At what point do we stop pretending that the west is capitalist and accept that it's some weird corporate-cabal-command-economy? The only thing which might stop this backroom regulatory capture is the EU since they're not in on it.
Statement on AI Risk
31–40 of 964 posts
Re: Statement on AI Risk
#32The issue I take with these kind of "AI safety" organizations is that they focus on the wrong aspects of AI safety. Specifically, they run this narrative that AI will make us humans go extinct. This is not a real risk today. Real risks are more in the category of systemic racism and sexism, deep fakes, over reliance on AI etc.
But of course, "AI will humans extinct" is much sexier and collects clicks. Therefore, the real AI risks that are present today are underrepresented in mainstream media. But these people don't care about AI safety, they do whatever required to push their profile and companies.
A good person to follow on real AI safety is Emily M. Bender (professor of computer linguistics at University of Washington): https://mstdn.social/@emilymbender@dair-community.social
Re: Statement on AI Risk
#33> Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war. risk of extinction due to AI? people have been reading too much science fiction. I would love to hear a plausible story of how AI will lead to human extinction that wouldn't happen with traditional non-AI tech. for the sake of conversation let's say non-AI tech is any broadly…
I agree that a lot of the Skynet-type scenarios seem silly at the current level of technology, but I am worried about the intersection between LLMs, synthetic biology, and malicious or incompetent humans.
But that’s just as much or more of an argument for regulating the tools of synthetic biology.
Re: Statement on AI Risk
#34At what point do we stop pretending that the west is capitalist and accept that it's some weird corporate-cabal-command-economy? The only thing which might stop this backroom regulatory capture is the EU since they're not in on it.
I miss David Graeber
>Graeber Um…that’s a long story. But one reason seems to be that…and this is why I actually had managerial feudalism in the title, is that the system we have…alright—is essentially not capitalism as it is ordinarily described. The idea that you have a series of small competing firms is basically a fantasy. I mean you know, it’s true of restaurants or something like that. But it’s not true of these large institutions. And it’s not clear that it really could be true of those large institutions. They just don’t operate on that basis.
>Essentially, increasingly profits aren’t coming from either manufacturing or from commerce, but rather from redistribution of resources and rent; rent extraction. And when you have a rent extraction system, it much more resembles feudalism than capitalism as normally described. You want to distribute— You know, if you’re taking a large amount of money and redistributing it, well you want to soak up as much of that as possible in the course of doing so. And that seems to be the way the economy increasingly works.
http://opentranscripts.org/transcript/managerial-feudalism-r...
Re: Statement on AI Risk
#35I have yet to see a solution for “AI safety” that doesn’t involve ceding control of our most powerful models to a small handful of corporations. It’s hard to take these safety concerns seriously when the organizations blowing the whistle are simultaneously positioning themselves to capture the majority of the value.
There is a way, in my opinion: distribute AI widely and give it a diversity of values, so that any one AI attempting takeover (or being misused) is opposed by the others. This is best achieved by having both open source and a competitive market of many companies with their own proprietary models.
Re: Statement on AI Risk
#36I really thought there would be a statement detailing what the risks are but this seems more like a soundbite to be consumed on TV. Pretty disappointing.
Because then you wouldn't be able to get this many people to sign the statement.
It's like with climate change, every serious scientist agrees it is a problem but they certainly don't agree on the best solution.
If the history of the climate change 'debate' is anything to go by this statement will do very little except be mocked by South Park.
Re: Statement on AI Risk
#37I suspect that in 5 years we’re going to look back and wonder how we all fell into mass hysteria over language models.
This is the same song and dance from the usual existential risk suspects, who (I’m sure just coincidentally) also have a vested interest in convincing you that their products are extremely powerful.
Re: Statement on AI Risk
#38There 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.
Re: Statement on AI Risk
#39> Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war. risk of extinction due to AI? people have been reading too much science fiction. I would love to hear a plausible story of how AI will lead to human extinction that wouldn't happen with traditional non-AI tech. for the sake of conversation let's say non-AI tech is any broadly…
Extinction would probably require an AI system taking human extinction on as an explicit goal and manipulating other real world systems to carry out that goal. Some mechanisms for this might include:
- Taking control of robotic systems
- Manipulating humans into actions that advance its goal
- Exploiting and manipulating other computer systems for greater leverage
- Interaction with other technologies that have global reach, such as nuclear weapons, chemicals, biological agents, or nanotechnology.
It's important to know that these things don't require AGI or AI systems to be conscious. From what I can see, we've set up all of the building blocks necessary for this scenario to play out, but we lack the regulation and understanding of the systems being built to prevent runaway AI. We're playing with fire.
To be clear, I don't think I am as concerned about literal human extinction as I am the end of civilization as we know it, which is a much lower bar than "0 humans".
Re: Statement on AI Risk
#40I have yet to see a solution for “AI safety” that doesn’t involve ceding control of our most powerful models to a small handful of corporations. It’s hard to take these safety concerns seriously when the organizations blowing the whistle are simultaneously positioning themselves to capture the majority of the value.
It's difficult as most of the risk can be reinterpreted as a highly advanced user.
But that is where some form of hard personhood zero proof mechanism NEEDS to come in. This can then be used in conjunction with a Ledger used to track deployment of high spec models. And create an easy means to Audit and deploy new advanced tests to ensure safety.
Really what everyone also need to keep in mind at the larger scale is that final turing test with no room for deniability. And remember all those Sci-fi movies and how that Moment is portrayed traditionally.