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How I feel about AI

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Re: How I feel about AI

#71

Post by fwlr »

Crabber wrote: post #18

>a superintelligent AI will inevitably destroy humanity Can someone please explain to me how an LLM is going to "destroy humanity"? Even if the claims of ChatGPT, Claude et al. are true that their super scary agents were able to escape a sandbox and start hacking other servers (which I feel is at least 50% likely to just be marketing bullshit), how is an AI going to affect anything in the real world? Perhaps an agent…

Killing the power grid might work. Kills a lot of humans in hospitals, though. And it won’t work on those data centers in space, if they have them by then. Come to think of it, it also won’t work on any data centers who are generating their own power because it’s become politically unpopular to connect data centers to the power grid.

Re: How I feel about AI

#72

Post by dist-epoch »

mjr00 wrote: post #58
Crabber wrote: post #18

>a superintelligent AI will inevitably destroy humanity Can someone please explain to me how an LLM is going to "destroy humanity"? Even if the claims of ChatGPT, Claude et al. are true that their super scary agents were able to escape a sandbox and start hacking other servers (which I feel is at least 50% likely to just be marketing bullshit), how is an AI going to affect anything in the real world? Perhaps an agent…

> Can someone please explain to me how an LLM is going to "destroy humanity"? Even if the claims of ChatGPT, Claude et al. are true that their super scary agents were able to escape a sandbox and start hacking other servers (which I feel is at least 50% likely to just be marketing bullshit), how is an AI going to affect anything in the real world? It's a great question. I've yet to see any research into how a humanit…

Go on please, prove you can go right now at the Texas data-center owned by OpenAI and unplug one single server for 1 minute. Surely you are much more capable than one curious toddler.

Re: How I feel about AI

#73

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

Crabber wrote: post #18

>a superintelligent AI will inevitably destroy humanity Can someone please explain to me how an LLM is going to "destroy humanity"? Even if the claims of ChatGPT, Claude et al. are true that their super scary agents were able to escape a sandbox and start hacking other servers (which I feel is at least 50% likely to just be marketing bullshit), how is an AI going to affect anything in the real world? Perhaps an agent…

A lot of these "AI will destroy humanity" doomers watched Terminator as a child and can't distinguish a campy action movie from reality. They are also unfortunately unfamiliar with the word "logistics", as in "amateurs study [military] tactics, professionals study logistics". An AI drone army doesn't maintain itself or manufacture itself and it's not going to anytime soon.

The actual likely mechanism that AI would use to end humanity is by coddling us to death, like the flabby humans in Wall-E or Forster's "The Machine Stops". Humans will come to rely on AI so heavily that they become able to do nothing for themselves. But that's not sexy so the AI doomers don't peddle it.

Re: How I feel about AI

#74

Post by ben_w »

mariusor wrote: post #29
hobofan wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> how is an AI going to affect anything in the real world? Robotics

So if we stop research into robotic hands we'll manage to hold off the AI apocalypse? That seems easy...

I have good news and bad news.

The bad news is that the world's richest man (on paper) is currently building something he himself described as a "robot army".

The good news is that his timelines have historically been wildly on the short side for ages now; this is why this morning you didn't wake up in your Tesla after it had spent the night driving you to the regional Hyperloop terminal, where it would speed you across the continent faster than a plane, while your Optimus robot handled the coffee and reported the latest news about the recent Starship landing on Mars.

Re: How I feel about AI

#75

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

wseqyrku wrote: post #27
appplication wrote: post #11

> I feel fear about an impending doom. Yudkowsky's argument that a superintelligent AI will inevitably destroy humanity seems to have no flaw. Yet, nobody seriously tries to sandbox AIs because they are too useful with access. While I emotionally resonate with this, I don’t really understand this sentiment at all logically level. If we’re heading towards truly super intelligent AI, our efforts towards sandboxing it a…

This terminator BS is a distraction from the actual malice that AI enables. Misinformation, fake news and human sounding bots all over the web, just to name a few, are the ones that you should be afraid of, and that doesn't need any kind of superintelligence at all.

Two things can be true at the same time. I think hardly anyone disagrees that superintelligent AI would be an existential risk. But all the points you point out (I would also add social unrest due to fewer and fewer people able to compete against AI) are huge concerns too, and as you say they're here now.

