521–530 of 532 posts
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If he wasnt getting the vast majority of the attention from publishing about it I would agree.
I don't really see the validity in creating a conspiracy theory here. It's very crisis actor adjacent.
Its a claim without evidence, and a significant lack of verification going on.
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Rice's Theorem says you cannot predict or control the effects of nearly any program on your computer; for example, there's no way to guarantee that running a web browser on arbitrary input will not empty your bank account and donate it all to al-qaeda; but you're running a web browser on potentially attacker-supplied input right now. I do agree that there's a quantitative difference in predictability between a web br…
In practice, most programs can be predicted within reasonable bounds quite easily. And you can contain the external effects of most programs quite easily. Rice's theorem doesn't stop you from keeping a program off the Internet, or running it in a VM. Your later comparisons are nonsense. We're not talking about babies, we're talking about adults who should know better assembling high leverage tools specifically to int…
The point is that, if you're designing and selling a product which a large minority of people are going to use in a way that harms themselves and others, pointing at the users and calling them irresponsible doesn't actually help anybody. The people designing and selling the products actually need to make them safer. And if they're not going to do that voluntarily (they're not), we need the government to create insurance requirements, safety bonds, and whatever other incentive gradients are required to make the producers build safe products.
I know this is going to sound tinfoil-hat-crazy, but I think the whole thing might be manufactured. Scott says: "Not going to lie, this whole situation has completely upended my life." Um, what? Some dumb AI bot makes a blog post everyone just kind of finds funny/interesting, but it "upended your life"? Like, ok, he's clearly trying to himself make a mountain out of a molehill--the story inevitably gets picked up by…
People get “overstimulated” from receiving one text message these days
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Stopping the anthropomorphization of AIs is kind of like fighting a trademark battle. Every time a perceived misuse is noticed, action must be taken! The difference is that the action is taken, for free, by a concerned citizen, rather than by a corporate lawyer. The outcome will be the same. Xerox and kleenex are practically public domain, and AIs will be anthropomorphized. Given that humans have been ascribing inten…
To amplify: It's also potentially lethally stupid. What if an industrial robot arm decides to smash a €10000 expensive machine next door, or -heaven forbid- a human's skull. "It didn't really decide to do anything, stop anthropomorphising, let's blame the poor operator with his trembling fist on the e-stop." Yeah, to heck with that. If you're one of those people (and you know who you are); you're overcompensating. We…
It's not the operator that's to blame, it's whoever made the decision to have a skull-smashing machine who's only safety interlock is a poor operator with an e-stop. The world has gone insane, and personifying these AI systems is a way to shift blame from the decision makers to "Shit happens shrug". That's what we should be fighting back against
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Does it matter? "It's not really writing a hit piece to destroy my reputation, it's just a next token generator" But you're still not getting hired.
Stopping the anthropomorphization of AIs is kind of like fighting a trademark battle. Every time a perceived misuse is noticed, action must be taken! The difference is that the action is taken, for free, by a concerned citizen, rather than by a corporate lawyer. The outcome will be the same. Xerox and kleenex are practically public domain, and AIs will be anthropomorphized. Given that humans have been ascribing inten…
This is true, but there's a big difference between "My car decided not to start" and "The computer wrote a hit piece about me". In reality, both of these events came from the same amount of intention, but to lay-people, these are two very different things. Educating about those differences (and very intentionally not blurring the lines) can only be a good thing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
To amplify: It's also potentially lethally stupid. What if an industrial robot arm decides to smash a €10000 expensive machine next door, or -heaven forbid- a human's skull. "It didn't really decide to do anything, stop anthropomorphising, let's blame the poor operator with his trembling fist on the e-stop." Yeah, to heck with that. If you're one of those people (and you know who you are); you're overcompensating. We…
> "It didn't really decide to do anything, stop anthropomorphising, let's blame the poor operator with his trembling fist on the e-stop." It's not the operator that's to blame, it's whoever made the decision to have a skull-smashing machine who's only safety interlock is a poor operator with an e-stop. The world has gone insane, and personifying these AI systems is a way to shift blame from the decision makers to "Sh…
For one, there's no single executive who pushes a red button marked "Deploy The Skull-Splitter". Rather the opposite in fact, especially in eg german industry where people very much care and demand proper adherence to safety.
