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An Alien Mind

openai.com

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Re: An Alien Mind

#441

Post by scotty79 »

an0malous wrote: post #391
scotty79 wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Prepare for moving goalposts. In 50 years people will still doubt that AI can create anything novel and worthwhile, while they are going to rely mostly on the things that didn't exist before AI, in nutrition, medicine, technology, communication, entertainment. They will see them as, normal, common and simple extensions of the previous developments, pushed mindlessly a bit forward by stochastic parrots.

Claiming that AI will be valuable in 50 years is you moving the goalposts back 50 years. It’s a strawman argument, no one is saying it won’t be valuable in 50 years

> no one is saying it won’t be valuable in 50 years

Plenty of people are saying that. That AI is fundamentally a bubbl and nothing will ever come out of it and we shouldn't pursue it.

Re: An Alien Mind

#442

Post by scotty79 »

krige wrote: post #385
scotty79 wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's not unreasonable that these systems cap out at some point, or perhaps fizzle away entirely. Yeah, like computers and mobile phones did. Things that have utility, even if not immediate or initially obvious, don't fizzle out.

That's survivor bias to the extreme.

What did fizzle away then and why do you believe AI is more similar to that thing than to computers?

Re: An Alien Mind

#443

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

baq wrote: post #151
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Collectively, humans aren't aligned, and don't build aligned systems. Humans have a concept of alignment, and multiple traditions, practices, and systems that aggressively oppose it. Why would AI be any different?

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.

Humans had plenty of opportunity not to start World War 1 and World War 2 as well, which negates that argument.

Re: An Alien Mind

#444

Post by igleria »

27183 wrote: post #440
igleria wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can think of several computer programs that are stored in big 5.1/4 floppy discs that could end humanity in... half an hour.

It would require an authorized human to load the floppy into the drive and make it go. And there's nothing special about that process being done in code, it could just as well be done by people flipping switches manually. There's just no plausible way, in the real world, that a computer program running in some datacenter is going to make this happen. Or anything of any dire existential consequence. It's not a real th…

I think I disagree! You can always manipulate a human. It's true tho that this particular example has a myriad of failsafes, so the actual example I wrote is less than interesting.

Re: An Alien Mind

#445

Post by 27183 »

igleria wrote: post #444
27183 wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would require an authorized human to load the floppy into the drive and make it go. And there's nothing special about that process being done in code, it could just as well be done by people flipping switches manually. There's just no plausible way, in the real world, that a computer program running in some datacenter is going to make this happen. Or anything of any dire existential consequence. It's not a real th…

I think I disagree! You can always manipulate a human. It's true tho that this particular example has a myriad of failsafes, so the actual example I wrote is less than interesting.

> You can always manipulate a human.

Yes, but to make "apocalyptic" scenarios happen your AI would need to manipulate at least millions of people. So far it's not yet clear they can successfully manipulate even one, or even that "manipulate" is a coherent concept, since LLMs pretty clearly have no agency or intrinsic goals. So like... I guess if we start seeing AI systems autonomously throwing elections and starting wars I'd be more concerned? It doesn't look likely anytime soon.

Re: An Alien Mind

#447

Post by treszkai »

doginasuit wrote: post #376
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Collectively, humans aren't aligned, and don't build aligned systems. Humans have a concept of alignment, and multiple traditions, practices, and systems that aggressively oppose it. Why would AI be any different?

I don't think this captures the full mechanics of human alignment. We have rational alignment but we also have emotional alignment, i.e., empathy. It is an automatic process and happens (or doesn't happen) dynamically with the other humans we observe. This is one of the hard limitations of LLMs, they will never be natively in tune with this layer of alignment. Culture is another layer of human alignment. Those things…

> the HF hack was partly the result of a training algorithm that incentivized goal completion as the highest priority, and let them run endlessly in an unmonitored sandbox with weak security

I don't mean to be a smart-ass, just emphasize the fatality of this: goal completion will always be the highest priority, and even if one day it takes second place on certain deployments to "human values" or whatever, there's no way to guarantee at the moment that it will be so on every deployment of highly capable models across the globe. Same goes for running AIs in an unmonitored sandbox with weak security.

Re: An Alien Mind

#448

Post by nullbio »

_dark_matter_ wrote: post #314
nullbio wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My opinion is that serious repercussions for lying would fix the world overnight. Everything bad stems from lying, it is the root of all evil. It creates distrust, fear, paranoia. It re-inforces bad ideas and groupthink. It creates delusions and delusional people. It makes weaker people, too. People don't get an opportunity to learn to deal with criticism. People don't get an accurate reflection of how others see the…

This is so, painfully, childish. Humans have known for thousands of years that there is no objective truth. Every falsity can be bent and twisted until it is more true than the sun itself.

Your reading comprehension is painfully childish. You're conflating my point of "telling the truth" with objective truth.

I was talking about lying. i.e., facing accountability for your actions and not going out of your way to deceive others. Dissonance between what you believe and what you express. Being honest. I think that was fairly clear.

> Every falsity can be bent and twisted until it is more true than the sun itself.

Objective truth is relative to its grounding. The solution to 1 + 1 is 2 in arithmetic is objectively true within that system. It's also objectively true that you are not Elon Musk. Some systems have no or few axioms and are mostly a matter of fashion, but it's not relevant to what I'm talking about.

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