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International Scientific Report on the Safety of Advanced AI [pdf]

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Re: International Scientific Report on the Safety of Advanced AI [pdf]

#11

The biggest risk of ai can be simply characterized by one concept: This very report could have been generated by AI. We can’t fully tell.

Sure you can. You simply email one of the listed authors and ask them if the document is legit.

And if they say "yes, it is legit", what does that tell you?

Re: International Scientific Report on the Safety of Advanced AI [pdf]

#12
post #9

"At a time of unprecedented progress in AI development, this first publication restricts its focus to a type of AI that has advanced particularly rapidly in recent years: General-purpose AI, or AI that can perform a wide variety of tasks" Is "general-purpose AI" supposed to be something different from "AGI" or from "General Artificial Intelligence"? Or is it yet another ambiguous ill-defined term that means something…

> It's funny that they claim that "general purpose AI" has "advanced particularly rapidly" even though they didn't, nor can't, define what it even is. I'm confused about what you are missing. You are quoting their definition. "General-purpose AI, or AI that can perform a wide variety of tasks". That's their definition. You might not like it but that is a definition.

A corporation, a question and answer website, a Minecraft game, and basically any sufficiently complex system could all be General-purpose AIs by that definition though. Having an overly general and useless definition is not better than having no definition in my opinion, so I see where the OP is coming from.

Re: International Scientific Report on the Safety of Advanced AI [pdf]

#13

The biggest risk of ai can be simply characterized by one concept: This very report could have been generated by AI. We can’t fully tell.

So what if it was generated by AI? Does that invalidate its contents in any way?

Interesting point. Are we already at a state where an A.I. could respond to email, phone calls, and even video calls in a convincing way ?

Re: International Scientific Report on the Safety of Advanced AI [pdf]

#14
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure you can. You simply email one of the listed authors and ask them if the document is legit.

And if they say "yes, it is legit", what does that tell you?

That the author has risked their reputation on the claim. If you're doubting the author is legit, interrogate their professional associations with an internet search, relying on the domain name system.

Nothing about any of this is new or profound. Counterfeit documents have been around for hundreds of years.

Re: International Scientific Report on the Safety of Advanced AI [pdf]

#15
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure you can. You simply email one of the listed authors and ask them if the document is legit.

And if they say "yes, it is legit", what does that tell you?

There's a certain point where this line of thought just becomes an AI-themed rehash of "Trusting Trust" by Thompson

Re: International Scientific Report on the Safety of Advanced AI [pdf]

#16
Recursively self-improving AI, of the kind Nick Bostrom outlined in detail way back in his 2014 book Superintelligence and Dr. Omohundro outlined in brief in [1], is the only kind which poses a true existential threat. I don't get out of bed for people worrying about anything less when it comes to 'AI safety'.

On the topic: One potentially effective approach to stopping recursive self-improving AI from being developed is a private fine-based bounty system against those performing AI research in general. A simple example would be "if you care caught doing AI research, you are to pay the people who caught you 10 times your yearly total comp in cash." Such a program would incur minimal policing costs and could easily scale to handle international threats. See [2] for a brief description.

If anyone wants to help me get into an econ PhD program or something where I could investigate this general class of bounty-driven incentives, feel free to drop me a line. I think it's really cool, but I don't know much about how PhDs work. There's actually nothing special about AI in regards to this approach, it could be applied to anything we fear might end up being a black-urn technology [3].

[1]: https://selfawaresystems.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/01/ai_d...

[2]: https://web.archive.org/web/20220709091749/https://virtual-i...

[3]: https://nickbostrom.com/papers/vulnerable.pdf

Re: International Scientific Report on the Safety of Advanced AI [pdf]

#17

Recursively self-improving AI, of the kind Nick Bostrom outlined in detail way back in his 2014 book Superintelligence and Dr. Omohundro outlined in brief in [1], is the only kind which poses a true existential threat. I don't get out of bed for people worrying about anything less when it comes to 'AI safety'. On the topic: One potentially effective approach to stopping recursive self-improving AI from being develope…

> Such a program would incur minimal policing costs and could easily scale to handle international threats

Who ensures every country enforces the ban?

How do you ensure international cooperation against a nation that decides to ignore it, against whom sanctions have no effect? What if that nation is a nuclear power?

Re: International Scientific Report on the Safety of Advanced AI [pdf]

#18
Clearly AI is unstoppable as it is math. I don't get how politicians or intelectuals continue to argue without understanding that simple truth. I don't know if AI will be comparable to human or organizational intelligence but know that is unstoppable.

Just ranting but a potential way of defending about it is taking an approach similar to cryptography for quantum computers: think harder if we can excel on something even assuming (some) AI is there.

Re: International Scientific Report on the Safety of Advanced AI [pdf]

#19

Recursively self-improving AI, of the kind Nick Bostrom outlined in detail way back in his 2014 book Superintelligence and Dr. Omohundro outlined in brief in [1], is the only kind which poses a true existential threat. I don't get out of bed for people worrying about anything less when it comes to 'AI safety'. On the topic: One potentially effective approach to stopping recursive self-improving AI from being develope…

> is the only kind which poses a true existential threat

You don't accept the possibility that a non-improving tool of an AI system that is fixed at the level of "just got a PhD in everything" by reading all the research papers on arxiv, might possibly be advanced enough for a Jim Jones type figure to design and create a humanity-ending plague because they believe in bringing about the end times?

Re: International Scientific Report on the Safety of Advanced AI [pdf]

#20

Recursively self-improving AI, of the kind Nick Bostrom outlined in detail way back in his 2014 book Superintelligence and Dr. Omohundro outlined in brief in [1], is the only kind which poses a true existential threat. I don't get out of bed for people worrying about anything less when it comes to 'AI safety'. On the topic: One potentially effective approach to stopping recursive self-improving AI from being develope…

Try to get that bounty enforced in the courts! All it'll take is one loophole to what would surely be a few vague poorly drafted laws and the floodgates open again.
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