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…
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…
Demis Hassabis has a plan to harness AI safely
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Re: Demis Hassabis has a plan to harness AI safely
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It is very long run. Industrial revolution was disaster for average worker for example. For that matter, all the tech that allowed chattel slavery made whole class of people poorer and significantly worst off.
The accumulation of power and money by smaller group of people means loss of power by poorer people. Those with power then use the power to their own benefit while poorer people dont have that option and become even more poor or worst off.
Re: Demis Hassabis has a plan to harness AI safely
#103Oh jesus, AGI in the USA would be a disaster. They can't even control the trillioth obelisks, now imagine all the power hungry sociopaths around AGI. AGI means Big Tech's Oppenheimer moment is looming on the horizon.
Re: Demis Hassabis has a plan to harness AI safely
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
#106The 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…
Only after we establish and guarantee the rights of humans and the rest of the natural world. The rights of machines, however "intelligent", come only after that.
Re: Demis Hassabis has a plan to harness AI safely
#107Re: Demis Hassabis has a plan to harness AI safely
#108Spoiler: 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
Re: Demis Hassabis has a plan to harness AI safely
#109The 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…
Aside from that the link explains that the BBB traded tax income for „accelerated depreciation of assets“ aka economic growth.
Asode from that, even if one disagrees with the first statement or the Trumpism economics, there are 195 countries in the world and quite a few will be willing to tax foreign (enemy) tech companies. See the new hostility of EU against american tech.
Re: Demis Hassabis has a plan to harness AI safely
#110Earlier 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…
Yes, but why do we think the likelihood of any of that happening is great enough to warrant all this effort and cost
It's not a settled debate, even among experts, and perhaps in retrospect we'll realize AI safety was unnecessary or based on fundamental confusions. But if the median ergonomics researcher gave a 5% chance that a new chair will be so comfortable that it drives humanity extinct (https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00147-z), I would definitely want the government to start measuring and regulating chair comfort, even if that was costly and even if that meant I couldn't buy a comfy new chair I wanted.