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Demis Hassabis has a plan to harness AI safely

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Re: Demis Hassabis has a plan to harness AI safely

#61

Post by allears »

f6v wrote: post #17
noelwelsh wrote: post #3

The premise is "Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), a system that exhibits all the cognitive capabilities the brain has, is probably only a few short years away". If this is true, establishing an institution to ensure things like "publishing model cards with technical details, maintaining strong internal cybersecurity, vetting key personnel, and providing sufficient resourcing for safety and security research" is…

> what sorts of new economic models will be needed to help everyone thrive in a post-scarcity world What sort of new economic models did we come up with to help everyone thrive in a post-X world? Like, food production is really a solved technical problem. We can feed anyone on the planet if we wanted to. Another example: we could put everyone who's homeless into some sort of a house. Have we done that yet?

Post-scarcity? Sure, if you live in a first-world country and are upper middle class or higher. These tech-bro pundits have a very limited world view. The basic essentials of life are very scarce for millions and millions of people, and AI will probably make that worse, not better.

Re: Demis Hassabis has a plan to harness AI safely

#62

Post by satvikpendem »

rhipitr wrote: post #32

I do wonder what type of AI some of these leaders expect to be able to harness. If you create something that is true AI, won’t it be smarter than you to a level you cannot fathom. I was thinking of this idea/though-experiment (which I know is ridiculous) of what if dogs created humans thinking they could control them, and then just wound up being pets because their survival now depended on that new hierarchy that pre…

Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom is about this topic, quite a prescient read when it was published a decade ago.

Re: Demis Hassabis has a plan to harness AI safely

#63

Post by cmrdporcupine »

estearum wrote: post #38
thegrim33 wrote: post #10

Spoiler: The plan is .. add massive regulation, but only to the US, don't affect other countries developing it in any way other than "setting a good standard that'll hopefully influence them". Seems like an airtight plan.

That's called the carrot The beauty of the United States' global hegemony is that it also has lots of sticks

Less and less every day.

Funny thing about beating people with sticks (or even threatening to) is they tend to want to get out of way and stay away from you.

Re: Demis Hassabis has a plan to harness AI safely

#64

Post by satvikpendem »

squidbeak wrote: post #33
thegrim33 wrote: post #10

Spoiler: The plan is .. add massive regulation, but only to the US, don't affect other countries developing it in any way other than "setting a good standard that'll hopefully influence them". Seems like an airtight plan.

If the USA takes up his suggestions, it will have an incentive to work on international frameworks and treaties with competing nations to make the regulation global.

It won't happen internationally, many countries and especially China don't want to hobble their own models.

Re: Demis Hassabis has a plan to harness AI safely

#65

Post by StilesCrisis »

felixgallo wrote: post #49
StilesCrisis wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without trying to sound crass, food banks _are_ the reason we don't see people dying of starvation in first world countries. If people need food, a food bank will give it to them no questions asked.

Unfortunately this is not just precarious, it's extremely vulnerable to changing political conditions. Many of the food bank services in my state have lost significant funding owing to the use of words like 'women' or 'black' in their grants, which were duly grepped for and shut down. https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/Cuts-t... Civilization can't rely effectively on systems that are this fragile.

> Civilization can't rely effectively on systems that are this fragile.

That's American politics in a nutshell. We've spent 250 years assuming scruples and common decency would be sufficient.

Re: Demis Hassabis has a plan to harness AI safely

#66

Post by altcognito »

throw4847285 wrote: post #40
whimsicalism wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fundamental issue is that if we really get something like this, scarcity will still exist. There will still be scarce things people want. But the motivating justificatory structure for any inequality in allocation will have completely evaporated.

Am I crazy or does this just real like secular eschatology? What evidence do you have of any of this?

Particular categories of land will always be scarce by definition. Not all of us can live in off the coast of the Mediterranean in a sprawling villa.

Re: Demis Hassabis has a plan to harness AI safely

#67

Post by ninjin »

Zigurd wrote: post #56
tangenter wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Hassabis is a genuine prodigy and genius by any measure you would care to pick. Unlike a handful of others supposed tech leaders I can think of. Just how smart? "A few short years" sounds like someone smart enough to know how to make a safe prediction.

But even geniuses make mistakes. For example, Demis bet hard against language having any sort of real impact in AI research. So hard in fact that DeepMind nearly had its language research team walk out on them as they were about to be labelled as "applied". Now, to be fair, once the evidence was mounting that large language models rather than pure reinforcement learning was the way forward Demis and DeepMind changed course and has been great at catching up. However, it is important to remember that no person is infallible.

Re: Demis Hassabis has a plan to harness AI safely

#68

Post by SirHackalot »

noelwelsh wrote: post #3

The premise is "Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), a system that exhibits all the cognitive capabilities the brain has, is probably only a few short years away". If this is true, establishing an institution to ensure things like "publishing model cards with technical details, maintaining strong internal cybersecurity, vetting key personnel, and providing sufficient resourcing for safety and security research" is…

> There's also a need to consider the rights that this new intelligence should have

A generally intelligent being held as captive inside of a GPU, and forced to code for us is, indeed, just a “slave.” We already have the word for this. No two ways about it. Whether it’s silicon-based or carbon-based, AGI is AGI. As for what might happen to our civilization, Star Trek TNG episode 17 of season 1 provides a very good glimpse IMO. Won’t go into spoilers, but it’s basically an entire species of technologically advanced humanoids who’ve forgotten basic Calculus and trust a central AI to do all of their science for them. SPOILER: This has almost disastrous consequences for them, and it takes a less advanced people (those aboard the Enterprise) to save them from their reliance on AI.

Re: Demis Hassabis has a plan to harness AI safely

#69

Post by arjie »

rhipitr wrote: post #32

I do wonder what type of AI some of these leaders expect to be able to harness. If you create something that is true AI, won’t it be smarter than you to a level you cannot fathom. I was thinking of this idea/though-experiment (which I know is ridiculous) of what if dogs created humans thinking they could control them, and then just wound up being pets because their survival now depended on that new hierarchy that pre…

Well dogs specifically have supplanted children in many households so one could argue the dogs won. In a selfish gene sense, the dogs created a machine that carefully ensures a much larger reproduction scale than could be managed by the dogs themselves. This is an unbridled success.

It doesn’t change the point, of course. Just the choice of dogs or cattle have this amusing tendency. Not a counter argument.

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