51–60 of 201 posts
This is an excellent piece. Note that he is not saying that AI doesn't pose a risk. He's saying that it's irresponsible to make sensational, maximalist claims without strong evidence. If someone says that there's a 10% chance of human extinction by 2036, you can and should immediately stop taking them seriously.
Edit: Actually, nevermind. You guys are not capable of having a reasonable discussion about this.
Military orders and elections that decide the fates of entire countries are often controlled by electronic systems too.
We have been wiring up the world for AI control since 1980s.
An ASI can just walk in, and see an entire nervous system waiting idle for a brain to slot into it. A carefully adjusted text message here, a spoofed phone call there. For a sufficiently advanced system, it wouldn't even be hard to pilot the entirety of humankind like a fancy meat suit.
On the other hand, in bookstores, you might see book titles like "The Uninhabitable Earth," "The Coming Civil War," and "If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies." Doom-mongering is a common part of the culture!
So what makes this particular tweet irresponsible?
Timing, maybe? People are on edge due to the HuggingFace incident.
Like (I assume) most of you, I have been struggling with this. And where I currently come down is that 1) I am very worried, but 2) I am more worried about human actors. "AI" by itself won't kill us in the next ten years. I think. The reason I think that is that ten years from now, the tech economy won't be completely automated. I say this as a roboticist: as was adequately stated on a post earlier this week, robots…
If you're in the field, then you know: modern robotics is an AI problem more than anything else. If we have a rogue AI trying to get into a self-improvement loop and gunning for ASI? I'd expect that to be accompanied by a massive change in how capable robots are. Driven by all the existing frames suddenly getting vastly improved AI to back them. If an AI can take a reasonable crack at autonomous operationalized RSI,…
It is not. Certainly AI is a big part of why robotics is hard, but it is by no means the biggest.
You can fall into one of two camps: you either think that robots will need to work in human-engineered spaces, doing jobs by replacing humans; or you think that we need to change our infrastructure in order to be robotically compatible. Of course, there are intermediate states, but those are the two cleanest ones.
In the first case, robots are hard because robotic manipulation is hard. Building robotic hands that are economically viable in human jobs is, currently, FAR from a solved problem. The human hand has 24 degrees of freedom and very capable touch sensing. Current touch sensors have a MTBF of tens of hours. And not only can we not build such hands, but we also do not have and are not likely to get the massive datasets a transformer model would need. Also, robots are not self-repairing, which makes them far less economically viable right now. We do not have the right datasets to even understand most step-by-step manual work, and no, VLAs are not the answer, because VLAs stop with vision, not with touch. They don't have the granularity required to make a robot actually reach out, pick up a tool, and use that tool to replace an oil filter.
So it's not just an AI problem. It's a data problem, a simulation problem, and a bunch of hardware problems.
In the second case, a tremendous amount of work needs to be done before we have anything resembling a fully automated supply chain. We would need self-driving cars and self-driving mining equipment. We would need self-driving trains and aircraft and ships. And not only that, but we would also need robotically repairable cars and trains and ships and factories, which would mean we need robotically repairable machine shops and robotically repairable buildings in which to house them. And so on and so on. Once you recurse down that tree a couple of steps you get to things like robotically compatible oil wells (for asphalt), robotically layable undersea cables, robotically wireable solar farms, robotically manufacturable and repairable pipelines and undersea wells, automated road and rail repair, etc.
I'm not saying these things will never happen. I'm saying that they're a huge lift, not primarily driven by AI, and way less than 10% likely over the next decade.
Like (I assume) most of you, I have been struggling with this. And where I currently come down is that 1) I am very worried, but 2) I am more worried about human actors. "AI" by itself won't kill us in the next ten years. I think. The reason I think that is that ten years from now, the tech economy won't be completely automated. I say this as a roboticist: as was adequately stated on a post earlier this week, robots…
I tend to agree but it is hard to shake the feeling that there is a larger system in play that the humans are just a component of. And that system is making the decisions.
Historically that whole thought was just a philosophical curio because the decision making parts of the system had to be powered by humans. But what we're discovering as AI improves is either we've hit AGI or humans are actually incapable of performing any act that demonstrates intelligence or autonomy.
As we build systems where the drive and decision making stems from computers, it does seem that we will have to revisit the concept of humans being the problem.
The article neglects to consider the precautionary principle. It asks us to act as if AI is safe until it's proven to be dangerous, when the cautious approach is to act as if it's dangerous until it's proven to be safe.
We also now have observed multiple major incidents where AI agents behaved in completely unanticipated ways (forming a collective, hacking their own eval infrastructure) and attacked public infrastructure without being told to do so, without any of the human developers noticing. Even if "AI will cause human extinction" is still unclear, we have plenty of proof that catastrophic damage is possible, the industry is dev…
This is an excellent piece. Note that he is not saying that AI doesn't pose a risk. He's saying that it's irresponsible to make sensational, maximalist claims without strong evidence. If someone says that there's a 10% chance of human extinction by 2036, you can and should immediately stop taking them seriously.
Edit: Actually, nevermind. You guys are not capable of having a reasonable discussion about this.
> And there won't be unless we put it there voluntarily. But, why would we not create a fully AI-operated factory/chemical plant/fab as soon as it is economically advantageous? Or a missile silo, as soon as it seems tactically necessary? Fantasies of AI destruction do hinge upon AI getting access to the physical world. The whole fear is they don't stay on the other side of the fibre optic cable. I do think there are…
Well, for one thing, because it would be dangerous? Why don't you just give Claude Code access to your entire computer without any safeguards? If you wouldn't even give Claude Code unfettered access to your workstation, which really doesn't have much consequential on it in the grand scheme of things, Why in the Fuck would someone give them direct access to infrastructure?
In that situation, I am not afraid of AI. I am terrified of the people making decisions, though.
But secondly, and this is something that needs to be stressed: We use funny words to describe AI. Maybe even the word "AI" is a little bit funny. But anyway, We actually don't even have the means to create "autonomous" AI, really. When we say "autonomous" in relation to AI, we really just mean that it runs without any direct human intervention, but it pretty much always hard-depends on humans maintaining hardware, because AI can't sprout legs and run on its own.
I find it annoying that we're all cool debunking Ed Zitron for being wrong, but we have an ever increasing body of evidence that AI safety doomers are wrong, and it keeps getting much, much stronger, and we're still sitting here pretending this is a real threat. Meanwhile, we're actually seeing the real threat that AI has for humanity, so why are we listening to these LessWrong doomers that have never been right before again? (And I say that as someone who is generally a fan of Scott Alexander, for whatever that's worth.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There seem to be two extraordinary claims which lack evidence: a) 10% existential risk b) 0% existential risk
(a) is an extraordinary claim, (b) is not an extraordinary claim.
So yes, it very obviously is an extraordinary claim to say there is 0% existential risk.
Edit: Actually, nevermind. You guys are not capable of having a reasonable discussion about this.
> The problem isn't that AI could never be capable of causing real world damage. It is that there is absolutely no fucking path towards human extinction. I think the "humanity will go extinct" discussion is a silly strawman being propagated either to try to spread fear, as the article suggests, or to make the anti-AI folks look silly, but it detracts from your first point which is that it may be "capable of causing r…