At scale I think our society is slowly inching closer and closer to building HM.
What is HM here?
A Hidden Machine. That's right, a being that can cut, fly, surf, strength, and flash! Terrifying.
The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: Safety
41–50 of 195 posts
Re: The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: Safety
#42Feels like we’re repeating classic distributed systems lessons: assume failure, constrain blast radiusand never trust components that can’t explain themselves reliably
Re: The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: Safety
#43>Unlike human brains, which are biologically predisposed to acquire prosocial behavior, there is nothing intrinsic in the mathematics or hardware that ensures models are nice. How did brains acquire this predisposition if there is nothing intrinsic in the mathematics or hardware? The answer is "through evolution" which is just an alternative optimization procedure.
There’s a funny tendency among AI enthusiasts to think any contrast to humans is analogy in disguise.
Putting aside malicious actors, the analogy here means benevolent actors could spend more time and money training AI models to behave pro-socially than than evolutionary pressures put on humanity. After all, they control the that optimization procedure! So we shouldn’t be able to point to examples of frontier models engaging in malicious behavior, right?
Re: The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: Safety
#44The author is still grieving by watching a civilisation changing technology just passing by. Every single one of the problems they note applies to any technology that existed.
The internet produced 4chan. Produced scammers. Produced fraud. Instrumental in spreading child porn. Caused suicides. Many people lost their lives due to bullying on the internet. Many develop have addictions to gaming.
To anyone who has given it some thought, any sufficiently advanced technology usually affects both in good and bad ways. Its obvious that something that increases degrees of freedom in one direction will do so in others. Humans come in and align it.
There's some social credit to gain by being cynical and by signalling this cynicism. In the current social dynamics - being cynical gives you an edge and makes you look savvy. The optimistic appear naive but the pessimists appear as if they truly understand the situation. But the optimists are usually correct in hindsight.
We know how the internet turned out despite pessimists flagging potential problems with it. I know how AI will turn out. These kind of articles will be a dime a dozen and we will look at it the same way as we look at now at bygone internet-pessimists.
This is response not just to this article, but a few others.
Re: The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: Safety
#45Excellent articles as expected from aphyr. I'm seeing that these tools are extremely powerful the hands of experts that already understand software engineering, security, observability, and system reliability / safety. And extremely dangerous in the hands of people that don't understand any of this. Perhaps reality of economics and safety will kick in, and inexperienced people will stop making expensive and dangerous…
The future is happening. Instead of trying to raise awareness about evil AI... I think it would be more healthy if we could direct this energy to ways of improving the situation without condemning the unknown of AI evolution. As with anything.. there will be a bad side.. The bad guys will always be there.. be it AI or soccer matches.. should we stop developing nuclear energy because nuclear weapons are developed?
Re: The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: Safety
#46"Alignment"
In what world would I ever expect a commercial (or governmental) entity to have precise alignment with me personally, or even with my own business? I argue those relationships are necessarily adversarial, and trusting anyone else to align their "AI" tool to my goals, needs, and/or desires is a recipe for having my livelihood completely reassigned into someone else's wallet.
Re: The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: Safety
#47> "Unavailable Due to the UK Online Safety Act" Anyone outside the UK can share what this is about?
Ironic.
Re: The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: Safety
#48Feels like we’re repeating classic distributed systems lessons: assume failure, constrain blast radiusand never trust components that can’t explain themselves reliably
Exactly assuming failure and constraining the blast radius feels like the only reliable path when the models themselves are black boxes. Patch based alignment starts looking fragile pretty quickly
Re: The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: Safety
#49The issue with most of these articles is that they seem to demonize the technology, and systematically use demeaning language about all of its facets. This one raises a lot of important points about LLMs, but the only real conclusion it seems to make is "LLMs are bad! We should never build them!". This is obviously unrealistic. The cat is out of the bag. And we're not _actually_ talking about nuclear weapons here. Th…
Thanks LLM!
lol. I did use a lot of short sentences, that’s my bad. But please read through [1] and compare my text onto it, it may enlighten you on how to actually spot llm writing.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing
Re: The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: Safety
#50[deleted]