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Gavin Newsom vetoes SB 1047

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Re: Gavin Newsom vetoes SB 1047

#491

Post by atemerev »

whimsicalism wrote: post #487
atemerev wrote: post #483

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To make a deadly virus, you need just a degree in bioengineering and about $1M of equipment; the information is readily available. If you are on the cheap side, you can source the equipment nearly free on lab clearance sales etc. It is 2024. Children do their first genetic engineering projects in _high school_. You can buy a CRISPR kit _right now_ for about $150. This horse has sailed long ago.

That is not even remotely true for a novel viral sequence that would be very dangerous. And funny that we have gone from “nothing is more dangerous than the atomic bomb” to “anyone with a bio degree and 1 million is more dangerous than the atomic bomb”

> That is not even remotely true for a novel viral sequence that would be very dangerous.

We don't need fully novel sequences. The original Spanish Flu strain sequence is published and well known. And you can always modify existing ones with known aspects (e.g. as in this infamous paper: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC114026/). And yes, it is more difficult to build an atomic bomb, as materials are thankfully expensive and difficult to obtain.

Re: Gavin Newsom vetoes SB 1047

#492

Post by jpk »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #453
pkage wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no concrete concern past "models that can simulate thinking are scary." The risk has always been connecting models to systems which are safety critical, but for some reason the discourse around this issue has been more influenced by Terminator than OSHA. As a researcher in the field, I believe there's no risk beyond overconfident automation---and we already have analogous legislation for automations, for exa…

> There is no concrete concern This is false. You are dismissing the many concrete concerns people have expressed. Whether you agree with those concerns is immaterial. Feel free to argue against those concerns, but claiming there are no concerns is a false and unsupported assertion. > but for some reason the discourse around this issue has been more influenced by Terminator than OSHA. 1) Claiming that concerns about…

Ok, so based on another comment in this thread, your concrete concern is something like: the math that happens during inference could do some side-channel shenanigans that exploits a hardware-level vulnerability to do something. Where something leads to and existential threat to humanity. To me, there's a lot of hand waving in the something.

It's really hard to argue for or against the merits of a claim of risk, when the leap from what we know today (matrix multiplication on a GPU is generally considered safe) to the hypothetical risk (actually it's not, and it will end civilization) is so wide. I think I really need to see a plausible path from GPU vulnerability to "we're all gonna die" to take a concern like this seriously. Without that, all I see is a sci-fi boogeyman serving only to spook governments into facilitating regulatory capture.

Re: Gavin Newsom vetoes SB 1047

#493

Post by pc86 »

tempestn wrote: post #438
HumblyTossed wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think if you look at the actual news reporting on Fox News, it could be closer to center. But when you factor in their opinion "reporting" it's very clearly heavily right-leaning. Problem is, most of their viewership can't tell the difference.

Also while many individual stories might be in the center, bias is also exhibited in which stories they choose to print, or not to, as well as in esitorialized headlines.

This is part of why I like ground.news, they will show you blindspots based on the existence of reporting entirely. If you read mainly left or center news, the front page is about 50% stories that are mostly over covered by "right" news outlets (and vice versa).

Re: Gavin Newsom vetoes SB 1047

#494

Post by pc86 »

rhizome wrote: post #441
cbozeman wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When people say, "The Deep State", what they really mean is, "unelected lifelong government employees who can create regulations that have the force of law". And that is a problem. Congress makes laws, not government agencies like the FDA, EPA, USDA, etc. We've seen a near-total abdication of responsibility from Congress on highly charged matters that'll piss off someone , somewhere in their constituency, because the…

Congress makes laws, not government agencies like the FDA, EPA, USDA, etc. What are some examples of laws created by unelected people?

Federal regulations hold the force and effect of law. The listed agencies (and all others) all have thousands of pages of rules and regulations that, if violated, are federal crimes that come with serious financial penalties as well as jail time.

That Congress has given some measure of its Constitutional lawmaking ability to federal agencies is not a partisan statement and is not debated as a matter of fact, the question is just whether you think it's okay / legal or not.

Re: Gavin Newsom vetoes SB 1047

#495

Post by pc86 »

cbozeman wrote: post #424
Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - Blog you've never heard of? Right. That checks out. There's a certain sect of the far right that is easily convinced by one guy saying "The media is lying to you! This is what's really happening!" followed by the most insane shit you've read in your life. They love to rant about the Deep State.

When people say, "The Deep State", what they really mean is, "unelected lifelong government employees who can create regulations that have the force of law". And that is a problem. Congress makes laws, not government agencies like the FDA, EPA, USDA, etc. We've seen a near-total abdication of responsibility from Congress on highly charged matters that'll piss off someone , somewhere in their constituency, because the…

This is exactly why there should be aggressive term limits for all offices. A 3-4 term limit for all offices regardless of the length of your term (e.g. 6-8 for the House, 18-24 years for Senate, etc.) would still allow exemplary public servants to spend their life in public service if their constituencies demand it. Even at 3 terms that's over 3 decades if you spend 3 terms in the House, 3 in the Senate, and 2 as President.

If you know you have at most 6 years in the House to make a difference you're much more likely to actually try to make a difference.

I think somewhat counter-intuitively but related, members of Congress need to be paid more to attract successful people. If you're making $600k/yr as a surgeon you have very little incentive to leave your job to make $175k/yr as a member of Congress.

