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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

#91

Post by Marha01 »

allears wrote: post #61
f6v wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Why should AI make it worse? Can you point to any other important technology that historically made people in poor countries even poorer? Technological progress generally lifts people from poverty in the long run. There could be issues caused by disruption of established systems in the short term, though.

Re: Demis Hassabis has a plan to harness AI safely

#93

Post by techpression »

verdverm wrote: post #82
techpression wrote: post #42

Has anything really important been solved by AI yet, or where is this radical (imo) belief around AGI coming from? Genuinely curious, I know there are some math problems solved and ML has been used for far longer than AI to improve things, but where is clean (efficient) energy, the cure for cancer (or any of the horrible neurological disorders, take your pick), new hardware designs, quantum computing solutions, etc e…

AlphaFold is a pretty big deal, especially the millions of protein folds they published openly and scientists are just digging into.

It's also very very far from anything general intelligence. This is actually where I think we see the best ROI, we have a specific task or problem and we target it. I remember reading about a model trained on railroad tracks. By putting cameras on trains to take images while running like normal, then using the model to detect cracks before they cause issues.

Re: Demis Hassabis has a plan to harness AI safely

#94

Post by coffeeaddict1 »

techpression wrote: post #42

Has anything really important been solved by AI yet, or where is this radical (imo) belief around AGI coming from? Genuinely curious, I know there are some math problems solved and ML has been used for far longer than AI to improve things, but where is clean (efficient) energy, the cure for cancer (or any of the horrible neurological disorders, take your pick), new hardware designs, quantum computing solutions, etc e…

> Has anything really important been solved by AI yet

Alphafold essentially solved the protein folding problem and it's arguably one of the biggest (if not the biggest) scientific achievements of the 21st century.

Re: Demis Hassabis has a plan to harness AI safely

#95

Post by Marha01 »

mikeyouse wrote: post #58
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…

My great annoyance with all this blather about UBI and post-scarcity and new economic models is that it relies on taxing and redistributing the ~infinite profits of the largest tech companies on earth. What in the history of our world gives anyone faith that those companies are going to start paying taxes instead of using "AGI" to engineer increasingly complex methods to avoid them so that their equity owners can poc…

> My great annoyance with all this blather about UBI and post-scarcity and new economic models is that it relies on taxing and redistributing the ~infinite profits of the largest tech companies on earth.

The arrival of true AGI and human-level robots will likely result in very strong deflation, since robotic factories will flood the market with goods produced for far cheaper than those in factories with human workers.

At that point, you don't need taxation. The government can just print the money for UBI. It would have to print the money anyway, to combat the massive deflation.

Re: Demis Hassabis has a plan to harness AI safely

#96

Post by pshirshov »

sanex wrote: post #71
estearum wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

strawmen are fun and helpful

I am working on my change password page today and Fable is refusing to help me because "safety".

By the way, if you try to use it to write prose, it will drive you mad by adding "adult" everywhere, e.g. "adult chessboard". Applies to GPT, Claude/Fable and Grok.

Re: Demis Hassabis has a plan to harness AI safely

#97

Post by antondd »

I am looking forward to a bunch of investigative documentaries exploring “How the cult of Omnissiah infected every single Doomsayer CEO of an AI company in Delusional 20s” (or whatever monicker our times will have got in the future).

Hassabis is a genius. He is way, way smarter than me and I’m sure the majority of techies, but please get real. This is Prophets of Doom of our generation.

Re: Demis Hassabis has a plan to harness AI safely

#98

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

techpression wrote: post #90
SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is that we need to have a safety plan in place before an AI is smart enough to radically reshape the world. If you've got an AI that's ready to start sending humanity into the next era of civilization, it may be too late to control when and how it does that. > Heck, a proof for P=NP or P!=NP or solve the The Riemann Hypothesis. Just give me something truly exciting and I will believe AGI is around the corne…

Why would we be able to design a safety plan that would control such a powerful force? It would be like putting umbrellas on an asteroid hoping to slow its fall. That sounds like delusions of grandeur.

It'll certainly require a bit more than umbrellas! NASA has spent hundreds of millions of dollars developing asteroid defense systems, including a proof of concept for redirection in 2022. So, you know, let's try at least that much before declaring there's probably no way to do it.

Re: Demis Hassabis has a plan to harness AI safely

#99

Post by watwut »

pingou wrote: post #23
watwut wrote: post #12

These people who read too many scifi books and confused them with reality are royally annoying. There is real and potential harm from AI, but the more someone talks/write abut AI safety, the less they care about actual harm to real people, economy and what not.

If in 2020 I had sent you a book about the LLM achievements of 2026, you would probably have thought it was a science fiction book with no relation to reality, wouldn't you?

That it generates plausible texts? I would find it unlikely technological progress. That does not make this whole "AI safety" rhetoric any less bullshit distanced from reality. Especially from companies that are doom trolling all the time while also trying to maximize the negative impacts they are doom trolling about.

Frankly, book about the LLM achievements of 2026 would not be as long as people make it sound.

What I do really worry about the next depression and the fact that it will strengthen already strong fascist movements. Which already have full support of the most powerful CEO class intent on destroying democracy. Which happen to be the same people who push ai into everything, useful or not. I worry that the debt of these companies will be somehow offloaded on the rest of us again, that again middle class and poor will pay.

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