371–380 of 405 posts
Fact: Current gen AI are alien intelligence built by brute force - nobody explicitly programmed them (loosely speaking) so the real problem of runaway AI is definitely something to consider, especially since everything is accessible via API nowadays.
It's quite possible it's much smarter than us, but hamstrung, for now.
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They’re a clergy demanding tithes to keep writing about divine judgement.
I like that analogy a lot - it captures exactly the holier-than-thou nonsense coming out of these places.
At least the Church understood the value of architecture.
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Do you have any doubt that, say, Coca Cola Company could push heroin more effectively than someone on a street corner, if it were legal to do so? Do you think heroin is more or less commonly used than tabacco or alcohol? We've already seen from the opioid epidemic that drug companies at least are both willing and able to push massive amounts of an opioid drug on patients if it is even slightly legal to do so. Why do…
No, I have no doubt they would but I never suggested they should be allowed to. I think the sale and quality should be heavily regulated, advertising still banned, and requirements made to be allowed to purchase it. Like age, and who knows, maybe going through some basic harm reduction training. Certainly not advocating doing anything the way the US does it, in almost any respect. But the pharma thing is fundamentall…
If you're for making it fully legal but heavily regulated, somewhat akin to a prescription drug, then I more or less agree.
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> AI safety / x-risk folks have in fact made extensive and detailed arguments. Can you provide examples? I have not seen any, other than philosophical hand waving. Remember, the parent poster of your post was asking for a specific path to destruction.
AGI safety from first principles [1] is a good write-up. You can read more about instrumental convergence, reward misspecification, goal mis-generalization and inner misalignment, which are some specific problems AI Safety people care about, by glossing through the curricula of the AI Alignment Course [2], which provides pointers to several relevant blogposts and papers about these topics. [1] https://www.alignmentfo…
Also note we were talking about modern day LLM AIs here, and their descendants. We were not talking about science fiction AGIs. Unless of course you have an argument as to how one of these LLMs somehow descends into an AGI.
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That is why I believe that this debate is pointless. If AGI is possible, it will be made. There is no feasible way to stop it being developed, because the perceivable gains are so huge.
On the contrary, all we have to do is educate business leaders to show them that the gains are illusory because AGI will wipe us out. Working on AGI is like the story of the recent DOOM games where the foolish Union Aerospace Corporation is researching how to permanently open a gate to Hell through which to summon powerful entities and seemingly unlimited free "clean" energy. Obviously, this turns out to be stupid wh…
It's obscure, but I'd recommend Asimov's "The Dead Past". It's about the difficulties of suppressing one application of progress without suppressing all progress.
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Don't everybody use the government to do what they want? It's kind of the definition of government, in any country and in any political system.
Mostly the people with the money do
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Given that you need monumental amounts of compute power to come close to something like GPT-4, I don't think the added costs of not treading on people's IP is the major moat that it's being made out to be.
The difference here is that compute is always getting cheaper. In 5 or 10 years, it may be feasible to train something GPT-4-sized for a small business. Not to mention that we're likely not at the highest efficiency yet, and there may be undiscovered methods of training better LLMs on lesser hardware. But licensing costs are not going to decrease. If dataset compilation is ruled to be something that needs to be paid…
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> Since an AI has produced the latter from the former, there is no meaningful transformation. In law, in the eyes of those that want AI to "win", or in the eyes of those who want AI to "lose"? For all three can be different. (Now I'm remembering a Babylon 5 quote: "Understanding is a three-edged sword: your side, their side, and the truth.")
Don’t care! The problem at hand is people trying to argue that laws should be written in ways that are entirely unenforceable or have enormous gaping loopholes that undermine their stated goals.
I don't much like that laws seem so messy either, but that just doesn't seem like much of a reason to think it won't shake out like that.
The law may well start on the basis of what people feel, and work outwards from there to things that might, or might not, be actually enforceable. And the headline summary of that law may or may not have much in common with the details, which is why e.g. the USA PATRIOT Act has that name.
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You made an analogy between AI x-risk and e.g. cold fusion . I pointed out that there's an important disanalogy here: no one is claiming or has claimed that cold fusion poses an existential threat. Hence, the nearest cold-fusion claim to any AI x-risk claims is "cold fusion is worth investigating" (which it was, once, and isn't now). It looks to me as if (1) you made an analogy that doesn't really work, then (2) when…
If you want to make a research avenue illegal, IMO you need evidence that it's harmful. If there isn't evidence — minus circular claims that already assume it's harmful — I don't think it should be illegal. Very simple. This isn't an "analogy," it's what is happening in reality and is what the article is about.
"But that's what the argument was about!" No, it's what the OP was about, but this subthread was about the statement that AI x-risk arguments are "pretty hypothetical". Which, I agree, they are; I just don't see how they could possibly not be, even in possible worlds where in fact they are correct. If that's true, it seems relevant to complaints that the arguments are "hypothetical".
To repeat something I said before: it could still be that they're terrible arguments and/or that they don't justify any particular thing they're being used to justify (like, e.g., criminalizing some kinds of AI research). But if you're going to argue that just because they're "hypothetical" then you need to be comfortable accepting that this is a class of (yes, hypothetical) risk that can never be mitigated in advance, because even if the thing is going to happen we'll never get anything other than "hypothetical arguments" before it actually does.
You may very well be comfortable accepting that. For my part, I find that I am more comfortable accepting some such things than others, and how comfortable I am with it depends on ... how plausible the arguments actually are. I have to go beyond just saying "it's hypothetical!".
If I'm about to eat something and someone comes up to me and says "Don't eat that! The gods might hate people eating those and torture people who do in the afterlife!" then I'm comfortable ignoring that, unless they can give me concrete reasons for thinking such gods are likely. If I'm about to eat something and someone comes up to me and says "Don't eat that! It's a fungus you just picked here in this forest and you don't know anything about fungi and some of them are highly poisonous!" then I'm going to take their advice even if neither of us knows anything about this specific fungus. These are both "hypothetical arguments"; there's no concrete evidence that there are gods sending people who eat this particular food to hell, or that this particular fungus is poisonous. One of them is much more persuasive than the other, but that's for reasons that go beyond "it's hypothetical!".
To repeat once again: I am not claiming that AI x-risk arguments are in fact strong enough to justify any particular action despite their hypothetical-ness. Only that there's something iffy about using "it's only hypothetical" on its own as a knockdown argument.
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you seem to be implying past progress implies unlimited future progress which seems a very dubious claim. we hit all kinds of plateaus and theoretical limits all the time in human history.
Given history, it's infinitely more dubious to link our future safety to some idea of progress stopping for some reason. We'll have increasingly smart AI and your go-to position is that progress will...stop? It's literally helping us with thinking, which is the driver of innovation and progress. Very few things have slowed down over decades or centuries. If anything it's been a mad rush with AI recently. Of course th…
Of course, it's also very much possible that it's not: we don't have any good evidence either way.