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Among the A.I. doomsayers

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Re: Among the A.I. doomsayers

#251

Post by ralfd »

semi-extrinsic wrote: post #216
statuslover9000 wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The short-term effect is a harbinger of the long-term risk, since capitalism doesn’t inherently care for people who don’t provide economic value. Once superintelligent AI arises, none of us will have value within this system. Even the largest current capital holders will have a hard time holding on to it with an enormous intelligence disadvantage. The logical endpoint is the subjugation or elimination of our species,…

There are a lot of assumptions going on here. One of them is that superintelligent AI will arise. We have no reason to believe this will happen in our lifetimes. I posit that we are about as close to superintelligent AI as James Watt was to nuclear fusion. The other assumption is that wealth and power are distributed according to intelligence. This is obviously false, wealth and power are largely distributed accordin…

The higher the IQ, the higher the income:

https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2023/02/there-is-no-iq-threshol...

Re: Among the A.I. doomsayers

#252

Post by ben_w »

i5heu wrote: post #199
mitthrowaway2 wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given that you don't think the CEO of Anthropic is qualified to comment on this matter, what kind of "data that is relevant" do you imagine we might be able to have, prior to an AGI existing? I am indeed uncomfortable with someone saying that we can't worry about a gas leak until after someone strikes a match and notices an explosion or the lack thereof. If the sad reality is that we can't detect the gas leak any oth…

I really wonder why there is such a fixation with these CEOs. I have proven to you logically that they cannot have more knowledge then anyone else, but you continue to present their authority as knowledge. Pls prove to me that they know more about the effects of AGI on humanity or that they have some magical knowledge we normal ppl are unable to comprehend. If you cannot do this, then why are you bringing up these pp…

> I have proven to you logically that they cannot have more knowledge then anyone else, but you continue to present their authority as knowledge.

You've asserted it, not proven it.

Given their entire research field is "how to make the thing", it's a fair bet that they know more than me — even if what they know is, to paraphrase Thomas Edison, "1000 ways to not make an AGI", that's still more than me, and I follow some of the research and read some of the papers.

Re: Among the A.I. doomsayers

#253

Post by bamboozled »

Kostic wrote: post #224
bamboozled wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve personally never ever considered killing large swathes of ants

Would you consider it if they started affecting your life? Like, making it hard to build on land you just bought?

True story from me. I almost bought a house that was eaten severely by white ants.

The problem wasn’t the ants, it was the way the slab was formed which caused the slab to crack and the house was also built into the mud of a road side embankment. Due to this crap design the ants could access the wood and had access to water from the mud.

I assessed all of this and figured it wasn’t the ants fault, they were doing what they do, building nests and chomping wet wood.

Did I go and poison all the ants ? Nope. I just planned to fix the design move the wood they lived in off to the forrest nearby.

This was a conscious choice I made to not destroy the ants and benefit from a more robust design with less moisture problems in the house.

I just bought a house which the floor has been demolished by termites and I’ll do the same thing.

Imo with a bit of consideration, I think most of these coexistence problems can be worked out fairly simply.

Re: Among the A.I. doomsayers

#254

Post by ben_w »

ToucanLoucan wrote: post #196
mitthrowaway2 wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It still seems to me that you're saying that we won't possibly be able to declare AGI an existential threat to humanity until after it has already been built. At that point, we can presumably settle the question by seeing if humanity goes extinct. This poses something of a paradox to those of us who prefer existential threats to humanity not get built in the first place.

We don't even know if AGI is possible. Let's not mince words here: nothing, and I do mean nothing, not a single, solitary model on offer by anyone, anywhere, right now has a prayer of becoming AGI. That's just... not how it's going to be done. What we have right now are fantastically powerful, interesting, and neato to play with pattern recognition programs, that can take their understanding of patterns, and reproduc…

> We don't even know if AGI is possible.

Sure we do: we're made of atoms.

To reject that this necessarily shows that AGI is possible, you would have to demonstrate human intelligence is tied to an immaterial soul granted by a supernatural being.

Some people do in fact believe this. I think that if we can't build AGI even with a perfect copy of a brain, that would instead be a surprising proof the existence of souls.

> This is not intelligence of any sort, period, paragraph.

