111–120 of 130 posts
The problem with AI ethics, safety and to a smaller extent, privacy groups is that the priority of the work/message is not placed on the practicality of solving the problem, or i.e. calculating improving affordability of food/housing, but is placed,as evident on this article too, on the lack of "governance structures". In other words the priority of the work is to get these types of people into positions where they d…
I don't know why people allow others to proclaim they're 'ethicists' if they have no relevant philosophical education. There are whole fields of 'ethics' that are just PR departments trying to escape the now bad connotations of 'PR departments'.
It could be the case that Wittgensteinians have won completely, and if that is, indeed, the case—a great chunk of academic ethics should be considered hubris...
This has been happening for a long time. I first noticed this with the hand waving dismissals of older concepts like Asimov’s laws. Not a carefully reasoned argument why “not causing harm to a human” is outmoded, but just pushing it aside. I would love to see a good reasoned argument there. No, instead there is Avoiding talking about harm to humans. Just because harm is broad doesn’t get you out of having to talk abo…
I think a big factor in Asimov's laws specifically being sidelined is that the whole process of building AI looks very different from what we pictured back then. Instead of us programming the AIs by feeding it lots of explicit hand-crafted rules/instructions, we're feeding the things with plain data instead, and the resulting behavior is much more black-box, less predictable and less controllable than anticipated. Tr…
Well then that's terrifying - the problem with children is that you can raise them perfectly and they still end up psychos. That's mostly limited by the fact that we can't raise many children and humans are pretty limited in the damage they can do.
But AI scales infinitely, and if we give it access to too much stuff then the damage it could do could be human race ending.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's kinda hilarious that people are explicitly trying to build a future based on (mostly dystopian) scifi, which was the point of the torment nexus thing. But then when scifi argues for constraints on technology the argument is "those are just stories."
The argument isn't "those are just stories" it's that "those stories demonstrate why those constraints won't work." But people are going to try it anyway. Belief in Asimov's three laws is a matter of religious faith. Just know you've been warned.
If Asimov's laws don't work, that doesn't mean we can ignore the idea of them and... Just do nothing.
Humans can’t agree on what is ethical / safe, so I don’t get people trying to apply it to AI. Am I missing something big here? Anytime I see discussion framed as “ethics” my brain swaps ethics with “rules I think are good”.
Like, murder is bad, and some people disagree. Don't think that means we need to give AI access to murder. Certainly don't want to be giving them any guns.
The danger here is that we fall into a lazy "we tried nothing and we're all out of ideas" stance and then just recreate the entire plot of Terminator. We should probably do something.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The argument isn't "those are just stories" it's that "those stories demonstrate why those constraints won't work." But people are going to try it anyway. Belief in Asimov's three laws is a matter of religious faith. Just know you've been warned.
Trying to have constraints and then failing is arguably better than the current idea about AI safety - discarding constraints as a concept. If Asimov's laws don't work, that doesn't mean we can ignore the idea of them and... Just do nothing.
I don't think anyone is suggesting to just do nothing because Asimov's laws won't work, so much as suggest that people consider why they wouldn't work, and what that means for the problem of AI alignment in the real world.
It may simply be inevitable that AI (if we're defining AI as something like an LLM) can always be talked into or out of anything, given the right prompts. In which case constraints can only work so far and we need to consider what happens when they inevitably fail.
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It could be the case that Wittgensteinians have won completely, and if that is, indeed, the case—a great chunk of academic ethics should be considered hubris...
This isn't the case, and the hubris is not limited to academia...
Wittgensteinians won, and we should hope that philosophy department freaks eventually catch on to this reality.
It remains to be seen whether (b) will be needed, or for that matter, possible.
There are a lot of other ethical questions around AI too, although they mostly aren't unique to it. E.g. AI is increasingly relevant in ethical discussions around misinformation, outsourcing of work, social/cultural biases, human rights, privacy, legal responsibility, intellectual property, etc., but these topics predate LLMs by many years.
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Gebru didn't do any AI safety work at Google. She wrote stuff about doing social good, wrote the silly stochastic parrots paper that argued AI research was a waste of time, and whose title was proven false immediately (LLMs aren't parrots). The closest she got to "safety" was complaining that AI researchers weren't concerned enough that LLMs might say things Gebru didn't personally like. Serious safety researchers ar…
> Gebru didn't do any AI safety work at Google Wouldn't you find it strange for a co-lead of an Ethical AI team to not to do any AI safety work? I realize the AI Doomer vs AI Zoomer is a culture-war with a veneer or technical jargon, but I hope we can at least agree on the basic tenets of our shared reality even as we draw wildly different conclusions.
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You might not be aware of the context (actually the author of the article might not either). There has in fact been a big push by major AI companies to focus on quote safety unquote while marginalizing (not citing, giving attention to, etc) people focusing on what those companies call quote ethics unquote. For example, from Timnit Gebru: > The fact that they call themselves "AI Safety" and call us "AI Ethics" is very…
There has been a big push by major AI companies to focus on "safety", which they understand to refer to the novel types of harm that a powerful AI model might cause. It's true that some people are confident there's no such novelty, and it's impossible for an AI system to cause a problem which can't be analyzed within the frameworks we've developed for human misbehavior. Some of those people do say that if you don't a…
I generally agree with your first paragraph. My summary of the critique on "safety vs ethics" is that the push to focus on "novel" types of harm has come with dismissing and glossing over of AI reproducing and amplifying existing harms. These are well documented in machine learning from the pre-LLM era (e.g. books like Weapons of Math Destruction).