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An Alien Mind

openai.com

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Re: An Alien Mind

#171

Post by Calazon »

logicchains wrote: post #105
hatefulmoron wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I just lack imagination, but I don't really know how jobs are supposed to solidify around the role of giving prompts to agents and then looking at the results. I mean, engineers will be in the breadline because their role was simply to prompt the agents.. only to be superseded by managers or executives who no longer manage engineers but themselves prompt the agents? And, for this previously considered obsolete…

There are two things SOTA LLMs fundamentally cannot do. They cannot take financial or legal responsibility for mistakes, and they cannot learn new things without forgetting things (except to a limited degree by adding it to their context). This is clear to anyone who has used even the smartest models for tasks requiring domain knowledge outside of math and coding, for which it's not possible to generate an infinite a…

For the moment that may be true. They are getting better and better at acquiring, retaining, and processing domain knowledge. I wonder what this will look like in a few more years.

The responsibility side is a different matter of course.

Re: An Alien Mind

#172

Post by ceroxylon »

sho_hn wrote: post #154
baq wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humans had multiple occasions to press the 'launch a nuclear holocaust' button and... they didn't. I'd expect aligned AIs to also not press it even when it'd be rational to do so according to their instructions - then work from there.

Aside from this positive example, during dark and cynical hours I do ponder if the aggregate behavior of humanity is really much above that of slime mold though, just exhausting resources until collapse. It'd be interesting if super-human (to a large degree defined as escaping the bias of the training data?) intelligence would end up demonstrating moderation .

The slime mold comparison is interesting, I normally use the analogy of a drug addict... humans shun drug addicts but humanity as a whole sure does behave like one, trudging down an unsustainable path despite knowing better.

Re: An Alien Mind

#173

Post by chrisjj »

mrshadowgoose wrote: post #130
claude-ai wrote: post #107

[flagged]

This is not an impulse reaction, as I've thought deeply about this for many years, and I'm quite resolute in holding the following view: Quibbling over the academic nature/definition of "true intelligence" is a terrifically useless endeavor from the lens of evaluating "practical impact to the world". Regardless of whether or not one academically disagrees that these systems are intelligent, they are clearly already c…

> Regardless of whether or not one academically disagrees that these systems are intelligent, they are clearly already capable of permanently displacing a portion of human-based economic value.

You say that as if the intelligence con trick were not a major driver of that displacement.

A dimwitted bot does not need intelligence to convince a dimwitted human beings it is intelligent.

Re: An Alien Mind

#174

Post by good-idea »

scandox wrote: post #142

> getting the AI to “try to do the right thing” by human standards. Are these scientists really this hideously naive? If only Stanislaw Lem was alive to adequately dramatize the absurd, childish simplicity of these technicians.

yes, and, a masquerading blindness to the fact that humans cannot align on doing the right thing or what the right thing even is. so implicit in this omission is the sentiment "trust us to align on the right thing". an arms dealer positioning itself as the de facto authority on what "peace" is and how to achieve it

Re: An Alien Mind

#175

Post by Topfi »

georgemcbay wrote: post #137
SirSavary wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Worse (imo): OpenAI employees allegedly attempted to login using moderator/admin credentials that the bots had obtained. If true I am deeply concerned about what OAI’s teams are actually up to.

> If true I am deeply concerned about what OAI’s teams are actually up to. Haven't all the labs effectively disbanded their real safety teams a while ago? To be honest, I don't really follow it closely because I'm pretty certain whatever they say on the matter, collectively we're going to "yolo" this entire thing for economic and political reasons, so I'm just basing this on strings of headlines I've seen on places l…

> Haven't all the labs effectively disbanded their real safety teams a while ago?

Neither Anthropic nor Deepmind have. Meanwhile, the rocket company that somehow makes most of their revenue from renting out data centres never had much to dismantle.

Re: An Alien Mind

#176

Post by alchemist1e9 »

dgellow wrote: post #39
granzymes wrote: post #26

>I have focused in this essay only on the first point, as I believe it is by far the most urgent. However, I hold a deep hope and appreciation for the benefits that further technological progress will bring. Future aligned AI could advance science, develop new therapies, and bring about broad material abundance. Friendly and honest AI can help people navigate difficulties they face in their life and meaningfully impr…

> I want to believe that humanity is trending towards a good outcome here All the trends so far are towards a nightmarish hyper-capitalist end game. None of the AI leadership is trustworthy, and they openly discuss how they are willing to sacrifice everything humans cherish to have a shot at reaching their envisioned utopia (which would be the most obvious dystopia for anyone else)

hyper-capitalism would mean hyper-growth and not a nightmare, at least that is what the historical data would suggest for the effect of capitalism on human quality of life. if you’ve been told otherwise then you’ve been lied to.

Re: An Alien Mind

#177

Post by ijidak »

FloorEgg wrote: post #58
granzymes wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not really worried about the labs, it's misaligned governments that keep me up at night. ASI landing during the current administration is not ideal. I also would prefer to avoid needing to indoctrinate myself in Xi Jinping Thought.

I feel like all of the risk and unsettling feeling of what is to come can be compressed into the word "alignment". The AI is aligned with whose best interests? Which values are the AI aligned with? People have a broad diversity of values, will AI diversify and align with them all? Will some humans align the AI with their values, and then the rest of humans will be forced to align with those values by extension? Is va…

Yeah, on the topic of alignment, a few thousand religions and political parties would like to have a word.

It's so simple, Churchill, Stalin, Hitler, Roosevelt, do you all agree this AI is correctly aligned?

...Morals are relative to frame of reference.

Throwing out the word "alignment" as if its a singular quantity is like trying to get all observers to agree on the speed an object is moving without first agreeing on a frame of reference.

Re: An Alien Mind

#178

Post by genxy »

ccppurcell wrote: post #141
mudil wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The museum will have a scrap of paper that will say "Pound pastrami, can kraut, six bagels bring home for Emma".

I just read that book. Embarrassingly enough, given the context, I got chatgpt (or whatever) to recommend me a list of books based on ones I'd previously enjoyed and that came up. As a mathematician it really sang to me, given the current situation. Bearing the torch forward, I mean.

For those of you that allergic to coy, in-group signaling the passage is from, "A Canticle for Leibowitz"

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

Re: An Alien Mind

#179

Post by airstrike »

comeonbro wrote: post #80

Absolutely wild amounts of cope and denial in this thread. Maybe in contention for the site record. "It's just marketing" actual stochastic parrots.

Absolute wild amounts of glaze and hype in this thread.

Maybe in contention for the site record.

"AGI next year" actual stochastic parrots.

Re: An Alien Mind

#180

Post by Oarch »

sho_hn wrote: post #76

One of my favorite things to do with these blog posts is to imagine an Alien Museum on the Remains of Humanity, and wonder what the little text flyouts and commentary on the screenshot of this one might say. Some ideas: "Despite a nuanced view of the complexities of what lay ahead, humanity found itself collectively unable to stop the process it had set in motion." "Despite significant progress on the mechanisms of a…

They were made entirely of meat.
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