Assuming good faith; sometimes, the holes in the swiss cheese line up [1]
Advanced safety and reliability cultures don't look for people to blame [2] [3] . Your first goal is to look for the causes and you solve them. Very sometimes, someone does deserve blame (due to eg malice or gross negligence), in which case then you get to blame them.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_cheese_model
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_culture https://www.faa.gov/about/initiatives/cp (FAA Just Culture)
[3] https://www.atlassian.com/incident-management/postmortem/bla... https://sre.google/sre-book/postmortem-culture/ Atlassian, Google SRE
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Stopping the anthropomorphization of AIs is kind of like fighting a trademark battle. Every time a perceived misuse is noticed, action must be taken! The difference is that the action is taken, for free, by a concerned citizen, rather than by a corporate lawyer. The outcome will be the same. Xerox and kleenex are practically public domain, and AIs will be anthropomorphized. Given that humans have been ascribing inten…
> Given that humans have been ascribing intention to inanimate objects and systems since time immemorial, this outcome is preordained. This is true, but there's a big difference between "My car decided not to start" and "The computer wrote a hit piece about me". In reality, both of these events came from the same amount of intention, but to lay-people, these are two very different things. Educating about those differ…
The one thing I can tell you with certainty: If anyone is claiming certainty, they're hallucinating harder than the AI :-P (is also what I tell lay people).
Turns out, hilariously, Claude's much criticized "I don't know" is actually epistemically the most honest (tracing from Chalmers).
[ semi randomly: I'm especially frustrated at psychology papers at the moment. I can't find a good continuous measure for affect. Almost all the protocols use discrete buckets :-/ ]
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> "It didn't really decide to do anything, stop anthropomorphising, let's blame the poor operator with his trembling fist on the e-stop." It's not the operator that's to blame, it's whoever made the decision to have a skull-smashing machine who's only safety interlock is a poor operator with an e-stop. The world has gone insane, and personifying these AI systems is a way to shift blame from the decision makers to "Sh…
Seriously, that's not how you investigate incidents. For one, there's no single executive who pushes a red button marked "Deploy The Skull-Splitter". Rather the opposite in fact, especially in eg german industry where people very much care and demand proper adherence to safety. Assuming good faith; sometimes, the holes in the swiss cheese line up [1] Advanced safety and reliability cultures don't look for people to b…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Seriously, that's not how you investigate incidents. For one, there's no single executive who pushes a red button marked "Deploy The Skull-Splitter". Rather the opposite in fact, especially in eg german industry where people very much care and demand proper adherence to safety. Assuming good faith; sometimes, the holes in the swiss cheese line up [1] Advanced safety and reliability cultures don't look for people to b…
Advanced safety and reliability cultures also don't choose technologies that are unpredictable and misunderstood. Nothing is safe or reliable about these systems.
In fact, you can imagine that if we build up a just culture around deployment of semi-autonomous agents like this, the operator wouldn't have had to remain anonymous in the first place. Best practices help everyone.
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In practice, most programs can be predicted within reasonable bounds quite easily. And you can contain the external effects of most programs quite easily. Rice's theorem doesn't stop you from keeping a program off the Internet, or running it in a VM. Your later comparisons are nonsense. We're not talking about babies, we're talking about adults who should know better assembling high leverage tools specifically to int…
I guess today's kids don't know this; but "Unsafe at Any Speed" was the title of a 1965 book that spurred the creation of the Department of Transportation, and changed the automotive industry. The point is that, if you're designing and selling a product which a large minority of people are going to use in a way that harms themselves and others, pointing at the users and calling them irresponsible doesn't actually hel…
And actually, the deployer has a lot more control over the havoc the software can cause than the creator. They choose what credentials to give it, whether and how closely to monitor it, any other guardrails, etc. If the operator of the bot discussed in OP had intervened soon after it went off the rails, we wouldn't be here.
So sure, I would also tell the makers of this software to knock it off. Don't put out products that are the network equivalent of a chainsaw on a roomba, no matter how many cool tiktoks it creates. But when I'm talking to people running claws or whatever, they no longer have the excuse of ignorance. So the advice is still: Do not run the program.