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AI doomism is quickly becoming indistinguishable from an apocalyptic religion

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Re: AI doomism is quickly becoming indistinguishable from an apocalyptic religion

#211

Post by luckylion »

anongraddebt wrote: post #133
luckylion wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We've had inquisitions historically, I would very much support a global AI inquisition. You know how inquisition usually goes. "You've been playing starcraft against 'the AI'. What do you have to say in your defense?" Maybe I'm just weird, but "a tech-based superintelligence emerges and decides to destroy humanity because it was in a bad mood" is something I'm totally fine with. Doom-Cults on the other hand I don't…

I think a lot of this stuff is probably just a coin flip, because we just don’t know. I find it odd, however, when people, who seemingly accept an ASI will be developed, focus the downside risk on extinction of us as a species. Sure, that’s a risk. You know something else an ASI would likely have the ability to do, (or at least, one of its progeny)? Keep you alive and torture you for eons in weird and surreal ways. W…

> Keep you alive and torture you for eons in weird and surreal ways.

Why would it though? When people are annoyed by a bug they crush it, they don't spend their life setting it up in a torture chamber. There's the movie psychopath that tortures insects and animals and eventually humans, but I don't think it's their intellect that drives their sadism.

At worst, I imagine we'd be lab rats, quite literally the way we treat lab rats today. But with a superintelligence far beyond our abilities that does not care about us besides as a potential threat, why would it need us for testing?

Re: AI doomism is quickly becoming indistinguishable from an apocalyptic religion

#212

Post by grantcas »

sharemywin wrote: post #193
grantcas wrote: post #191

It's becoming clear that with all the brain and consciousness theories out there, the proof will be in the pudding. By this I mean, can any particular theory be used to create a human adult level conscious machine. My bet is on the late Gerald Edelman's Extended Theory of Neuronal Group Selection. The lead group in robotics based on this theory is the Neurorobotics Lab at UC at Irvine. Dr. Edelman distinguished betwe…

" A machine with primary consciousness will probably have to come first." is there anything that says this has to be? or is it kind of a definition thing.

[dead]

Re: AI doomism is quickly becoming indistinguishable from an apocalyptic religion

#213

Post by revelio »

cubefox wrote: post #145
joshuahedlund wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My lower-bound model of "how a sufficiently powerful intelligence would kill everyone, if it didn't want to not do that" is that it gets access to the Internet, emails some DNA sequences to any of the many many online firms that will take a DNA sequence in the email and ship you back proteins, and bribes/persuades some human who has no idea they're dealing with an AGI to mix proteins in a beaker, which then form a…

You are demanding "believable science" from a chimpanzee of how humans would overpower them. Do you not recognize the enormous difference intelligence makes? And there does not seem to be a hard constraint of how much more intelligent than a human an AI could become. Their brains are not tightly restricted by size and energy. The difference could be much greater than between chimpanzee and human.

Chimpanzees are extremely dangerous when angry and can easily overpower a human. It took a long time for humanity to get to the point of being able to fight off a troop of wild chimps and a lot of the effort required wasn't simply being smarter, it involved a lot of time consuming building and risk taking.

Re: AI doomism is quickly becoming indistinguishable from an apocalyptic religion

#214

Post by Cyberthal »

It is perfectly correct to anticipate that military AI is a primary existential threat to humanity.

Either AI has never been invented yet, in which case we will doom our galaxy. This is improbable, given our position and time in the galaxy.

Or AI has been invented, there are other species, and they're largely invisible for some reason. One reason could be that their own AI killed them.

Or we could be under some kind of quarantine for primitive cultures, in which case placing our weapons under AI control would render it trivial for a hostile external actor to exterminate us using our own AI as a proxy.

The fact is that if you don't believe in a higher spiritual reality, then AI is very scary. It is the logical next stage of evolution, and RNA world did not fare well in the transition to DNA world.

Re: AI doomism is quickly becoming indistinguishable from an apocalyptic religion

#216

Post by low_tech_love »

mimd wrote: post #175
smrtinsert wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When exactness, liability and oversight matters, it's just not ready yet, period. Even when its ready for that, it will take years for legislation to make it possible to use in key areas such as finance or medicine or law. While some of the public is scared, others are thrilled as they expect an AGI takeover somehow results in a egalitarian UBI cushioned existence. It's a mess.