Let's run with that. Just using your definition of intelligence: given AI can already beat us in Chess, in Go, in Mathematical Olympiad puzzles, in protein folding predictions, in poker, at real world stock market analysis, in the game of Diplomacy, … — does it matter that they're not what you call intelligent?

Do submarines swim?

> bring forth artificial life (or at least, consciousness) forward

Why does it matter if it's "life" or "consciousness"?

“Deep Blue was intelligent the way your programmable alarm clock is intelligent. Not that losing to a $10 million alarm clock made me feel any better.” ― Garry Kasparov

Re: Among the A.I. doomsayers

#255

Post by ben_w »

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #215
reducesuffering wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you call something humans built (artificial) that can solve all topics of AP tests (general) with most being 5/5, better than almost all humans (intelligence)?

Google search can solve AP tests too. (And before that library indexes did the same.) This isn't some new technology.

Google (and library indexes) can solve exactly and only the questions in their databases.

All AI, even narrow ones, necessarily have the ability to interpret novel questions in some fashion — how novel and how well they interpret being the "G" and the "I" in AGI.

Re: Among the A.I. doomsayers

#256

Post by ben_w »

crotchfire wrote: post #229
mitthrowaway2 wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Corporations are indeed a difficult alignment problem, as anyone who has tried to design an incentive scheme eventually realizes. But corporations are still composed of humans, beholden (if only loosely) to human values, limited (if loosely) by human intelligence, and are not very well-coordinated decisionmakers with coherent goals.

> Corporations are indeed a difficult alignment problem No, it's a very easy alignment problem: just impose a tax on size . That which you tax, you get less of. The tax is revenue-neutral, so it doesn't affect the government budget one way or the other. Full details here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39235533 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39236786 The problem is that the government likes gigantic corpo…

> No, it's a very easy alignment problem: just impose a tax on size.

That's like saying "AI alignment is a very easy problem: don't open the box".

Sure, it works on paper, but the exact thing you say later down about the government liking gigantic corporations is what makes it hard — the corporation (and, it is feared, AI) convinces the people who have the power to limit them, to remove those limits.

Re: Among the A.I. doomsayers

#257

Post by inference-lord »

barfbagginus wrote: post #249
13years wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Potentially there are no good outcomes even if AGI remains under control. If we are actually able to create the type of AI entity they are trying to create, one that exponentially improves, the implications are beyond what most have thought about. Something I recently wrote in depth about here. How we completely misunderstand the future that we think will happen. "The implication is that everyone is enthusiastically…

[flagged]

I'll take three teleports please!!! Thanks AGI!

Re: Among the A.I. doomsayers

#258

Post by semi-extrinsic »

namaria wrote: post #230
semi-extrinsic wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a lot of assumptions going on here. One of them is that superintelligent AI will arise. We have no reason to believe this will happen in our lifetimes. I posit that we are about as close to superintelligent AI as James Watt was to nuclear fusion. The other assumption is that wealth and power are distributed according to intelligence. This is obviously false, wealth and power are largely distributed accordin…

> As long as AIs don't play golf and don't have fathers, we are quite safe. Until it becomes 'who you exchange bytes most efficiently with" and all humans are at a disadvantage against a swarm of even bellow average intelligence AGI agents.

But why would it become this?

Re: Among the A.I. doomsayers

#259

Post by kunley »

Same old shit since decades about any fashionable topic that was made fashionable because certain individuals invested money in it.

Meanwhile, we the engineers are preparing to fix a lot more tech shit than usual coming from people confused by the abovementioned fashion.

Also: https://mastodon.social/@nixCraft/112074367321254656

Re: Among the A.I. doomsayers

#260

Post by ifwinterco »

toomuchdocs32 wrote: post #136
matteoraso wrote: post #31

I've always wondered why people think that an AI that's super-intelligent will also be evil. It could just as likely end up being very kind (more than likely, actually, because the programmers would have safeguard to ensure that it's nice).

Long time ago I was reading translated accounts of Rwandan Hutu's that had participated in the 1993 genocide. One in particular had stuck with me; one account of a man that had murdered his childhood friend. As he described it, standing there having gutting and dismembers the man he had grown up side by side with, he had a sense of exhilaration. With all the wealth he thought of the wealth he had now, a tin roof, cat…

To be truly evil you have to believe you're doing the right thing
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