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Why are you so sure I'll lose?

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Re: Why are you so sure I'll lose?

#51

Post by yawpitch »

mitthrowaway2 wrote: post #20
yawpitch wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If only chess were a nice allegory for life.

Given the context, what do you think are the relevant differences that affect the validity of the metaphor?

For one, the child can play any number of other games or choose not to play at all; the child can break the board, flip it upside down, fold it in half, introduce the concept of wraparound or flip the way pieces move… the child is free to choose to change the definition and rules of the game… the AI can only, ever, play chess, using only the rules it was given.

The metaphor assumes that life is a game in which there are a finite number of moves and someone is playing to win… chess isn’t remotely a workable metaphor for life.

Re: Why are you so sure I'll lose?

#52

Post by yawpitch »

dbuxton wrote: post #14
yawpitch wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not afraid of the motivations of a hypothetical strong AI… I’m absolutely terrified of the motivations of those who can afford to employ weak AI.

Can you expand on this?

Sure… imagine, for example, health insurance companies employing proprietary ML models to decide if you’re covered, or for-profit prisons using ML models to decide if someone will be a recidivist. Or governments or law enforcement or private corporations or simply rogue free speech absolutist billionaires using image recognition and ML models to decide which pixels represent a combat age male?

The AI we’ve got right now is an absolutely horrifying force multiplier for anyone with wealth and a sufficiently perverse incentive.

Re: Why are you so sure I'll lose?

#53

Post by ZeroGravitas »

Does skipping the 80 years of computer chess development leading up to stockfish make this a worse or better analogy?

I don't quite understand it but the group of people saying "AI is an evil god that will destroy us all" and the group of people saying "I am building an even stronger and more powerful AI with an explicit goal of it becoming godlike" seem to overlap more than you'd think.

Re: Why are you so sure I'll lose?

#54

Post by xcode42 »

While I find this story a fun and intelligent allegory for the issue of ASIs and a fun thought experiment, I find all the doomsaying around ai safety research kind of tiring. AI safety research is an important and worthwhile field without us needing to constantly be worrying about a far off doomsday that may never come. Yes ASIs are an existential threat and yes once they are out, they are out, and there's no stopping them nor turning them off or anything so we better get them right the first time, but like we don't seem to be anywhere close to ASIs. I have my doubts we will even achieve AGI in this century let alone ASI which I'm not even sure are possible for us non-super-intellegences to create. It seems obvious to me that we are still several major breakthroughs away from AGIs and if these are anything like the deeplearning breakthrough we will probably have a few AI winters between now and then, we have plenty of time to see this supposed doomsday scenario coming and preparing for it. And again this is not to say that ai safety research isn't important. The alignment problem is very much an important and immediate issue right now for Narrow AI let alone for AGI. But seriously the ai isn't going to go from Narrow to running a thousand loops around the whole of humanity in 2 seconds flat, no need for all this doomsaying.

Re: Why are you so sure I'll lose?

#55

Post by tpm »

dragonwriter wrote: post #48
jacquesm wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI doesn't act by itself and worst case you could unplug the bloody thing (SF notwithstanding). But the guys with the guns are the same guys with the guns that have been in charge for as long as there are guns (with some rare exceptions) and I really don't think the existence of AI will change human nature. So AI will be used as a weapon long before it will be a standalone threat. And I like to focus on the things th…

> AI doesn't act by itself It can be made to quite easily. > and worst case you could unplug the bloody thing Not necessarily. > But the guys with the guns are the same guys with the guns Well, unless they are autonomous AI drones with guns (or missiles), in which case they are different “guys” with guns.

>> AI doesn't act by itself

> It can be made to quite easily.

Not really, no. You can of course create an acting-by-itself bot but it will run into limits very very soon, because the world model and planning parts of AI are in their infant stages, if that.

Re: Why are you so sure I'll lose?

#56

Post by dbuxton »

yawpitch wrote: post #52
dbuxton wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you expand on this?