Re: Gavin Newsom vetoes SB 1047

#496

Post by SonOfLilit »

datavirtue wrote: post #484
SonOfLilit wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

so say someone builds an unintelligent nanomachine that can survive extreme conditions and can turn any matter it encounters into more of it and launch them into space in random directions... is that "our children" that you would be happy to see replacing us?

No. Fully sized machines. I'm trying to be realistic here.

But assume that it _were_ possible. Would you be happy about it, or sad? And why?

My point is that not anything we could conceivably create is a child we would like to see replace us (I'd argue for the stronger claim that the only kind of machine-child we would be happy to have replace us is one that contains a derivative of a mind-uploaded human).

Re: Gavin Newsom vetoes SB 1047

#497

Post by JoshTriplett »

jpk wrote: post #492
JoshTriplett wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is no concrete concern This is false. You are dismissing the many concrete concerns people have expressed. Whether you agree with those concerns is immaterial. Feel free to argue against those concerns, but claiming there are no concerns is a false and unsupported assertion. > but for some reason the discourse around this issue has been more influenced by Terminator than OSHA. 1) Claiming that concerns about…

Ok, so based on another comment in this thread, your concrete concern is something like: the math that happens during inference could do some side-channel shenanigans that exploits a hardware-level vulnerability to do something . Where something leads to and existential threat to humanity. To me, there's a lot of hand waving in the something . It's really hard to argue for or against the merits of a claim of risk, wh…

My concern is that people are rapidly attempting to build AGI, while applying lower standards of care and safeguards than we would expect to be applied to "team of humans thinking incredibly quickly", which is a bare minimum necessary-but-not-sufficient lower bound that should be applied to superintelligence.

Among the many ways that could go wrong is the possibility of exploitable security vulnerabilities in literally any surface area handed to an AI, up to and including hardware side channels. At the same time, given the current state of affairs, I expect that that is a less likely path than an AI that was given carte blanche (e.g. "please autonomously write and submit pull requests for me" or "please run shell commands for me"), because many many AIs are being given carte blanche so it is not necessary to break out of stronger isolation.

But that statement should not be taken as "so the only problem is with whatever AI is hooked to". The fundamental problem is building something smarter than us and expecting that we have the slightest hope of controlling it in the absence of extreme care to have proven it safe.

We currently hold frontier AI development to lower standards than we do airplane avionics systems or automotive control systems.

This is not "regulatory capture"; the AI companies are the ones fighting this. The people advocating regulation here are the myriad AI experts saying that this is a critical problem.

Re: Gavin Newsom vetoes SB 1047

#498

Post by jquery »

zzrzzr wrote: post #363
jquery wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rape is endemic throughout the prison industrial complex, protections for prisoners are nowhere good enough. Subjecting transwomen to rape in men’s prisons isn’t the solution. The JD Vance/Peter Thiel/SSC rationalist sphere is such a joke. Just a bunch of pretentious bigots who think they’re better than the “stupid” bigots.

> Rape is endemic throughout the prison industrial complex, protections for prisoners are nowhere good enough. The most effective safeguarding measure against this for female prisoners is the segregation of inmates by sex. SB132 has demolished this protection for women in Californian prisons and, as the linked articles discuss, we now see the awful and entirely avoidable consequences of this law, within just a few ye…

After 2 years of implementation, California has not seen an increase in sexual assaults. It's almost like transwomen aren't the problem.

Anyone can file a request, but the request must be approved, and this is based on the totality of the situation with the prisoner. Someone doesn't get to just wake up one day and go "I'm trans" and automatically get approval, this is fearmongering from transphobes.

There's tons of oversight involved and the idea this is some kind of "loophole" for horny cis guys is bigoted nonsense.

Re: Gavin Newsom vetoes SB 1047

#499

Post by zzrzzr »

jquery wrote: post #498
zzrzzr wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Rape is endemic throughout the prison industrial complex, protections for prisoners are nowhere good enough. The most effective safeguarding measure against this for female prisoners is the segregation of inmates by sex. SB132 has demolished this protection for women in Californian prisons and, as the linked articles discuss, we now see the awful and entirely avoidable consequences of this law, within just a few ye…

After 2 years of implementation, California has not seen an increase in sexual assaults. It's almost like transwomen aren't the problem. Anyone can file a request, but the request must be approved, and this is based on the totality of the situation with the prisoner. Someone doesn't get to just wake up one day and go "I'm trans" and automatically get approval, this is fearmongering from transphobes. There's tons of o…

Please consider reading the 4W article I linked above. It explains the problem.

You may find this enlightening also: https://womensliberationfront.org/news/wolf-attends-prelimin...

A relevant extract:

"The four witnesses for the prosecution gave detailed accounts of two horrible rapes and the efforts by the alleged perpetrator to dissuade one of the victims from seeking justice, even after she was moved to a new facility for her safety.

"One of the witnesses cited SB132 as the reason why Carroll was being housed in the women’s facility in the first place. He also noted that only males can rape females and that, until these past few years, there were no prisoners physically capable of rape."

Re: Gavin Newsom vetoes SB 1047

#500

Post by wslh »

SonOfLilit wrote: post #459
wslh wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are startups and startups, the ones that you read on media are just a fraction of the worldwide reality.

You misread my intention, I think. I was pointing out that startups that don't raise enough to train a GPT-4 are excluded from the bill, that requires >$100mm expenses for a model to be covered.

Fair enough. Hope all is well there.
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