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On AI regulation and messaging

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Re: On AI regulation and messaging

#502

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that essential commodity providers aren't the emperors of the universe does not imply the same thing could not be true about AI. Electricity needs transformation to be useful. AI is the transformation layer, a sufficiently advanced AI system could secure an advantage in practically any economically relevant domain. If you have the best AI in world where embodied robotics are sufficiently advanced, you also h…

You say that AI is transformation layer, then list out physical things that would be necessary to transform AI into something useful such as sufficiently advanced embodied robotics. How is this different than electricity?

AI would oversee the creation of those physical things, in the same way humans + machines do now

Re: On AI regulation and messaging

#503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We will cure virus. It is possible to prevent most viruses by recoding the human genome (requires embryo engineering or pre-embryo engineering) to use alternate codons that existing natty viruses don't use. This wouldn't prevent synthetic viruses from being developed that use the alternate codons, of course. See (1) https://diyhpl.us/wiki/transcripts/hgp-write/2016-05-10/ultr... and (2) https://diyhpl.us/wiki/trans…

What could possibly go wrong...

Honestly, the most likely thing is lots and lots of dead fetuses due to developmental abnormalities. I'd be surprised if it ever got to the point of resulting in a dead infant.

Re: On AI regulation and messaging

#504

> 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…

I don't think the idea is that a frontier model "cures cancer" so much as that it accelerates research that humans do, getting us to answers faster. That's a hard idea to dismiss after what's happening in mathematics, and I believe life sciences people take this very seriously, even if message board nerds like us don't.

Re: On AI regulation and messaging

#505
post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And maybe don't allow the military to use your AI WHEN YOU CAN'T TELL WHETHER IT WAS INVOLVED IN THE KILLING OF HUNDREDS OF SCHOOL CHILDREN

They had a near-monopoly on AI-usage by the US military, then had a very public fallout because they refused to allow it to be used for autonomous weapons and mass-surveillance which their main competitor (OpenAI) publicly undermined by immediately signing an unlimited-use agreement, and now they also get flack for this incident they had no control over, because the US military decided to smear them after this fallou…

Should we not judge them by their actions? They selected the children's school as a target. Anything else is irrelevant

Re: On AI regulation and messaging

#506
post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's so weird how distorted your view of any of these concepts are from what these people actually say. I don't think you've ever seriously looked into either group if you believe any of their views support what you say. In fact, many EAs and "longetermists" are explicitly AGAINST the development of AGI.

If you say so. I’ve been following the development of both groups since almost a decade, I’m pretty confident I understand their concepts and what values they stand for

Please explain an EA position that could possibly suggest that they would deprioritize human lives in order to make AGI more comfortable when, for example, the largest EA philanthropy organization, Coefficient Giving, formerly Open Philanthropy, has given millions to Yudkowksy's MIRI which is currently among the most anti-AGI organizations on the planet?

Can you find any explicitly EA organization that is at all aligned in perspective with anything you suggested?

Re: On AI regulation and messaging

#507

Just want to say, this comment section on this website would have been unthinkable a few years ago. It’s wild: all the engineers have developed class consciousness. I wonder how that happened? Anyway, it’s fun to watch, but remember to stay sane guys, be aware of the pendulum dynamics.

I'd caution that you just have independent groups in some of these comment sections.

You sometimes see people on reddit amazed that "reddit's opinion seems to have changed". Nothing changed, just a different subgroup. You'll see the other opinion again if you wait for another similar article.

For example, the "did bother reading the article" crowd is attracted to certain headlines, and this probably isn't one of those.

Re: On AI regulation and messaging

#508
post #406
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The effective altruist and longtermist crowd are into it as a religion. They would happily sacrifice anything human to satisfy their dreams of AI. They care way more about what the AI needs than their what their fellow humans need. We will end up with an AGI having better living and working conditions than humans and the whole AI industry will be clapping

It's so weird how distorted your view of any of these concepts are from what these people actually say. I don't think you've ever seriously looked into either group if you believe any of their views support what you say. In fact, many EAs and "longetermists" are explicitly AGAINST the development of AGI.

[dead]

Re: On AI regulation and messaging

#509

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…

I don't think the idea is that a frontier model "cures cancer" so much as that it accelerates research that humans do, getting us to answers faster. That's a hard idea to dismiss after what's happening in mathematics, and I believe life sciences people take this very seriously, even if message board nerds like us don't.

There is still a big distinction between

A) verifiable proof generation (a limited closed set of axioms and a minimal algorithm like Metamath's are enough to verify correct vs incorrect machine intuition, plus feeding back the rejection/acceptance to adjust the machine intuition)

B) optimizing an illposed problem (how do we define the inaccessible fitness function)

Yes the field of biology or medicine will advance faster, but only because the mathematics and physics will advance faster, any non-axiomatic or non-postulate ramifications actually depend on unknown variables like fitness functions etc. How do you model the environment? That model will necessarily be oversimplified. What makes us believe that a long tail of ever less frequent distinct failure modes (like cancers, cancer is not a single problem) can not be guessed. It would require oracles and crystal balls: if global warming brings malaria mosquito's up north, then "eliminating sickle cell anemia" can actually turn into a death sentence instead of a life-long disease, but perhaps malaria will not come to higher latitudes, it depends on the future!

Re: On AI regulation and messaging

#510

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Charity doesn't stop at the cure, but continues to shift with progress. If a big public charity is able to cure a cancer type (eg. lung cancer), then it's next aim would be to try cure another cancer type. Let's just say they are somehow able to cure all the cancers, and therefore they cured cancer, then there's distribution of the cure, with a focus on 1st world but then it would have to go to developing nations too…

Has that model been proven to work for other diseases?

Malaria is one that comes to mind. We can prevent it, have eradicated it from many countries, but the long tail will take a few more decades to reach planet-wide success.

There are charities that specialize in analyzing climate data to see where outbreaks may occur next. There are charities that just do government outreach to leaders that don't believe medicine is real.

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

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