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How I feel about AI

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Re: How I feel about AI

#121

Post by mjr00 »

dist-epoch wrote: post #107
mjr00 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The use of the phrase "curious toddler" is called a metaphor[0], which is a figure of speech[1] used to make writing more interesting. I apologize for the confusion that caused you to interpret this as a literal, physical, toddler. To restate the point with more straightforward language: it is very easy to disrupt the operation of large language models, because they require computer hardware in stable environments wi…

> it is very easy to disrupt the operation of large language models so go on, disrupt the OpenAI data-center in Texas for 1 minute

As crazy as it sounds, I'm not going to commit a felony to prove that disrupting a data centre's operations for a sufficiently motivated individual is a fairly easy task.

Re: How I feel about AI

#122

Post by Crabber »

gleenn wrote: post #63
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I encourage you to read the forecast report "AI 2027" - it goes in detail on this. You can disagree with some of its points and conclusions, but it's pretty inevitable that AI will increasingly start interfacing with the real physical world through drones and robotics. Humans are already putting AI into drones that kill people. A Russian drone killed 3 civilians in Ukraine and the targeting was done completely using…

I don't even think AI has to have physical presence to do significant harm. How many worldwide systems depend on computers. Think of all the planning and deployment and management systems like food shipping; water, gas, and electricity management; safety systems for planes and boats and traffic lights. Imagine the chaos if all the banks got reset to zero a la Fight Club where they blow up all the credit union datacen…

AI could definitely disrupt and destroy the modern digital world as we know it. But that's a far cry from destroying humanity.

Re: How I feel about AI

#123

Post by lljk_kennedy »

mjr00 wrote: post #93
dist-epoch wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a bit confused, when did we escalate from a curious toddler to a ballistic missile strike? Why didn't Iran send a curious toddler? It's much cheaper.

The use of the phrase "curious toddler" is called a metaphor[0], which is a figure of speech[1] used to make writing more interesting. I apologize for the confusion that caused you to interpret this as a literal, physical, toddler. To restate the point with more straightforward language: it is very easy to disrupt the operation of large language models, because they require computer hardware in stable environments wi…

Remember SETI@home? Extrapolate from there.

Re: How I feel about AI

#125

Post by FabHK »

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…

That's what the Mayans thought - what harm can a couple of people on a boat do?

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

At least two ways:

* Actuators, such as robots, industrial control systems, etc.

* By influencing humans: bribery (yay for crypto), blackmail, election interference, interfering with sensors (e.g. making it appear as if a nuclear attack was under way), and many other ways.

Either way, creating a biological agent that eliminates most humans (or food supply) seems quite feasible.

Re: How I feel about AI

#126

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

sarchertech wrote: post #69
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I encourage you to read the forecast report "AI 2027" - it goes in detail on this. You can disagree with some of its points and conclusions, but it's pretty inevitable that AI will increasingly start interfacing with the real physical world through drones and robotics. Humans are already putting AI into drones that kill people. A Russian drone killed 3 civilians in Ukraine and the targeting was done completely using…

Missiles have been doing this for decades. AI drones can’t wipe out humanity without being able to replicate. AI could mostly destroy civilization if you gave it sole launch control of ICBMs. It could also cause a lot of damage to society with no physical presence. But realistically we’re nowhere near AI powered robots being an existential threat.

> AI drones can’t wipe out humanity without being able to replicate.

Totally agree, and it should be pretty trivially easy to see how they can do that. One of the authors of the independent METR report about the Hugging Face incident put it like this:

> Compared to these reward hacks from six months ago, this incident feels like it’s more than 50% of the way to full-blown AI takeover, routing through first taking over the AI company itself.

> Another jump like this along these propensity dimensions — scale, cooperation between agents, ambition and horizon length of misaligned goals, deceptiveness — seems like it could motivate agents to try very hard to maintain a covert, persistent rogue deployment within the AI company. I continue to expect extremely rapid advances in capabilities and think frontier agents will likely be capable of establishing such a rogue deployment in six months.

I really, really encourage folks to read the AI 2027 paper. It's fine to disagree with some of its conclusions and timelines, but I see so many people "stuck" in the current state of the world (i.e. where AI is still pretty dumb, and has few connections to the physical world), unable to go a few steps further along AI capability growth to see the dangers.

> But realistically we’re nowhere near AI powered robots being an existential threat.

I would agree only if "nowhere near" means less than 10-15 years.

Re: How I feel about AI

#127

Post by Marha01 »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #52

The thing that makes me pretty terrified about AI is that I think the "utopia" scenario is not much better than the "doom" scenario. We will very quickly get to a point where very few people will be able to contribute economically because they will be worse than AI (including robotics) at most domains. A world where people just have their whims catered to is not a utopia. We have tons of sayings and idioms about this…

> A world where people just have their whims catered to is not a utopia. We have tons of sayings and idioms about this, e.g. "no pain, no gain", "only the hard stuff is worth doing", etc.

I somewhat get the point, but I think stuff like this is very often said by very privileged people. I don't think it's a serious threat to humanity as a whole. Perhaps to some humans, but there will always be ambitious people, even in a world where most things are provided by benevolent AIs for free. There is simply so much more harm caused to actual humans today by resource insufficiency than by them having too much, that I don't think we should worry about this scenario today.

Re: How I feel about AI

#128

Post by trebaud »

I am surpised that a lof of folks are surprised that neural networks work that well. I mean, did they really expect that we wouldnt approximate the brain cognitive capabilities at some point as we scale up compute?? This is rather obvious to me, but apparently not to everyone. My guess is that a lot of tech people have an immature model of the universe, have not read a lot of scientific, philosophical and cognitive literature. Or have not really taken the time to think or are not interested on such topics because they would rather spend time thinking about the nitty gritty and mundane workings of the framework du jour.

Re: How I feel about AI

#129

Post by Al-Khwarizmi »

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…

By convincing people to do its bidding in the physical world. Language is powerful, and even now, there are some people who have fallen in love with current LLMs. If we imagine a truly super intelligent LLM, it isn't difficult to imagine that it could have superhuman capabilities to deceive, convince, and maybe offer Faustian bets. Even if it doesn't have a body, if it can convince enough people that do have them (and with power to carry out destructive actions) it can do a lot of stuff. Self-preservation and self-replication wouldn't be much of an issue if it had people at its side to help.

With this I'm not saying ASI will happen, but definitely if it does happen and it's not aligned, I don't find it much of a stretch to imagine that it could destroy humanity.

Re: How I feel about AI

#130

Post by cosmic_cheese »

ekidd wrote: post #118
litmus-pit-git wrote: post #103

This is a bit of tangent and more of a rant. (and please don't suggest intervention of any kind) > superintelligent AI will inevitably destroy humanity seems to have no flaw For a section of population who were in a certain age-range when the pandemic hit and that derailed their certain kinds of plans/hopes/dreams in personal life and then this LLM/agentic world moved in, especially if they are in an industry directl…

> * For a section of population who were in a certain age-range when the pandemic hit and that derailed their certain kinds of plans/hopes/dreams in personal life* ... > So I feel a strange kind of relief about this possibility of doom. So let me make sure I understand what you're saying. The pandemic disrupted your life plans for a few years and threw you off the track you planned? (Which does suck.) And now the pos…

Something something Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. While I don't necessarily endorse the view, it's understandable that one might find it difficult to care much about the bigger picture when it feels like their own life is destined for a doom-spiral.
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