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On AI regulation and messaging

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Re: On AI regulation and messaging

#301

Post by skybrian »

traceroute66 wrote: post #136
kilpikaarna wrote: post #32

> I think it is fundamentally a crisis of trust. I think that ordinary people don’t trust companies, governments, or the tech industry and always suspect that we are cooking up some new way to screw them over. [...] > I don’t think that a glitzy marketing campaign with a positive spin (which some have advocated that Anthropic do) is the way to win back that trust — at this point, saying that AI will cure cancer is mo…

> The thing that will work is actually curing cancer. This is honestly hilarious. Dario must think people are stupid. First, cancer research charities are some of the most well funded on this planet. They all obtain donations on the basis of "together, we will cure cancer" messaging. They all fund the best science they can. Second, the human body is a complicated thing. You can feed your fancy LLM as many textbooks a…

“Cure cancer” is vague shorthand. A more charitable interpretation would be something like “provides important assistance to research scientists who come up with new cures to most kinds of cancer.”

Re: On AI regulation and messaging

#302

Post by a2ff6eeb0 »

vrganj wrote: post #300
a2ff6eeb0 wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What kind of political leverage do the useless have? This isn't a realistically sustainable outcome. Today, people have leverage because removing them has real economic consequences. With AI, we need to be on the useful side of the divide to have any leverage. And then we'd better hope AI has respect for property rights.

What kind of political leverage did a French peasant have in the 1780s?

Well, the gap in armament between them all the French military was relatively small.

Why did you think there's a massive uptick in surveillance and policing technology and automation? It's to make the French solution unfeasible.

Re: On AI regulation and messaging

#303

Post by mrhottakes »

zer00eyz wrote: post #257
glimshe wrote: post #13

One thing Dario said is important reflecting on (but from another angle): where's the big deliverable from AI? If AI makes us 10x more productive, the 3 years since its popularization were enough for a product that would have taken 30 years to build without AI, for instance. I'm an AI advocate but that question makes me feel that AI is simply "very useful" rather than being a historical game changer for humanity.

> where's the big deliverable from AI ... AI is simply "very useful" rather than being a historical game changer for humanity. The last 30 years of tech has been about big, the dot com boom, the next unicorn, the magnificent 7 or 11 or whatever. The thing is that the missing solutions people want have never been the one sized fits all multi Tennant we need 6 rounds of seed funding kinds of problems. The "app boom" sh…

So then shouldn't someone be able to see these huge mountains of grains of sand?

Re: On AI regulation and messaging

#304

Post by datsci_est_2015 »

alphazard wrote: post #180
eloisant wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Besides cancer isn't really "a disease" but rather "a family of diseases" that can vary a lot. Even breast cancer can be one of many different cancers. It's like saying "we'll cure infectious diseases"

"Cancer isn't a single disease" is often shouted from the Dunning-Kruger peak of cancer research. I think it was popularized by an explainer video on Youtube, and now it's being memed. The people who think this way want to legitimize funding a particular research niche that they benefit from. A more sophisticated view is that cancer (one idea) is an problem of rates (like most things in biology) and there is a tumor…

Is there something like a meta-Dunning-Kruger, where someone invokes Dunning-Kruger in a way that itself is a potential Dunning-Kruger phenomenon?

I'm inclined to believe that the thing - that everyone intelligent says is complicated - is actually complicated. I would be surprised if the thing - that everyone intelligent says is complicated - is actually simple.

This is almost like an application of the conspiracy theory gambit where you try to find out how many people would have to be "in on it" in order to disprove the theory's likelihood. Like flat earth.

Re: On AI regulation and messaging

#305

Post by EMIRELADERO »

a2ff6eeb0 wrote: post #291
EMIRELADERO wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not comparable at all. The Iranian protesters are/were a minority group within a country that itself makes up 1.1% of humanity. I'm talking about morality here, not practical ability. The ultrarich have their circle of friends and family, who themselves have their own social circle, on and on until suddenly you're not looking at wealthy people anymore. Six degrees of separation and all that. How many people in the so…

Why would they take action to exterminate anyone, when they can simply ignore them and let them live and die in extreme poverty, unable to participate in the economy? The west already accepts this kind of poverty with the sweatshop workers, and nobody bats an eye. It's just disenfranchisement. Only the people who try to use violence to replace the political leverage they lose when they lose economic leverage would ne…

Because 7.5 billion people with nothing to lose would quickly turn chaotic and mass-murdery. 90% of humanity in idle poverty is impossible to justify, at least today they do something of value that can be used as a retort by the morally unscrupulous. A black-and-white situation where a few get everything, most get nothing and do nothing for anybody else is beyond justifying, so the self-defense argument wouldn't work.

Re: On AI regulation and messaging

#306

Post by watwut »

a2ff6eeb0 wrote: post #245
vrganj wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about we don't create one instead?

