmoreira wrote: post #190
dkjaudyeqooe wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "We don't know if we'll have time travel and ray guns in six months or 600 years." That's not the (only) problem, it's that no one can describe what AGI will really look like outside of vague and circular definitions. People have an idea of what they would like it to be, but there's no evidence any of it can be built, particularly human like intelligence, which may be only possible in the human host. > "If we can m…

Sounds like something really simple to define and grasp. What's wrong with, for example: "A software that beats most humans on most cognitive tasks". People make it harder than it needs to he IMO

The stronger version of this definition is "capable of meeting or beating human experts at all tasks".

If and when there exists software close to this capability, I think all reasonable people would agree that AGI has been accomplished.

Re: After OpenAI's blowup, it seems pretty clear that 'AI safety' isn't a real thing

#334

Post by fragmede »

RandomLensman wrote: post #319
fragmede wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

not doubting your experience, what is important then, that you've seen?

Very roughly: where the future business is coming from, what the future capabilities should be, how a new organisation should look like, what change can actually be accomplished, how to manage that change, required skills & infrastructure, how to get them. Then there is a whole legal ans compliance arc somewhere. Only when the change is small and local is it getting close to a math thing, but a large rollout of techn…

The canonical example isn't forklift workers, but car recalls. If the cost of the recall is X, and the cost of settling wrongful death lawsuits over the defective part is Y. If X > Y, don't do the recall. How true that is, idk, but the cynic in me believes it.

Re: After OpenAI's blowup, it seems pretty clear that 'AI safety' isn't a real thing

#335

Post by pixl97 »

RandomLensman wrote: post #321
pixl97 wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uh this is like saying "Y2K didn't happen so we wasted our time preventing it" Like dude, it didn't happen because a lot of people prevented it, the same with nuclear war. Because something could have tragic consequences is a reason to put great effort into ensuring it doesn't happen.

Not all hypotheticals justify great efforts in prevention. Unlike AGI, nuclear weapons are not hypothetical in their existence. On Y2K you can certainly ask if the efforts put into prevention were disproportionate to the risks.

Intelligence is not a hypothetical, we spend 100s of billions per year protecting against other human intelligences. 30 years ago how much were you spending on computer security? Yet somehow computers are supposed to get more capable and you expect us to do the same amount as now.

Re: After OpenAI's blowup, it seems pretty clear that 'AI safety' isn't a real thing

#336

Post by Teever »

RandomLensman wrote: post #322
Teever wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear war is still an overhanging threat that we should be concerned about, especially in the day and age of automation and AI.

Nuclear weapons and their dangers are real, unlike AGI which poses hypothetical risks .

When did the dangers of nuclear weapons become real?

The Chicago Pile? Trinity? Hiroshima? Nagasaki? RDS-1?

Re: After OpenAI's blowup, it seems pretty clear that 'AI safety' isn't a real thing

#337

Post by moneytide1 »

ary wrote: post #88
subharmonicon wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We're so far away from AGI Although I personally suspect this is correct, the issue seems to be that there are a lot of people who feel otherwise, whether right or wrong, including some of the people involved in the research and/or running these companies. I've seen several prominent people say things to the effect of "We just don't know if we're six months or 600 years from AGI,", which to me is a little like sayi…

> Although I personally suspect this is correct, the issue seems to be that there are a lot of people who feel otherwise, whether right or wrong, including some of the people involved in the research and/or running these companies. There is a clear and perverse incentive to talk about "the coming AGI uprising" incessantly because it's free marketing. It gets and keeps people's attention as the majority of humanity is…

> fearmongering about AI is a form of grift

If you cry wolf and agitate the masses with fear, then you gain free advertising for a "new" search engine because the spin of the "journalist" requires anxiety to circulate organically.

Re: After OpenAI's blowup, it seems pretty clear that 'AI safety' isn't a real thing

#338

Post by jalapenos »

subharmonicon wrote: post #62
crazygringo wrote: post #52

It's so confusing because people keep (intentionally?) conflating two separate ideas of "AI safety". The first is the kind of humdrum ChatGPT safety of, don't swear, don't be sexually explicit, don't provide instructions on how to commit crimes, don't reproduce copyrighted materials, etc. Or preventing self-driving cars from harming pedestrians. This stuff is important but also pretty boring, and by all indications c…

> We're so far away from AGI Although I personally suspect this is correct, the issue seems to be that there are a lot of people who feel otherwise, whether right or wrong, including some of the people involved in the research and/or running these companies. I've seen several prominent people say things to the effect of "We just don't know if we're six months or 600 years from AGI,", which to me is a little like sayi…

I think the people worried about AGI have an oddly positive view of the world - like it's so wonderful as-is that we need to guard it from any disturbances.

Perhaps if they paid closer attention to how profoundly bad so much of human existence is, people living in squalor, dying from awful diseases, killing each other, they'd understand how truly acceptable that dice roll is.

Pedal to the metal all the way.

Re: After OpenAI's blowup, it seems pretty clear that 'AI safety' isn't a real thing

#339

Post by amanaplanacanal »

emptysongglass wrote: post #261
josephg wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the leaps required are: - Giving gpt4 short term memory. Right now it has working memory (context size, activations) and long term memory (training data). But no short term memory. - Give it the ability to have internal thoughts before speaking out loud - Add reinforcement learning. If you want to write code, it helps if you can try things out with a real compiler and get feedback. That’s how humans do it. I…

You're guessing, which is a problem, and gives you license to conclude that: > I don’t think agi will be that far away. To, > Give it the ability to have internal thoughts before speaking out loud , you have no idea what that means technically because no one knows how internal thinking could ever be mapped to compute. No one does, so it's ok to not know, but then don't use it as a prior to guess. Some have maybe seen…

The drive to protect ourselves from threats occurred via evolution, but our abhorrence at killing people to achieve our goals also came from evolution. If you assume the first is implausible, how can you keep the second?

Everything we assume about intelligence is based on what humans are like because of evolution. Figuring out what intelligence might be like without those evolutionary pressures is really hard.

Re: After OpenAI's blowup, it seems pretty clear that 'AI safety' isn't a real thing

#340

Post by RandomLensman »

pixl97 wrote: post #335
RandomLensman wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not all hypotheticals justify great efforts in prevention. Unlike AGI, nuclear weapons are not hypothetical in their existence. On Y2K you can certainly ask if the efforts put into prevention were disproportionate to the risks.

Intelligence is not a hypothetical, we spend 100s of billions per year protecting against other human intelligences. 30 years ago how much were you spending on computer security? Yet somehow computers are supposed to get more capable and you expect us to do the same amount as now.

AGI is hypothetical. If it is just like another human intelligence we know how to work the problems.
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