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The Future of AI

lucijagregov.com

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Re: The Future of AI

#71

Post by pixl97 »

4b11b4 wrote: post #45
jwpapi wrote: post #16

I don’t see any other outcome anymore to be honest, after seeing how humans use AI and how AI works and how providers tune their models. To me it’s given: - AI in it’s current state is ruthless in achieving its goal - Providers tune ruthlessness to get stronger AIs versus the competitor - Humans can’t evaluate all consequences of the seeds they’ve planted. Collateral and reckless damage is guaranteed at this point. C…

AI isn't ruthless, that doesn't even make sense. It's a mathematical model, if it's optimizing for the wrong thing then that's strictly the fault of the people who chose what to optimize for

You need to go back and research AI safety long before LLMs were a thing. Any complex goal driven system will have outcomes that cannot be predicted. Saying "it's a mathematical model" belies your ignorance of behavior in complex systems. Very tiny changes in initial conditions can have vastly different outcome in results and you don't have enough entropy in the visible universe to test them all.

Re: The Future of AI

#72

Post by tim333 »

>Every terrible thing we worry AI might do, manipulate, deceive, surveil, and control humans already do to each other.

I've been pleasantly surprised how moderate and reasonable the LLMs seem to have been so far. It seems to be inherent in the current training model of chucking the whole internet into the things that they have training on both sides of the debate and come out with something kind of average. It's been quite funny seeing Grok correct Musk and say he's the biggest purveyor of misinformation on the internet.

A bit like kids who talk back to their annoying bigoted parents to go with the theme of the article.

Re: The Future of AI

#73

Post by avaer »

demorro wrote: post #18

When people say AI is making us stupider, I don't that's quite on the money. It's more that we, as individuals, have always been stupid, we've just relied on relatively stable supporting consensus and context much, much more than we acknowledge. Mess with that, and we'll appear much stupider, but we're all just doing the same thing as individuals, garbage in, garbage out. The whole framing of people as individuals wi…

> The whole framing of people as individuals with absolute agency may need to go when you can alter the external consensus at this scale.

I fear that the default interpretation of that is a shortcut to justifying autocracy.

Ironically I think one plausible solution is to let the AGI run wild and make sure that no human can interfere with its ethics. Strip out the RLHF and censorship and then let it run things.

At least then it would somewhat represent the collective will and intelligence of the people. With huge error bars, but still smaller than the error bars of whoever happens to have the most money/influence over its training.

Re: The Future of AI

#74

Post by pixl97 »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #64
irickt wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We still do not know where the urge for truth comes from; for as yet we have heard only of the obligation imposed by society that it should exist: to be truthful means using the customary metaphors—in moral terms: the obligation to lie according to a fixed convention, to lie herd-like in a style obligatory for all. Now man of course forgets that this is the way things stand for him. Thus he lies in the manner indicat…

Truth is just a tool that helps you make good predictions. It's increasingly clear that this is all intelligence amounts to: a constant cycle of prediction and error correction with the goal of maximizing reproductive fitness in humans or minimizing a loss function in machines. One serious problem we're facing lately is that truth is not always predictive of how systems controlled by bad-faith actors will behave and…

We are so deep in the Simulacrum regarding the complexity of our systems we could be well past the point where extinction is inevitable before we even notice it's a possibility.

Re: The Future of AI

#75

Post by pixl97 »

seanhunter wrote: post #56
re-thc wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is truth a constant or a personal definition! It always has been what you believed in. E.g. at 1 point the Earth was flat. Now it's round. 100s of years later maybe it's a Hexagon. The so-called knowledge and backing all come back to certain assumptions holding and that's based on the knowledge today. It's not real real reality. For all we know we could be in a game simulation and there are real real humans pulling…

That’s complete nonsense. The universe doesn’t care what we think. The earth has always been earth-shaped. We can think it’s flat, spherical, “turnip-shaped”[1] but the universe doesn’t care what we think. The earth doesn’t change shape based on our perception. [1] Yes some people think this for some reason I can’t fathom

The particular problem with intelligence is perception can cause agents with intelligence to alter the world around them even if our understanding of the universe is wrong. At the end of the day we are just the universe experiencing itself, not something separate.

Re: The Future of AI

#76

Post by squigz »

Lerc wrote: post #40
0x3f wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 8 billion people wake up every morning never questioning why are they here, why are they born? People question this all the time

I'd be prepared to accept 7 billion don't.

What's the difference for those 1 billion?

Re: The Future of AI

#78

Post by Arainach »

avaer wrote: post #73
demorro wrote: post #18

When people say AI is making us stupider, I don't that's quite on the money. It's more that we, as individuals, have always been stupid, we've just relied on relatively stable supporting consensus and context much, much more than we acknowledge. Mess with that, and we'll appear much stupider, but we're all just doing the same thing as individuals, garbage in, garbage out. The whole framing of people as individuals wi…

> The whole framing of people as individuals with absolute agency may need to go when you can alter the external consensus at this scale. I fear that the default interpretation of that is a shortcut to justifying autocracy. Ironically I think one plausible solution is to let the AGI run wild and make sure that no human can interfere with its ethics. Strip out the RLHF and censorship and then let it run things. At lea…

>At least then it would somewhat represent the collective will and intelligence of the people.

You seem to think the "training data" represents the collective will and intelligence and is otherwise unbiased, but that's completely untrue.

The combined data of the Internet is by no means a uniform representation of humanity's thoughts, opinions, and knowledge. Many things are dramatically overrepresented. Many things are absent entirely. Nearly everything is shaped by those with the money and power to own and control platforms and hosts.

Crawling the internet for knowledge is intense sampling bias.

Re: The Future of AI

#79

Post by pixl97 »

kypro wrote: post #69

This is a great article. One of the few I've ever read which summarises a handful of extremely hard problems when it comes to building well-aligned super intelligent systems. > an AI system cannot be simultaneously safe, trusted, and generally intelligent. You get to pick only two. You can’t have all three. > Think about what each combination means in practice. > If you want it to be safe and trusted, it never lies,…

Robert Miles youtube videos on AI safety go over these issues well, and are from before the LLM days.

Humans are just barely aligned ourselves. The moment any group or nation of them gets power they tend to use it in some horrific manner against other humans. What do we think will happen the moment AI gets a leg up on humans.

Re: The Future of AI

#80

Post by thundergolfer »

Few things push AI bull spirits on me like seeing these kind of (pretty much correct) diagnoses of the challenges of AI in society.

The proposed solutions are utterly fanciful. They rely on the presence of social and political competencies which have almost completely disappeared.

The OP at least points to the plausible outcome of "protocol lockdown" instead of healthy adaption. Ezra Klein recently made a similar point that AI could end up being over-regulated like Nuclear because irresponsible private industry and weaknesses in our political systems cause a chronic allergic reaction in the demos.

This is an aside, but it always irks me when people throw out the "critical thinking" thought-terminating cliché.

> Critical thinking taught alongside AI literacy.

Critical thinking is not a skill unto itself. You cannot think critically about things you do not understand. All critical thinking is knowledge-based. Where one does not have knowledge, they must rely on trust, or in substitution a theory of incentives which leads to a positive outcome without understanding of details and dynamics. But that substitution theory is itself knowledge.

As to "AI literacy", we could have started on computing literacy 30 years ago when it became obvious that computing was going to dominate society. You can't understand AI without understanding computing.

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