It's not a choice we have, unless you want to figure out a global AI ban treaty. AI will make human thought economically useless. In the new economy, the one economically useful thing we will be able to do is legal property ownership.

No. AI as a tech is not an issue. The wealth and power accumulation in the hands of Amodei, Altman, Thiel, Musk, Karp and the rest of CEO is the issue.

Permanent underclass is ideological goal of the above people. AI is an impersonal technology with no goals or wishes.

Re: On AI regulation and messaging

#307

Post by hn_submit »

Yizahi wrote: post #265
hn_submit wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's fairly easy to cure cancer by repairing DNA, but Big Pharma isn't interested because they can't patent it. They want to sell us some kind of "miracle cure" medicine that earns them trillions. The future is being held back by profit motives.

a) they can and will patent it, because in the end it will be same tools "bIg pHormA" uses today for all kinds of tasks. b) they are financially and subjectively interested in developing said tools to combat cancer even if they will be cloned and sold in parallel way cheaper than original. Because - 1) it would be immensely profitable on it's own, cancer is one the most common ailments, 2) post-cancer treatments are…

Repairing cannot be patented. It will be rejected as "trivial" by the Patent Office.

Yes, I know someone patented a "cure" for hemophilia which repairs the DNA of said patient. But that's just because no other pharmaceutical thought it worth their while to fight the patent since the number of patients is small.

But I can guarantee you that a cancer cure patent that repairs the DNA will be fought in Court.

Re: On AI regulation and messaging

#308

Post by a2ff6eeb0 »

EMIRELADERO wrote: post #305
a2ff6eeb0 wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would they take action to exterminate anyone, when they can simply ignore them and let them live and die in extreme poverty, unable to participate in the economy? The west already accepts this kind of poverty with the sweatshop workers, and nobody bats an eye. It's just disenfranchisement. Only the people who try to use violence to replace the political leverage they lose when they lose economic leverage would ne…

Because 7.5 billion people with nothing to lose would quickly turn chaotic and mass-murdery. 90% of humanity in idle poverty is impossible to justify, at least today they do something of value that can be used as a retort by the morally unscrupulous. A black-and-white situation where a few get everything, most get nothing and do nothing for anybody else is beyond justifying, so the self-defense argument wouldn't work…

It's already been here for much of the 20th century, and everyone seems to have just accepted it. We're just going to have Europe and America join sub-saharan Africa.

I think it's inevitable.

Re: On AI regulation and messaging

#309

Post by datsci_est_2015 »

bko wrote: post #193
traceroute66 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The thing that will work is actually curing cancer. This is honestly hilarious. Dario must think people are stupid. First, cancer research charities are some of the most well funded on this planet. They all obtain donations on the basis of "together, we will cure cancer" messaging. They all fund the best science they can. Second, the human body is a complicated thing. You can feed your fancy LLM as many textbooks a…

> First, cancer research charities are some of the most well funded on this planet Maybe I'm overly cynical, but I think charities exist to exist. They don't have a strong incentive to actually deliver on their mission. Everyone at the org may be fully bought it and obviously want to cure cancer, but as an organization it would fail to deliver on the promise. Like most organisms, their actual purpose is to continue t…

It's likely a mixed bag. If you're diligent about which organizations you choose to support, you're more likely to have a positive impact.

If you want a simpler example that doesn't involve biotech research, I would just look at the diversity of animal welfare organizations, and their relative quality. Some of the best animal welfare organizations in terms of impact are local rescues run by (in my experience) spouses of wealthy career-people (executives, lawyers, etc.) who have a ton of free time and love animals. But then there are also plenty of animal welfare organizations with questionable motives, and questionable spending patterns - bordering on fraud and embezzlement, if not outright fraud and embezzlement.

Re: On AI regulation and messaging

#310

Post by txrx0000 »

kilpikaarna wrote: post #32

> I think it is fundamentally a crisis of trust. I think that ordinary people don’t trust companies, governments, or the tech industry and always suspect that we are cooking up some new way to screw them over. [...] > I don’t think that a glitzy marketing campaign with a positive spin (which some have advocated that Anthropic do) is the way to win back that trust — at this point, saying that AI will cure cancer is mo…

Suppose the tech is real, I do not want Anthropic/Dario to hoard it and be my cancer-curing messiah. Release the weights and do research in the open. People will save themselves if you give them the means.

The bio/cyber/alignment risk rhetoric is nonsense. Somewhat counterintuitively, all of those risks are lower/non-issues if frontier labs release their weights and do all of their research in the open, as explained in a past comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49313739

Again: if we were to regulate anything, it would be to force frontier companies to release their model weights and do all of their research in the open. This is a necessary yet insufficient condition for the intelligence explosion to benefit the vast majority of people.

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