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Among the A.I. doomsayers

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Re: Among the A.I. doomsayers

#321

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xamuel wrote: post #277
ben_w wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The hour before Thomas Newcomen invented the first practical fuel-burning engine in 1712, the most informed person in the world to do so was an ironmonger by the name Thomas Newcomen. The hour before the Kitty Hawk flight, the two most informed people in the world on the topic of heavier than air flight were a pair of bicycle retailers and manufacturers named Wilbur and Orville. These people sure don't spot everythin…

>The hour before the Kitty Hawk flight, the two most informed people in the world on the topic of heavier than air flight were a pair of bicycle retailers and manufacturers named Wilbur and Orville. Actually, this is quite false. There were many people working on flight with massive credentials and massive funding. That the Wright brothers beat them is part of what makes the story of the Wright brothers so interestin…

Now, imagine if the people who were beaten by the Wright brothers had set up a regulatory system 20 years before their first flight, which instituted a bunch of rules and requirements that made it impossible for the Wright brothers (or anyone) to actually achieve flight.

Re: Among the A.I. doomsayers

#322

Post by IncreasePosts »

reducesuffering wrote: post #157
i5heu wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They did not build a AGI yet so they have build as many AGIs as anyone else and therefore they are also laypersons regarding the effects of AGI on humanity.

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)?

Fairly boring - "The answer is known and I want to see if you know the answer" is good for judging students abilities, but no real world problem exists like that. I will be much more hopeful for AGI when AI starts producing new and interesting knowledge, rather than regurgitating already known facts.

Re: Among the A.I. doomsayers

#323

Post by thom »

clooper wrote: post #315
thom wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We do invest quite a lot of money building things with earthquakes in mind, and have extensive early warning systems around the world. You were arguing that AI won't be dangerous, are you now arguing that it will be but we can't do anything about it?

It was nice chatting. Good luck in your future endeavors of preventing unexpected outcomes.

I'm baffled by your responses unless you're just on here to try and score points, which ironically you could do better by actually engaging with people instead of changing the terms of debate and then enigmatically exiting every thread where people respond to you.

Re: Among the A.I. doomsayers

#324

Post by hollerith »

bglazer wrote: post #110
hollerith wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>who runs the power plants that supply the AI data centers? Who runs the fabs producing more chips? A very capable AI can create robots to do those thing better than people can or alternatively create better data centers and fabs that run themselves without human help. Or do you just not believe that if AI research continues unimpeded the way it has been that eventually researchers will create an AI that is better at…

I absolutely believe researchers (possibly assisted by AI) will eventually create an AI better than humans at inventing technology. My idea is that actually building and sustaining technology requires a lot of hands. Until the AI has enough hands to sustain itself, it depends on us to continue existing.

My reply is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39676638

Re: Among the A.I. doomsayers

#325

Post by kouru225 »

HKH2 wrote: post #316
kouru225 wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hold up. Why is the AGI a devil now?

Why would an AGI stick to what seems to be a set of arbitrary rules and not look outside of them? The AGI would be smarter than that, no? Or is there a way to make an AGI immune to hubris?

What makes you think morality is arbitrary? Morals are instilled by the superego. The superego is an internalized version of your parents. You decided to do your homework because your parents told to, but now you’re much older. Does it still seem like doing homework was an arbitrary decision? Of course not. It had a purpose and a goal that was well-thought out. You just couldn’t understand it as a child because you’d only lived so long and the goal of doing your homework was too far in the future for you to be able to comprehend it. This is how all morals are. They all have a goal. If they don’t have a goal, then we don’t consider them moral: if treating someone nicely (magically) causes that person to kill millions of people, then we wouldn’t say it was moral to treat them nicely.

Re: Among the A.I. doomsayers

#326

Post by danielmarkbruce »

gcr wrote: post #320
clooper wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's true but organizations are agents and they do act to preserve "themselves" which is much more than can be said about software systems we call AI.

I think "artificial agency" could have some legs as a descriptive term. "Agency" is about having an effect on the world. But ascribing "intelligence" to some entity speaks to something more cunning and planful than just thrashing.

yes. Agency is a good term. It seems like corporations have agency and sort of try to make short term profits in response to outside pressures.

Re: Among the A.I. doomsayers

#327

Post by sangnoir »

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #218
reducesuffering wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even worse, some factions literally advocate for killing all humans in the pursuit of a synthetic intelligence, and YC's Garry Tan is advocating for these people! Beff Jezos (e/acc founder): "e/acc has no particular allegiance to the biological substrate for intelligence and life, in contrast to transhumanism Parts of e/acc (e.g. Beff) consider ourselves post-humanists; in order to spread to the stars, the light of c…

Let's hope Jezos gets transduced first, inshallah.

Im sure he'd be happy to become the first multi-instantiated, immortal billionaire. The pesky laws about death and personhood would need to be changed first though.

Re: Among the A.I. doomsayers

#328

Post by semi-extrinsic »

ralfd wrote: post #251
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…

The higher the IQ, the higher the income: https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2023/02/there-is-no-iq-threshol...

That data is in fact orthogonal to my point, for two reasons:

1. When we are talking about wealth and power that actually can influence the quality of the lives of many other people, we are talking about way less than 0.01% of the population. Those people aren't covered in this survey, and even if they were it would be impossible to identify on an axis spanning 0-100%.

2. Your linked article talks about income. People with significant wealth and power frequently have ordinary or below-ordinary income, for tax reasons.

Re: Among the A.I. doomsayers

#329

Post by Animats »

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…

> impose a tax on size.

Then you get lots of little companies with interconnected management. Read up on the early years of antitrust law. Find out how keiretsu and chaebol work. See the early history of the electrical industry and the Utility Holding Company Act. Understand how McDonalds franchise agreements work. Check out the current arguments over the definition of "beneficial employer".

Re: Among the A.I. doomsayers

#330

Post by bglazer »

hollerith wrote: post #201
bglazer wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s a political question. It would require maintaining popular resistance to giving over all critical segments of the economy to AI. Of course that would be difficult, given the short term gains that would bring, but people seem pretty good at hanging on to ideology at their own expense.

Long ago, people a lot like you were saying we should go ahead with AI research, but we shouldn't do anything dangerous like giving the AI access to the internet or giving it the ability to write and run computer programs. (Giving it the ability to run code was back then considered dangerous because it might create an AI with the same goals it has, only more capable, then that second AI might use its novel capabiliti…

First, you're the popular resistance to AI research. The movement already exists and is already prominent enough to be written up in the New Yorker. If your response is that the resistance is just a small set of people in SF, then I would refer you to the resistance to a much less capable class of systems: generative image models. Artists are having their livelihood (partially) disrupted by AI and they've been quite vigorous in defending themselves through both legal means and public relations. This kind of popular opposition to rapid automation is basically guaranteed given that the gains from such a system would be extremely concentrated in our current social-economic system.

It's hard to think of a quick takeover scenario, starting in near present day conditions, that doesn't involve absolutely earth-shattering social and economic re-arrangements. Every factory worker loses their job because we've handed over all material production to robots, and you imagine that there's no political constituency fighting against that change?

Remember, we're talking about a near complete destruction of humanity here. Sustaining the infrastructure to support a massive AI doesn't require just a few robots, it would need to fully replace large percentages of the entire world economy, and you think no one would notice or care?

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