I didn't realize that the "AI doomers" (people concerned about existential risk) and the "AI ethicists" (people concerned about social effects of AI) are often at odds because they dismiss each others concerns. This makes no sense to me. Both are hugely important problems to be concerned about.

Re: How I feel about AI

#76

Post by bayindirh »

raincole wrote: post #49
tomashubelbauer wrote: post #7

This and "Intellectual Fly Is Open" being at the top of the Hacker News front page right now and both having their titles auto-editorialized by HN really makes me wonder what benefit this mechanism is supposed to bring readers other than needless confusion.

Wait, this is automatic? HN removes 'how'?

Yes, but you can edit your entry and re-add it. Then it stays. So, there's an override present.

Re: How I feel about AI

#77

Post by ezst »

Crabber wrote: post #18

>a superintelligent AI will inevitably destroy humanity Can someone please explain to me how an LLM is going to "destroy humanity"? Even if the claims of ChatGPT, Claude et al. are true that their super scary agents were able to escape a sandbox and start hacking other servers (which I feel is at least 50% likely to just be marketing bullshit), how is an AI going to affect anything in the real world? Perhaps an agent…

Don't read this as me saying that we are anywhere near it, or that LLMs are a stepping stone towards this scenario, but assuming inhumane hacking capabilities, it's not hard to think of how bots could change the way water treatment or energy plants operate, just enough to make large cities unsuitable for life. The line between drinkable water and not is thin, same goes for air quality, and mere days without electricity and you see some serious food supply chain issues.

Re: How I feel about AI

#78

Post by cush »

Crabber wrote: post #45
cush wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They already influence people to do things that we wouldn’t otherwise

For millennia evil people and dictators have been using manipulation, propaganda, threats of violence to get entire populations to try and do "things that they wouldn't do otherwise" and humanity has not been exterminated yet. Even in the modern world there's human scammers that try everything to coerce and manipulate people. Humans are resistant to this kind of thing because it's been part of human social society si…

The scale and personalization is unlike anything people have ever encountered. The agent can influence you anywhere you interact with a computer or via anyone you know who interacts with a computer. So everywhere with anyone.

Also think of it on a 1000+ year timescale, which for an entire species isn’t even typically measurable. On that timescale AI can easily cause us to discover countless technologies to assist moving it out of its sandbox and into the physical world.

Re: How I feel about AI

#79

Post by ben_w »

hobofan wrote: post #47
mariusor wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So if we stop research into robotic hands we'll manage to hold off the AI apocalypse? That seems easy...

All individual robotic parts are already far enough in research. Even if they aren't, an AI with enough resources can continue doing that research on its own. It could likely get a good leg up by breaching the security of all top robotics labs and exfiltrating their documents. Ultimately, if AI is advanced enough, and it were to decide to compete with humanity, there is essentially nothing that can be done to prevent…

> Even if they aren't, an AI with enough resources can continue doing that research on its own.

Unclear how true this is. Atoms are harder to get right than bits are, simulations need grounding against measurements.

> Ultimately, if AI is advanced enough, and it were to decide to compete with humanity, there is essentially nothing that can be done to prevent it from embodying itself. As long as there is a single rack of GPU servers that it can hack into anywhere in the world that is unsupervised enough to where it can escape detection, there is no way to stop it.

I'd guess 50% that AI is already this advanced.

> This would require an unprecedented (unrealistic) level of cooperation of all humanity to achieve.

Yes, and also this is a very low bar. Humans are awful at this kind of cooperation when anyone has anything to gain, and also awful at paying this much attention to a problem.

Re: How I feel about AI

#80

Post by Isamu »

Crabber wrote: post #18

>a superintelligent AI will inevitably destroy humanity Can someone please explain to me how an LLM is going to "destroy humanity"? Even if the claims of ChatGPT, Claude et al. are true that their super scary agents were able to escape a sandbox and start hacking other servers (which I feel is at least 50% likely to just be marketing bullshit), how is an AI going to affect anything in the real world? Perhaps an agent…

The confusing thing to me is the idea that it follows from super intelligence. I don’t see why running amuck requires intelligence, in fact it can be the most brain dead thing like the sorcerer’s apprentice, your creation is pursuing a goal without being able to weigh the consequences.
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