171–180 of 1001 posts
My honest take is a lot of these famous academics played almost no part in the developments at openai. But they want the limelight. They aren’t as relevant as they want to be. In many cases, they were directly wrong about how ai would develop
Hinton has had a significant part to play in the current state of the art.
The real problem is the bad actors - trolls, mental and financial strip miners, and geopolitical adversaries. We are just not psychologically adapted or intellectually prepared or availing of a legal framework for the deluge of human-like manipulative, misleading, fraudulent generative fake reality that is about to be unleashed. Free speech, psychopathic robots, adversaries who want to tear it all down, and gullible…
I used to be fairly unconcerned about AI being dangerous. But part of the Yudkowsky interview on Lex Fridman 's podcast changed my mind. The disconnect for me is that Yudkowsky posits that the AIs will be fully "alive", thinking millions of times faster than humans and that there will be millions of them. This is too big of a speculative leap for me. What I can fairly easily imagine in the next few years with improve…
That part is doing a LOT of very heavy lifting in a story that otherwise hangs together.
The problem is that we are nowhere near such a thing. These LLM and generative systems produce very impressive results. So does a mirror and a camera (to those who have never seen one). What we have is enormous vector engines that can transform one output into another that is most statistically likely to occur in the new context. These clusters of vector elements may even appear to some to sort of map onto something that resembles computing a concept (squinting in a fog at night). But the types of errors, hallucinations, confabulations, etc. consistently produced by these tools show that there is actually nothing even resembling conceptual reasoning at work.
Moreover, there is no real idea of how to even abstract a meaningful concept from a massive pile of vectors. The closest may be from the old Expert Systems heritage, e.g., Douglas Lenat's CYC team has been working on an ontological framework for reasoning since 1984, and while they may produce some useful results, have seen no breakthroughs in a machine actually understanding or wielding concepts; stuff can rattle through the inference engine and produce some useful output, but...
Without the essential element of the ability for a computing system to successfully abstract concepts, verify their relation to reality, and then wield them in the context of the data, the entire scenario forever fails to start.
How is this different from what we have now? His immediate concern is that the internet will be flooded with false photos, videos and text, and the average person will “not be able to know what is true anymore.” maybe it's just me, but seems like this isn't a problem with technology but rather with how we organize society He is also worried that A.I. technologies will in time upend the job market. Today, chatbots lik…
We already have foreign state actors & profit maximizing corporate actors working against the average western citizens interest.
They're already doing their level best to exploit those foolish and credulous to be easy marks. This is already taking our societies to a place where life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are no longer in mosts grasp.
So yeah, generative A.I. will allow a deluge of content that means a significantly greater percent of the population get entangled in the web of propaganda. In the same way that recommended feeds with targeted adverts & content has already been doing.
A pause in A.I. research might stop us being turned into paper clips. But without a fundamental restructuring of how our big tech companies are funded the societies we know are still utterly doomed. Either the user or the state is going to need to pay. Our current system where tech companies fund themselves by selling their users minds to those who would exploit them will take us somewhere very dark with the technology that's already out there.
After reading the NYT interview, I don’t understand why he still chose to invent, in his words, a dangerous technology and publish the results openly. Not a criticism of the man, but of the article.
He states himself that it’s not a convincing argument to some.
But it surely carries some weight: in developing nuclear weapons many scientists made the same calculation even though the invention is a wicked one, in and of itself.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How would you curtail their use when any military that commits to using them will have a huge advantage ? This isn’t like nuclear weapons where any use is curtailed by the apocalyptic outcomes. Killer robots are the way we will fight in the future and any military which refuses to deploy them will find themselves facing defeat.
AI is not allowed to make the decision to kill, that must be done by a human. Having every other step done by an AI is still going to be a huge advantage over non-AI military forces.
What if we allow AI to propose targets? Even if testing shows that the AI is highly effective at picking "good" targets, that changes the situation entirely.
Suppose humans make the final decision of which target to strike. How much time is given to make that decision? What information is presented to them? If the answer is that humans make a decision in a short amount of time largely relying on an AI-generated confidence score, are humans really making the decision?
I used to be fairly unconcerned about AI being dangerous. But part of the Yudkowsky interview on Lex Fridman 's podcast changed my mind. The disconnect for me is that Yudkowsky posits that the AIs will be fully "alive", thinking millions of times faster than humans and that there will be millions of them. This is too big of a speculative leap for me. What I can fairly easily imagine in the next few years with improve…
I'm not sure that's a given. Artificial Intelligence as it currently exists, doesn't have any volition. AI doesn't have desire or fear, the way natural biological intelligence does. So you may be able to build a directive for self-preservation or reproduction into an artificial intelligence, but there's no particular reason to expect that these instincts will develop sui generis of their own accord.
I don't want to say that those concerns are unwarranted. The premise of the science fiction novel "Avogadro Corp" is that someone programs a self-preservation directive into an AI pretty much by accident. But I'm less concerned that AI will wage war on humans because it's malevolent, and much more concerned that humans will leverage AI to wage war on other humans.
That is, the most pressing concern isn't a malevolent AI will free itself from human bondage. Rather it's humans will use AI to oppress other humans. This is the danger we should be on the lookout for in the near term. Where "near term" isn't a decade away, but today.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've heard this before, but why would it be true? Serious question. I've seen Chomsky argue that LLMs can't regurgitate his linguistical theories - but ChatGPT can! I've seen Penrose argue that AI is impossible, and yet I think that ChatGPT and AlphaZero prove him wrong. I know about Linus Pauling and quasicrystals. Is this a general rule, or are people sometimes wrong regardless of their age? There's also a danger t…
You just reinforced OP's point with your examples.
We are barely scraping the surface when it comes to understanding the future dangers of AI. Geoffrey Hinton is uniquely positioned to point out where the dangers are, and from what I've gleaned from interviews one of his main concerns atm is the use of AI in the military: fully autonomous military robots might not be possible to curtail. The tried and tested method is international agreements. The current focus on ar…
You really think actors like North Korea, Al Qaeda, etc. will adhere to International agreements?!?