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Statement on AI Risk

safe.ai

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Re: Statement on AI Risk

#191

Post by endisneigh »

lb4r wrote: post #183
endisneigh wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do not think the internet, or AI in its current form, is a existential risk to humanity, no.

I think if you were referring to AI in its 'current form' all along, then most people will probably agree with you, myself included. But 20 years from now? I personally think it would be arrogant to dismiss the potential dangers.

if we are talking about regulating something now, we must talk about capabilities now. there's no point in talking about nonexistent technology. should we also regulate teleportation? it's been done in a lab.

if AI actually is a threat, then it can be regulated. it's not a threat now, period. preemptively regulating something is silly and a waste of energy and political capital.

Re: Statement on AI Risk

#193

Post by endisneigh »

clnq wrote: post #185
lb4r wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you saying that the internet at large could pose a 'legitimate risk to human life such that we would go extinct in the near future,' or do you disagree that AI, when used as a tool by humans, could pose such a risk?

In retrospective, the internet has done a lot to stifle human progress or thriving through proliferation of extremist ideas and overwhelming addictiveness. Just take the recent events alone - COVID-19 would not have been as much of a threat to humanity if some people wouldn't have built echo chambers on the internet with tremendous influence over others where they would share their unfounded conspiracy theories and m…

without the internet more people would have died from COVID simply because the information wouldn't have been disseminated about what it is to begin with.

Re: Statement on AI Risk

#194

Post by pixl97 »

wongarsu wrote: post #63
sycamoretrees wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is more research really going to offer any true solutions? I’d be genuinely interested in hearing about what research could potentially offer (the development of tools to counter AI disinformation? A deeper understanding of how LLMs work?), but it seems to me that the only “real” solution is ultimately political. The issue is that it would require elements of authoritarianism and censorship.

A lot of research about avoiding extinction by AI is about alignment. LLMs are pretty harmless in that they (currently) don't have any goals, they just produce text. But at some point we will succeed in turning them into "thinking" agents that try to achieve a goal. Similar to a chess AI, but interacting with the real world instead. One of the big problems with that is that we don't have a good way to make sure the g…

Intelligence cannot be 'solved', I would go on to further say that an intelligence without the option of violence isn't an intelligence at all.

If you suddenly wanted to kill people, for example, then could probably kill a few before you were stopped. That is typically the limits of an individuals power. Now, if you were a corporation with money, depending on the strategy you used you could likely kill anywhere from hundreds to hundreds of thousands. Kick it up to government level, and well, the term "just a statistic" exists for a reason.

We tend to have laws around these behaviors, but they are typically punitive. The law realizes that humans, and human systems will unalign themselves from "moral" behavior (whatever that may be considered at the time). When the lawgiver itself becomes unaligned, well, things tend to get bad. Human alignment typically consists of benefits (I give you nice things/money/power) or violence.

Re: Statement on AI Risk

#195

Post by aero-deck »

api wrote: post #174
aero-deck wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't matter who wrote it, it got picked up, had a good argument and affected market opinion. The execs now need to respond to it. Humans also don't grasp that things can improve exponentially until they stop improving exponentially. This belief that AGI is just over the hill is sugar-water for extracting more hours from developers. The nuclear bomb was also supposed to change everything. But in the end nothing…

It's too early to say definitively but it's possible that the atomic bomb dramatically reduced the number of people killed in war by making great power conflicts too damaging to undertake: https://kagi.com/proxy/battle_deaths_chart.png?c=qmSKsRSwhgA... The USA and USSR would almost certainly have fought a conventional WWIII without the bomb. Can you imagine the casualty rates for that...

cool - so AI is gonna dramatically reduce the number of emails that get misunderstood... still gonna still be sending those emails tho.

Re: Statement on AI Risk

#196

Post by notahacker »

alasdair_ wrote: post #144
notahacker wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems apt the term "Bulverism" comes from CS Lewis, since he was also positing that an unseen, unfalsifiable entity would grant eternal reward to people that listened to him and eternal damnation to those that didn't...

The irony of critiquing Bulverism as a concept, not by attacking the idea itself, but instead by assuming it is wrong and attacking the character of the author, is staggeringly hilarious.

I'm replying in agreement with someone who already pointed out the obvious flaw in labelling any questioning of the inspirations or motivations of AI researchers as "Bulverism": none of the stuff they're saying is actually a claim that can be falsified in the first place!

I'm unconvinced by the position that the only valid means of casting doubt on a claim is through forensic examination of hard data that may be inaccessible to the interlocutor (like most people's bank accounts...), but whether that is or isn't a generally good approach is irrelevant here as we're talking about claims about courses of action to avoid hypothetical threats. I just noted it was a particularly useful rhetorical flourish when advocating acting on beliefs which aren't readily falsifiable, something CS Lewis was extremely proud of doing and certainly wouldn't have considered a character flaw!

Ironically, your reply also failed to falsify anything I said and instead critiqued my assumed motivations for making the comment. It's Bulverism all the way down!

Re: Statement on AI Risk

#198

Post by dwaltrip »

sf4lifer wrote: post #139

LLMs are just text prediction. I don't see the linear path from LLM to AGI. Was there similar hysteria when the calculator or PC first came out?

It’s not just random text, they are predicting writings and documents produced by humans. They are “language” models.

Language is used to say things about the world. This means that predicting language extremely well is best done through acquiring an understanding of the world.

Take a rigorous, well-written textbook. Predicting a textbook is like writing a textbook. To write a good textbook, you need to be an expert in the subject. There’s no way around this.

The best language models (eg GPT-4) have some understanding of the world. It isn’t perfect, or even very deep in many ways. It fails in ways that we find quite strange and stupid. It isn’t capable of writing an entire textbook yet.

But there is still a model of the world in there. It wouldn’t be able to do everything it is capable of otherwise.

Re: Statement on AI Risk

#199

Post by duvenaud »

I signed the letter. At some point, humans are going to be outcompeted by AI at basically every important job. At that point, how are we going to maintain political power in the long run? Humanity is going to be like an out-of-touch old person on the internet - we'll either have to delegate everything important (which is risky), or eventually get scammed or extorted out of all our resources and influence.

Re: Statement on AI Risk

#200

Post by duvenaud »

trebligdivad wrote: post #38

There are a bunch of physicists signed up on there; (e.g. Martin Rees) - they don't seem relevant to it at all. There's been a long history of famous physicists weighing in on entirely unrelated things.

Well, Rees co-founded the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, and has at least been thinking and writing about these issues for years now.
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