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The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: Safety

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Re: The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: Safety

#101

Post by zozbot234 »

MaulingMonkey wrote: post #91
sigbottle wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting you single out commercial and government entities but not people. What defines the difference? Bureaucracy? Concentration of resources? Legal theory? I guess I'm trying to wonder why this line of thinking (in theory) doesn't turn to paranoia about everybody. I don't know much ethics or political theory or anything.

> Interesting you single out commercial and government entities but not people. What defines the difference? Bureaucracy? Concentration of resources? Legal theory? Not OP, but for me, kind family and friends, and various feel-good pieces of fiction and other writing, at least let me envision the possibility of a perfectly kind/dedicated/innocent/naieve individual who is truly on my side 100%. But even that is mostly…

> each party's profit is necessairly limited by the other party's

Profit is obtained by maximizing traded benefits and minimizing costs. None of this requires taking anything away from any other party.

Re: The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: Safety

#102

Post by bigfishrunning »

atleastoptimal wrote: post #55

There really are only 3 options that don't involve human destruction: 1. AI becomes a highly protected technology, a totalitarian world government retains a monopoly on its powers and enforces use, and offers it to those with preexisting connections: permanent underclass outcome 2. Somehow the world agrees to stop building AI and keep tech in many fields at a permanent pre-2026 level: soft butlerian jihad 3. Futurama…

Scenario 2 makes the assumption that no technological development can happen without AI, which seems like a stretch to me. Honestly, the worst scenario i can think of is 40ish years of AI assisted development followed by a technological crash due to there being no competent engineers left to fix the slop.

Re: The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: Safety

#103

Post by simianwords »

slopinthebag wrote: post #96
simianwords wrote: post #44

The author is still grieving by watching a civilisation changing technology just passing by. Every single one of the problems they note applies to any technology that existed. The internet produced 4chan. Produced scammers. Produced fraud. Instrumental in spreading child porn. Caused suicides. Many people lost their lives due to bullying on the internet. Many develop have addictions to gaming. To anyone who has given…

> We know how the internet turned out despite pessimists flagging potential problems with it. A sludge of spyware and addiction machines which employ negative emotion and outrage to drive shareholder value? "The internet" is a pretty big tent. Everything from text messages to streaming video to online gaming to social media to encyclopedias. I think 15 years ago you could make a strong case that the internet was most…

No internet is not a net negative now. I can't believe I have to say this.

Re: The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: Safety

#104

Post by weinzierl »

goatlover wrote: post #78
weinzierl wrote: post #73

Oh boy, that’s a very generous view of human nature. The cynic in me agrees with the article’s premise, but not because I believe "alignment is a joke" , but because I doubt that humans are "biologically predisposed to acquire prosocial behavior."

Human cooperation is the norm not the exception.

The norm is competition and cooperation is the tool we invented to compete more effectively.

Cooperation is only competition’s favorite strategy.

Re: The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: Safety

#105

Post by JumpCrisscross »

robot-wrangler wrote: post #89
sigbottle wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting you single out commercial and government entities but not people. What defines the difference? Bureaucracy? Concentration of resources? Legal theory? I guess I'm trying to wonder why this line of thinking (in theory) doesn't turn to paranoia about everybody. I don't know much ethics or political theory or anything.

You can tell that broad alignment between people is natural just by looking at the effort that corporations and governments make to undermine it. Alignment between people is perhaps not a state of nature , but it really is a pretty normal consequence of a fairly small amount of education and of middle-class existence that is left to itself (i.e. without brain-washing and deliberately working to create out-groups). If…

> broad alignment between people is natural

Uh, what? People have been killing each other over values misalignments since there have been people. We invented civilization in part to protect our farms and granaries from people who disagreed with us on whose grain was in said granaries.

Re: The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: Safety

#106

Post by bitwize »

MaulingMonkey wrote: post #91
sigbottle wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting you single out commercial and government entities but not people. What defines the difference? Bureaucracy? Concentration of resources? Legal theory? I guess I'm trying to wonder why this line of thinking (in theory) doesn't turn to paranoia about everybody. I don't know much ethics or political theory or anything.

