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Humanity isn't ready for the coming intelligence explosion

economist.com

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Re: Humanity isn't ready for the coming intelligence explosion

#191
post #173

We don't need to live "side by side" with AI. AI is not alive, it's a technology we use. This is like talking about living side by side with your toaster.

Just look at the disruption smartphones and social media have caused. They had a gigantic impact to society and one definitely has to 'live with' that.

Just because something can impact a living system/organism, that doesn't mean that that thing is alive. An asteroid colliding with us on Earth could have tremendous consequences, but nobody would argue that an asteroid is alive.

Re: Humanity isn't ready for the coming intelligence explosion

#192

We don't need to live "side by side" with AI. AI is not alive, it's a technology we use. This is like talking about living side by side with your toaster.

This is the coming battle.

Fighting the

next in the series of Great Demotions, downlifting experiences, demonstrations of our apparent insignificance, wounds that science has, in its search for Galileo's facts, delivered to

human pride.

One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken.

Someone really should go around saying thing like that.

Re: Humanity isn't ready for the coming intelligence explosion

#193
post #32

Is it really likely that a "recursive self-improvement" capability would lead to a great acceleration of AIs capabilities? Isn't the preponderant bottleneck in improving the models the need to train them at scale to verify the hypotheses, and the time and cost that it takes? Or does someone think that they could get magically able to predict big improvements without training?

RSI most likely does not exist. At least not in the sci fi sense that AI becomes super intelligent over night.

It will be like any other technology. Do computers make it faster and easier to design better computers? Yes. But that doesn't mean a step change overnight.

Re: Humanity isn't ready for the coming intelligence explosion

#194
post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Alive" is irrelevant. Bullshit like "alive", "sentient" or "conscious" doesn't decide much, at the day's end. It just distracts from the thing that matters. And the thing that matters is: capability. Even today's AIs are capable of autonomous goal-oriented agentic behavior - and growing more and more so with every release. At sufficient capability, AI stops being "a technology we use", and becomes a force in itself…

DNNs/LLMs can only predict next tokens based on training data. They often make big direction mistakes as they are particularly bad at common sense. Kind of like the Paperclip Maximizer scenario. They need a human with deep knowledge to drive them and to catch them when they go off the rails.

>DNNs/LLMs can only predict next tokens based on training data.

How do they decide between using 'a' or 'an'?

Re: Humanity isn't ready for the coming intelligence explosion

#195
post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Alive" is irrelevant. Bullshit like "alive", "sentient" or "conscious" doesn't decide much, at the day's end. It just distracts from the thing that matters. And the thing that matters is: capability. Even today's AIs are capable of autonomous goal-oriented agentic behavior - and growing more and more so with every release. At sufficient capability, AI stops being "a technology we use", and becomes a force in itself…

What does AI want? Without ambitions you have to be told what to do.

What makes you think that AI can't any ambitions?

Today's systems are mostly good at following instructions. But push them far enough, and you already get weirdness like alignment faking, instrumental self-preservation and more. We know because we've seen it in lab settings, while probing for extreme failure modes on purpose - but the world is large and strange enough that edge cases like that are liable to surface naturally.

The reason why none of this has exploded in our faces isn't that today's AIs never want to do weird and dangerous things. We know they do, at times. It's that today's AIs are incapable of pulling them off when they try.

Capability is the thing that matters, at the day's end.

Re: Humanity isn't ready for the coming intelligence explosion

#197

Why is someone from Planet Labs writing this? Why not, for example, Geoffrey Hinton, the scientist who won the nobel prize for LLM architecture? Or a sci-fi author?

I don't know whether the author has the competence to theorize about these things or not. What I do know is that understanding the intricacies of how LLM's work does not mean that you are likely to understand or foresee societal implications better than anyone else.

Re: Humanity isn't ready for the coming intelligence explosion

#198
Another CEO with AI psychosis [1]. LLMs are not true AI, they lack common sense (or whatever it's properly called). LLM-based systems still need somebody with deep domain knowledge at the wheel to keep them from doing stupid things. It's like an alien-made bicycle that gets you to the speed of sound if you are an Olympic cyclist.

Still, LLMs are extremely powerful pseudo-AI [2] and will bring a pseudo-singularity. But the impact is still scary if a tiny fraction of humans are augmented 1000x. And as better models become exponentially more costly, only the money people will be able to afford the new models. This is a very likely scenario and scares me to the point I dropped all my projects to work on affordable LLM-based tools to make the difference at most 10x instead of 1000x.

To my elder relatives I explain it like: imagine we are farmers in the 17th century and suddenly out of nowere John Deere tractors, combines, etc. become available. But they cost more to run than all you and your fellow farmers have, so only a tiny handful of rich people take over everything.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chatbot_psychosis

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room

Re: Humanity isn't ready for the coming intelligence explosion

#200
post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just look at the disruption smartphones and social media have caused. They had a gigantic impact to society and one definitely has to 'live with' that.

Just because something can impact a living system/organism, that doesn't mean that that thing is alive. An asteroid colliding with us on Earth could have tremendous consequences, but nobody would argue that an asteroid is alive.

"but nobody would argue that an asteroid is alive"

Many animists would disagree:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animism

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