Sure… imagine, for example, health insurance companies employing proprietary ML models to decide if you’re covered, or for-profit prisons using ML models to decide if someone will be a recidivist. Or governments or law enforcement or private corporations or simply rogue free speech absolutist billionaires using image recognition and ML models to decide which pixels represent a combat age male? The AI we’ve got right…

Ah ok I see what you mean.

I think what we have today (weak ML) are models which can be trained to operate at the quality of a human for specific tasks.

So I am definitely terrified by the recidivism example, because it’s not obvious to me that there is a human who can do that task, but I’m pretty relaxed about the coverage one (because presumably at least in principle if you automate these sorts of manual tasks you can drive down the cost of providing care - if that saving passed on to consumer).

The image recognition one is a bit more complicated but if your scenario is targeting a hellfire missile I’m not sure the human-in-the-driving-seat method has created good outcomes so far, so I’m at least in principle open to some level of AI involvement perhaps short of full autonomy.

But I can definitely understand the problem of incentives. Ultimately we have that issue with humans though and it’s in some respects harder to audit them.

Re: Why are you so sure I'll lose?

#57

Post by pointlessone »

eigenket wrote: post #13
pointlessone wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is actually one of the failure modes described long ago. Paperclip maximizer. An AI that has agency, intelligence, and a goal . In the course of achieving its goal it completely neglects all other considerations. These unaccounted externalities are the danger.

In addition to a hypothetical AI, it sounds like you are describing real companies here.

You're not wrong but also real companies consist of people. Individually they share many of their thinking patterns and moral views with people outside of those companies. So even though collective nature of companies diffuse responsibility and somewhat erode moral considerations of collective action it's relatively hard to come up with Paperclip Maximizer LLC. Eventually individual morality will kick in and there will be a revolt against dismantling of the Earth. AI doesn't share thinking patterns. We're not even sure to what extent it can do that. We almost certainly don't operate on matrix multiplication while most AIs do. We don't know if AI can share our moral considerations. Many people act as if they equate intelligence with morality, as if one can not exist without other, and as if there's only human kinds of morality. Meanwhile ChatGPT will lie to your face without a hitch even though OpenAI spent a lot of time trying to make it not.

Re: Why are you so sure I'll lose?

#58

Post by aerojoe23 »

jacquesm wrote: post #47
chmod775 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And strength has long been the domain of machines, couple machines with AI and you lose all of these as well and you lose them faster. I don't think rock climbers need to worry about Stockfish. We're going to lose to specialized machines every time while putting to shame any general purpose machines of our own creation. At least for a while yet no machine is going to match the breadth of our capabilities and our se…

Rock climbing = personal entertainment. That's why rock climbers don't need to worry about Stockfish. But competitive chess players do have to worry about Stockfish.

There is competitive rock climbing. Rock climbing isn't all about physical strength, you have to pick your route. Eventually some military robot company will want to prove that its combat bot can out perform humans on any terrain. And we'll see best humans vs matches that can match and a few years later beat their performance.

Of course the professional competitors don't have to worry about competing against a human that's cheating using a robot; the exoskeleton would be obvious.

But it isn't unimaginable that, in some distant future, nanobots could be inject to infiltrate our muscles and tendons, and then assemble in to fibers that would assimilate with them and look normal from the outside. Competitions are won by incredibly small percentages.

Re: Why are you so sure I'll lose?

#60

Post by philipswood »

yawpitch wrote: post #51
mitthrowaway2 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given the context, what do you think are the relevant differences that affect the validity of the metaphor?

For one, the child can play any number of other games or choose not to play at all; the child can break the board, flip it upside down, fold it in half, introduce the concept of wraparound or flip the way pieces move… the child is free to choose to change the definition and rules of the game… the AI can only, ever, play chess, using only the rules it was given. The metaphor assumes that life is a game in which there…

I think his message is targeting a bit deeper than that.

If I had so sum it up (always hard with an allegory):

Developing superhuman AI is a game you can only play once and can expect to lose without ever having a good understanding of how, why or even when you lost.

The suggestion is (like in the movie Wargames) that the best move is not to play.

I'd say the child in the story is mankind. Developing strong AI is the game. It's a game we can expect to lose.

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