> Interesting you single out commercial and government entities but not people. What defines the difference? Bureaucracy? Concentration of resources? Legal theory? Not OP, but for me, kind family and friends, and various feel-good pieces of fiction and other writing, at least let me envision the possibility of a perfectly kind/dedicated/innocent/naieve individual who is truly on my side 100%. But even that is mostly…

> But even that is mostly imagination and fiction... although convincing others of that isn't necessairly an argument worth making.

There was a Japanese visual novel in the 2000s about a girl who was your personal maid, and was so devoted would always take your side in any conflict, accept and support you just the way you are, even if you were a horrid person to your friends. It turns out she was a ghost, or a kind of yokai, or something. Anyhoo, back on 2ch she attracted a fandom, and there was a second group of people on 2ch who labelled her a "useless person manufacturer" because if you actually had a person who always accepted you just the way you are and never pushed back, that can be actually a trap that prevents you from developing.

It's a theme that's relevant today when people have AI servitors that always glaze them. It puts even certain utopian AI fiction, like Richard Stallman's story "Made for You", into a whole new light.

Re: The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: Safety

#107

Post by cindyllm »

simianwords wrote: post #84
raincole wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The world is far more democratic now than before and I attribute it to technology because it reduces information asymmetry That is fantasy. Information technology has created an unprecedented level of information asymmetry and the gap is widening everyday as the total computing capacity grows. Before information era, the ruling class was roughly as blind as peasants. Population census took years, and sometimes outr…

Take two countries. One with open access to information in the way you described and another country where internet is not allowed. Which one do you think will be more democratic? (hint: there already exist examples like such) Without information, there is no way a voter may know which person to vote for and whether to believe in them at all and you are easily susceptible towards manipulation. It will become more cle…

[dead]

Re: The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: Safety

#108

Post by acdha »

jazzpush2 wrote: post #11
acdha wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s unsurprising given the author’s long history in the tech community. A ton of people see that domain and upvote.

Sure, but 4 front-page posts from the same url in 4 days surely sits at the tail of the distribution. (I guess they all capitalize on the same 'LLM-is-bad' sentiment).

Different URL, same domain, and exactly the kind of thing I’d expect a fair number of HN readers to have in a feed reader where they’d see it shortly after publication and decide to share it.

Also, if you think this is just “LLM is bad”, I highly suggest reading the series first. The social impacts they talked about at the start of the series should resonate with a lot of people here and are exactly the kind of thing which people building systems should talk about. If you’re selling LLMs, you still want to think about how what you’re building will affect the larger society you live in and the ways that could go wrong—even if we posit sociopath/MBA-levels of disregard for impacts on other people, you still want to think about how LLMs change the fraud and security landscape, how the tools you build can be misused, how all of this is likely to lead to regulatory changes.

Re: The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: Safety

#109

Post by [deleted] »

amarant wrote: post #90
anon35 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't think a human using an LLM to generate content that convinces another human to press the launch button is a concern? Sure seems like there's more than one thing we need to do.

Honestly? I really don't! What kind of content do you think would trigger that? If humans were launching nukes based on Facebook posts we'd all be long dead! A good deep fake might trick your grandma, but it's not very likely to fool military intelligence.

[deleted]

Re: The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: Safety

#110

Post by atleastoptimal »

bigfishrunning wrote: post #102
atleastoptimal wrote: post #55

There really are only 3 options that don't involve human destruction: 1. AI becomes a highly protected technology, a totalitarian world government retains a monopoly on its powers and enforces use, and offers it to those with preexisting connections: permanent underclass outcome 2. Somehow the world agrees to stop building AI and keep tech in many fields at a permanent pre-2026 level: soft butlerian jihad 3. Futurama…

Scenario 2 makes the assumption that no technological development can happen without AI, which seems like a stretch to me. Honestly, the worst scenario i can think of is 40ish years of AI assisted development followed by a technological crash due to there being no competent engineers left to fix the slop.

I didn't say all technological development would be halted, just that tech "in many fields" would have to be stalled for safety (AI development, algorithm development that would reduce the cost of training models, etc)> Naturally if AI is considered an existential threat there would be a huge safety radius for things that would allow bad-actors to train AI models.
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