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AI 2040 and the cult of intelligence

geohot.github.io

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Re: AI 2040 and the cult of intelligence

#201

Post by beepbooptheory »

Aurornis wrote: post #199
beepbooptheory wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But like.. How can this remain a satisfying or even helpful position for you? It kinda feels The State is but one of a set of concerns I could have in this world. And the lack of one, in some contexts, is also a concern. Like, I wanna know if there is going to be mudslide, or that air traffic controllers are not overworked, that the car that I buy is not going to blow up, if I will be able to buy food tomorrow. It ju…

I addressed this in my comment: > You don’t write the laws and regulations for a perfectly faultless government that doesn’t exist. You write them for the governments as they do exist, which means they must be written first in a way that makes them resilient to bad governments abusing them. The answer isn't "Don't regulate anything!". The answer needs to be an approach to regulation that restrains the government from…

OK but then this just feels like an ultimately empty, universally acceptable thing to argue for. No one wants overreach. Its like: "we should prevent regulations that actively harm people." I agree with that! This is precisely what I mean about it just all feeling like a mostly empty dismissal, not something people can use.

Re: AI 2040 and the cult of intelligence

#202

Post by [deleted] »

mlinsey wrote: post #51

I have some sympathy to geohot's view when it comes to pure informational chatbots. It's a first amendment issue, I'm allowed to write and read books that are useful to getting away with crimes, etc. This obviously doesn't work at all when the agents start doing real things in the real world, though. "Hey AI, I don't like my neighbor, find an exploit in the firmware for his car and make the cruise control malfunction…

[deleted]

Re: AI 2040 and the cult of intelligence

#204

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

Aurornis wrote: post #199
beepbooptheory wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But like.. How can this remain a satisfying or even helpful position for you? It kinda feels The State is but one of a set of concerns I could have in this world. And the lack of one, in some contexts, is also a concern. Like, I wanna know if there is going to be mudslide, or that air traffic controllers are not overworked, that the car that I buy is not going to blow up, if I will be able to buy food tomorrow. It ju…

I addressed this in my comment: > You don’t write the laws and regulations for a perfectly faultless government that doesn’t exist. You write them for the governments as they do exist, which means they must be written first in a way that makes them resilient to bad governments abusing them. The answer isn't "Don't regulate anything!". The answer needs to be an approach to regulation that restrains the government from…

Ok, but this is so abstract that it fails to connect to the issue at hand. Ancient Athenians would have been quite mystified by the idea that certain metals are so dangerous that nobody must be allowed to own even a small piece of them; we don’t restrict uranium because our democracy is more tyrannical than theirs, we do it because we’ve discovered important facts about nuclear physics they didn’t know.

I think it would be quite sad if the mechanics of AI end up being such that people can’t be trusted with powerful compute, but sometimes sad things are true.

Re: AI 2040 and the cult of intelligence

#205

Post by slopinthebag »

Aurornis wrote: post #161
ks2048 wrote: post #61

> Like we either live in a world with freedom or we don’t, and like many Americans who have come before, I’m willing to give my life to fighting for it. This is a very simplistic view. "Freedom" isn't binary. In most of "land of the free", I can't even sit on a park bench and drink a can of beer. Yes, this is just a small example of a personal freedom - and not an important, cherished freedom like his examples (freed…

> In most of "land of the free", I can't even sit on a park bench and drink a can of beer. Freedom doesn’t mean you get to do whatever you want with property that isn’t yours. You can sit on your own bench on your own property and drink a beer. The people of the city can decide that they don’t want people using the taxpayer funded public benches used for that. Other cities do allow it. But freedom doesn’t mean anyone…

The issue is state ownership of property more than anything else. If it was truly a public space, drinking a beer wouldn’t be a problem at all.

Re: AI 2040 and the cult of intelligence

#206

Post by ks2048 »

Aurornis wrote: post #161
ks2048 wrote: post #61

> Like we either live in a world with freedom or we don’t, and like many Americans who have come before, I’m willing to give my life to fighting for it. This is a very simplistic view. "Freedom" isn't binary. In most of "land of the free", I can't even sit on a park bench and drink a can of beer. Yes, this is just a small example of a personal freedom - and not an important, cherished freedom like his examples (freed…

> In most of "land of the free", I can't even sit on a park bench and drink a can of beer. Freedom doesn’t mean you get to do whatever you want with property that isn’t yours. You can sit on your own bench on your own property and drink a beer. The people of the city can decide that they don’t want people using the taxpayer funded public benches used for that. Other cities do allow it. But freedom doesn’t mean anyone…

I agree one man's "freedom" is another man's annoyance (or worse). It is a difficult, fine-line to draw.