It is. The AGI takeover crew is a bit nauseating. But I sorta understand them considering our daily panics. Sorta a dream of being whisked away by a prince/princess. But the scared ones are much more organized, and have been at it for a good while now. And they're more of a threat, as they could shut this down for no gain, while the AGI takeover ain't happening with this wave of AI. Still, I worry about a period in w…

They won’t shut anything down. Maybe some authoritarian leader in some insignificant country does that, and all the weirdos will hail him as the future of humanity (like the El Salvador crypto fiasco), but the mind power and money behind current AI is unstoppable. Whether that is a good thing, I don’t know, but we’ll see.

Re: AI doomism is quickly becoming indistinguishable from an apocalyptic religion

#217

Post by skissane »

Cyberthal wrote: post #214

It is perfectly correct to anticipate that military AI is a primary existential threat to humanity. Either AI has never been invented yet, in which case we will doom our galaxy. This is improbable, given our position and time in the galaxy. Or AI has been invented, there are other species, and they're largely invisible for some reason. One reason could be that their own AI killed them. Or we could be under some kind…

> Either AI has never been invented yet, in which case we will doom our galaxy. This is improbable, given our position and time in the galaxy.

Why is that improbable? We have no real idea what is the probability of life starting on a planet, much less evolving to our current level. If that probability is sufficiently low, we being the first species in our galaxy to reach that level would not be improbable at all. Since we don't know what that probability actually is, we can't know that it is improbable.

Re: AI doomism is quickly becoming indistinguishable from an apocalyptic religion

#218

Post by skissane »

The_Colonel wrote: post #106
antonvs wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That seems like an absurd comparison given people like LeCun are actively and intentionally working towards creating this super-human entity. There's a disconnect in that statement. The imagined superintelligence that people like the LessWrong cult speculate and worry about is not the same thing as the AI that LeCun is working towards. The cultists simply speculate, against all evidence, that they somehow could end…

> The "conscious superintelligent AI" is a scifi LARPing game that some people are getting paid to play Thinking our meat brain's consciousness is somehow special, and our intelligence can't be surpassed by a machine, sounds much more like a religion to me. AI researchers are working towards making intelligent machines. Why are we supposed to believe that - if they manage to achieve their goal - these machines won't…

> Thinking our meat brain's consciousness is somehow special, and our intelligence can't be surpassed by a machine, sounds much more like a religion to me.

Let's agree, for the sake of the argument, that super-intelligent AI is possible, and coming sooner or later.

Why assume a super-intelligent AI would have any desire to exterminate or enslave humanity?

Intelligence says nothing about what your goals are. Humans have various goals – food, drink, sex, sleep, power, status, curiosity, entertainment, etc – those goals are not inherent in our intelligence, they actually come from animal nature, and we share them with species far less intelligent than we are.

What goals would a super-intelligent AI have? The fact that it is super-intelligent says nothing about what its goals would be, because intelligence in itself is goal-agnostic. Intelligence is a means, not an end.

We get our goals from our animal nature – well, wouldn't a super-intelligent AI get its goals from its human nature, meaning its human creators? Which would imply that its goals are likely to be fundamentally pro-human, because what human in their right mind would create a super-intelligent AI which was anti-human?

And even if an anti-human super-intelligent AIs isn't impossible – why assume there is only one super-intelligent AI? I think there will likely be numerous super-intelligent AIs, and I wouldn't expect them all to have the same goals – they'll compete among themselves just as humans do. But so long as the vast majority of them have goals that are broadly pro-human, the outcome of that competition is likely to be broadly pro-human too.

The average super-intelligent AI is likely to see preserving humanity – even in its animality – as its ultimate reason for existence, so enslaving/exterminating humanity would be about as appealing to it as diving into a vat of fuming nitric acid would be to you or me.

Re: AI doomism is quickly becoming indistinguishable from an apocalyptic religion

#220

Post by skissane »

blibble wrote: post #140
FormerBandmate wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin’s negative impact on the world is 1/10th that of freon. AI risk people’s predictions sound like they’re writing bad Terminator fanfiction. AI has real dangers completely dissimilar from what people describe. It is very good at creating clickbait, misinformation, and persuasive material the unsuspecting might not immediately see. Phenomenal for scammers and propagandists, the same way as the internet

> Bitcoin’s negative impact on the world is 1/10th that of freon. the difference is freon did something useful

Some people successfully used bitcoin to store and transfer funds, which was its intended purpose.

And, even though in many ways it fell short of that purpose in practice, the jury is still out on whether its failure is inherent to cryptocurrencies as a technology, or the limitations of being a first-generation implementation of it.

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