331–340 of 964 posts
The statement should read: Mitigating the risk of extinction from climate change should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war. The fantasy of extinction risk from "AI" should not be placed alongside real, "societal scale" risks as the ones above. Well. The ones above .
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Sure, and you can set another superintelligence on another task - prevent covid ebola. See the problem with these scenarios?
Yes, I see a huge problem. Preventing damage is an order of magnitude more difficult than causing it.
The Sagan standard[1] needs to be applied here. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagan_standard
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That's curiously the standard crackpot line. "They doubted Einstein! They doubted Newton! Now they doubt me!" As if an incantation of famous names automatically makes the crackpot legitimate.
The signatories on this are not crackpots. Hinton is incredibly influential, and he quit his job at Google so he could "freely speak out about the risks of A.I."
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She's a professor of computer linguistics; it's literally her field that's being discussed. The list of signatories includes people with far less relevant qualifications, and significantly greater profit motive. She's an informed party who doesn't stand to profit; we should listen to her a lot more readily than others.
How are fame, speaking engagements, and book deals not a form of profit? She's intelligent and worth listening to, but she has just as much personal bias and motivation as anyone else.
What I wonder is why all these folks didn’t come out so vocally before? Say 3 years ago when companies like Alphabet and Meta already saw glimpses of the potential.
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Here's one of my concrete worries: 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 influenc…
Well, that's a different risk than human extinction. The statement here is about the literal end of the human race. AI being a big deal that could cause societal upheaval etc is one thing, "everyone is dead" is another thing entirely. I think people would be a lot more charitable to calls for caution if these people were talking about sorts of risks instead of extinction.
If you look at any of the writing on AI risk longer than one sentence, it usually hedges to include permanent human disempowerment as similar risk.
Nonsense, the industry giants are just trying to scare the law makers to license the technology. Effectively, cutting out everyone else. Remember the Google note circulating saying "they have no moat", this is their moat. They have to protect their investment, we don't want people running this willy nilly for next to no cost on their own devices, God forbid!
This could be Google's motivation (although note that Google is not actually the market leader right now) but the risk could still be real. Most of the signatories are academics, for one thing, including two who won Turing awards for ML work and another who is the co-author of the standard AI textbook (at least when I was in school). You can be cynical about corporate motives and still worried. I personally am worrie…
Serious question, who funds their research? And do any of them ever plan to work or consult in industry?
My econ professor was an “academic” and drew a modest salary while he made millions at the same time providing expert testimony for giant monopolies in antitrust disputes
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?
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"nuclear weapons are no big deal actually" is just a wild place to get as a result of arguing against AI risk. Although I guess Eliezer Yudkowsky would agree! (On grounds that nukes won't kill literally everyone while AI will, but still.)
Nuclear weapons are uniquely good. Turns out you have to put guns to the collective temples of humanity for them to realize that pulling the trigger is a bad idea.