Thus, the beer example was mocking the author's view of "you have freedom or you don't" and the simplistic idea that "America is a _free country_".

Re: AI 2040 and the cult of intelligence

#207

Post by Aurornis »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #204
Aurornis wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I addressed this in my comment: > You don’t write the laws and regulations for a perfectly faultless government that doesn’t exist. You write them for the governments as they do exist, which means they must be written first in a way that makes them resilient to bad governments abusing them. The answer isn't "Don't regulate anything!". The answer needs to be an approach to regulation that restrains the government from…

Ok, but this is so abstract that it fails to connect to the issue at hand. Ancient Athenians would have been quite mystified by the idea that certain metals are so dangerous that nobody must be allowed to own even a small piece of them; we don’t restrict uranium because our democracy is more tyrannical than theirs, we do it because we’ve discovered important facts about nuclear physics they didn’t know. I think it wo…

> Ok, but this is so abstract that it fails to connect to the issue at hand. Ancient Athenians…

There is actually a lot to learn from history on this topic. There is a reason why most successful governments are founded with documents outlining the rights that people have and limiting the powers of the government.

Your comparison to radioactivity doesn’t hold because you’re trying to compare physical harms to information freedom. Once you go down the path of outlawing access to general knowledge unless the government decides you’re worthy of being able to access the knowledge you’re just signing up for government control of knowledge.

We’re not talking about restricting uranium or nuclear bombs in this thread. We’re talking about government control over words (or weights and tokens). This almost turning into a new “think of the children” where we’re asked to consider surrendering access to knowledge and freedom to learn because that knowledge might harm someone. If you aren’t thinking about how inviting the government to become the arbiter of safe knowledge access would go wrong you can look to many of the other governments throughout history that have restricted knowledge access in the name of protecting the people.

Re: AI 2040 and the cult of intelligence

#208

Post by clickety_clack »

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #3

Yep, that's horrifying. Imagine LLMs not just denying information about, to intentionally choose a hot button example, abortions but also invisibly logging a black mark against the asker for thoughtcrime/precrime because the current ruling party has baked their ideology into law. [EDIT] Imagine subtle injection of biases into responses that support the agenda of the current ruling party and failing to include any cou…

They don’t have to be authoritarians. Equally bad would be a group of people getting control of them thinking that they were doing all this for our own good.

> Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

- CS Lewis

Re: AI 2040 and the cult of intelligence

#209

Post by anthuswilliams »

throw310822 wrote: post #123
piker wrote: post #26

What a provocative and brilliant way to prove misalignment. It will fall on deaf ears for most but it’s a great litmus test for all: “in your opinion should your AI be permitted to tell you how to cover up a murder?”

In fact I find it a really bad example. Yes I think your personal AI could be allowed to tell you how to cover up a murder. I'm not entirely sure about it but seems possible. What about your personal, local AI guiding you to modifying a flu virus for maximum contagiousness and deadliness? "Sure George, here's your shopping list. It's $1500 total in equipment, do you want me to proceed with the orders?"

Why not? There are perfectly pro-social reasons a person might ask such a question. And a bio-terrorist would have many other avenues to answer these questions.

The concept of a bioweapon attack is commonly cited but in fact there are many other defenses against actually developing and deploying such a weapon. It's commonly portrayed as easily achievable but is in fact very, very far from it. Moteover, although there is no evidence that AI makes it easier in any way, somehow this is constantly invoked as an example of a thought crime that must be forestalled at all costs.

In the AI era people seem to want to redefine the criminal act from "doing the thing" to "asking or investigating how to do the thing". Not a mindset I share.

Re: AI 2040 and the cult of intelligence

#210

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

Aurornis wrote: post #176
SiempreViernes wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This leads to LLMs refusing to do security work for anyone, because it can’t tell if it’s being done for good or evil purposes. Oh no, of only we had some sort of ideas about automated authentication and authorisation! (If big AI actually make a model that would reliably reject dangerous queries in the first place, they can just use auth tech to serve the current ones to vetted customers)

> they can just use auth tech to serve the current ones to vetted customers Your solution is to require everyone to surrender their privacy and then allow some company or government decide who is worthy of being allowed to use AI? It’s crazy how authoritarian, controlling, and anti-privacy the anti-LLM conversation is getting.

I don’t think it’s a privacy issue. All the best auditors collaborate to agree on ethical auditing standards requiring complete disclosure; that’s not a privacy violation, even if it means some businesses end up effectively forced to reveal details they’d prefer to keep private.
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