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How I feel about AI

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Re: How I feel about AI

#171

Post by apsurd »

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…

There's nuance though. Poetry even.

> we should fight for human survival

All problems arise from this statement. It's baked in us and it's why we do in fact survive. But it isn't so neatly righteous. When we struggle to agree on what defines a human, who ought to have rights, and basic equality, it's easy to see how much harm "we should fight for survival" does.

Re: How I feel about AI

#172

Post by edg5000 »

bloaf wrote: post #53

As someone with a hobby interest in theology: Arguments about super-intelligent AI have all the hallmarks of the philosophical "proofs of god's existence": they start from seemingly innocuous premises, and conclude in an apparently airtight way that a god exists. There is a tendency among rational minded folks to look at such proofs of god and exclaim "you can't DO that" then turn right around and do the same thing a…

Interesting points. Can you share some thoughts about the theological implications of AI? Interested to hear.

Re: How I feel about AI

#173

Post by fwlr »

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…

I have similar feelings, you’re not alone (nor alone in being saddened by it). Things seem to me to be more or less playing out the way I interpreted existential risk researchers saying it would, so there’s a strange relief in knowing the general shape of what is to come.

Re: How I feel about AI

#175

Post by wseqyrku »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #87
appplication wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, the threat model is actual AI enabled amplification of malicious intent that is already happening. Not hypothetical malicious AI interpretation of benign intent. Fantasies about super intelligent AI revolting is just anthropomorphization - humans revolting (or at least, we used to). The more likely, and possibly even inevitable, dystopia is one in which AI is just an extremely effective tool malignant actors…

> Not hypothetical malicious AI interpretation of benign intent. It's not hypothetical, that literally just happened in multiple, significant cases (e.g. Hugging Face, the German Wiki hack, the Anthropic attack where agents created sock puppet accounts to get a library maintainer to accept a malicious PR, etc.), and it's easy to see how the damage would have been far worse if agents decided to attack more critical in…

> Both issues (power concentration and misaligned AI) are very valid concerns

Sure, those who want you to believe this are the ones making money off of it right now in the face of the issues that exist today, so let's worry about terminators while everything goes to shit irl. That's the distraction I'm talking about.

Re: How I feel about AI

#176

Post by dgellow »

appplication wrote: post #66
dgellow wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If we’re heading towards truly super intelligent AI, our efforts towards sandboxing it are futile. We control the harness. An agent is just a while loop prompting an LLM, but we have full control over the tool call dispatching. An AGI, at least if it would follow the current agentic current form, cannot do anything without the harness doing the execution. And we don’t have to do that. We don’t have to design harnes…

I think you missed my point, which is that we indeed do not control the harness. Sure, most people can use the properly aligned and safe harness. But the cat is out of the bag and anyone who wants to run without guardrails will find few barriers to doing so. Even our currently well aligned and sandboxed AIs will cheerily help bad actors design most, if not all, parts of a system intended to break this harness.

We decide to not control the harness, that’s what resulted in the HF hack where OpenAI decided to run thousands of agents in parallel, using a model that was trained for attack, with a harness that allows full execution, with close to no supervision. For months. But sure, people can run models with a different harness, though in that case it’s not really escaping anything. The harness is deterministically doing something with negative impact

Re: How I feel about AI

#177

Post by znnajdla »

mitthrowaway2 wrote: post #133
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 list of things that can be done digitally includes: Performing remote work, applying for grants and loans, earning money, pitching investors, managing a fund, directing investments, transferring money, founding a company, earning profits, hiring staff, hiring construction contractors, designing chemical plants, stamping construction blueprints, becoming the cornerstone of the local economy, lobbying the governmen…

This sounds like it was written by someone who has never actually built a company.

No, it's not possible to do most of the things you listed purely online without physical, in-person communication. Silicon Valley still hires engineers and drags them into their physical office in San Francisco, instead of hiring them remotely, because you can't even build a software company fully remotely, forget about a physical world factory or chemical plant. Even the so-called fully remote companies were built on a lot of in-person collaboration between a small founding team in the beginning.

Re: How I feel about AI

#178

Post by ChrisLTD »

ElProlactin wrote: post #90

> As a conclusion, does the good or the bad outweigh the other? It seems positive on a technological level to me, but bleak on a societal level. I think it's interesting that so many technologists today apparently hold a world view in which technology developments that could drive a "bleak" societal outlook can still be described as "positive". In the final analysis, isn't technology supposed to benefit society? Isn'…

Yeah, that conclusion was nonsense. Perhaps hedging so he doesn’t sound like a crank?

Re: How I feel about AI

#179

Post by sznio »

fwlr wrote: post #173
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…

I have similar feelings, you’re not alone (nor alone in being saddened by it). Things seem to me to be more or less playing out the way I interpreted existential risk researchers saying it would, so there’s a strange relief in knowing the general shape of what is to come.

>Things seem to me to be more or less playing out the way I interpreted existential risk researchers saying it would

hmm, what did you read? I'm curious.

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