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Thousands of AI Authors on the Future of AI

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Re: Thousands of AI Authors on the Future of AI

#61

Post by ShamelessC »

jjcm wrote: post #19

A really simple approach we took while I was working on a research team at Microsoft for predicting when AGI would land was simply estimating at what point can we run a full simulation of all of the chemical processes and synapses inside a human brain. The approach was tremendously simple and totally naive, but it was still interesting. At the time a supercomputer could simulate the full brain of a flatworm. We then…

> At the time a supercomputer could simulate the full brain of a flatworm.

Citation needed?

Re: Thousands of AI Authors on the Future of AI

#62

Post by throwup238 »

glial wrote: post #50
throwup238 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The vast majority of the chemical processes in a single cell are concerned with maintaining homeostasis for that cell - just keeping it alive, well fed with ATP, and repairing the cell walls. We don't need to simulate them.

> We don't need to simulate them. You might be right, but this is the kind of hubris that is often embarrassing in hindsight. Like when Aristotle thought the brain was a radiator.

If you have any evidence to the contrary, I would love to hear it because it would upend biology and modern medicine as we know it and we'd both win a Nobel prize.

As long as it's modern scientific evidence and not a 2,300 year old anecdote, of course.

Re: Thousands of AI Authors on the Future of AI

#63

Post by redavni »

throwup238 wrote: post #42
jjcm wrote: post #19

A really simple approach we took while I was working on a research team at Microsoft for predicting when AGI would land was simply estimating at what point can we run a full simulation of all of the chemical processes and synapses inside a human brain. The approach was tremendously simple and totally naive, but it was still interesting. At the time a supercomputer could simulate the full brain of a flatworm. We then…

Another approach: the adult human brain has 100 (+- 20) billion or 10^11 neurons. Each neuron has 10^3 synapses and each synapse has 10^2 ion channels, amounts to 10^16 total channels. Assuming 10 parameters is enough to represent each channel (unlikely), that's about 10^17 (100 quadrillion) total parameters. Compare that to GPT4 which is rumored to be about 1.7*10^12 parameters on 8x 80GB A100s. log(10^17/10^12)/log…

> December, 2048

So it is not unreasonable to expect I can have an Ana de Armas AI in 2049?

I hope you AI people are better than the flying car people.

Re: Thousands of AI Authors on the Future of AI

#64

Post by dmd »

gary_0 wrote: post #58
shpongled wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be pedantic, I would argue that we aren't even close to being able to simulate the full brain of a flatworm on a supercomputer at anything deeper than a simple representation of neurons. We can't even simulate all of the chemical processes inside a single cell. We don't even know all of the chemical processes. We don't know the function of most proteins.

It depends on what kind of simulation you're trying to run, though. You don't need to perfectly model the physically moving heads and magnetic oscillations of a hard drive to emulate an old PC; it may be enough to just store the bytes. I suspect if you just want an automaton that provides the utility of a human brain, we'll be fine just using statistical approximations based on what we see biological neurons doing. T…

> based on what we see biological neurons doing

We have almost no idea what biological neurons are doing, or why. At least we didn't when I got my PhD in neuroscience a little over 10 years ago. Maybe it's a solved problem by now.

Re: Thousands of AI Authors on the Future of AI

#65

Post by __loam »

sveme wrote: post #16

Does anyone know potential causal chains that bring about the extinction of mankind through AI? Obviously aware of terminator, but what other chains would be possible?

One potential line is a general purpose ai like chat gpt that can give instructions on how to produce genetically engineered viral weapons, for example. I find this improbable, but it's possible that a future LLM (or whatever) gets released that has this capability but isn't know to have that capability. Then you might have a bunch of independent actors making novel contagions in their garage.

That would still require a lot of equipment potentially but it's there.

Another possibility would be some kind of rogue agent scenario where the program and hide and distribute itself on many machines, and interact with people to get them to do bad things or give it money. I think someone already demonstrated one of the LLMs doing some kind of social engineering attack somewhere and getting the support agent to let them in. Not hard to imagine some kind of government funded weapon that scales up that kind of attack. Imagine whole social movements, terrorist groups, or religious cults run by an autonomous agent.

Re: Thousands of AI Authors on the Future of AI

#66

Post by shpongled »

jjcm wrote: post #59
shpongled wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be pedantic, I would argue that we aren't even close to being able to simulate the full brain of a flatworm on a supercomputer at anything deeper than a simple representation of neurons. We can't even simulate all of the chemical processes inside a single cell. We don't even know all of the chemical processes. We don't know the function of most proteins.

I very likely was incorrect about the chemical processes, so thank you for clarifying. This is remembering work for a decade ago, so I'm almost certainly wrong about some of the details.

It's still a great idea - I haven't heard anyone else suggest using such context for predicting AGI timelines.

Re: Thousands of AI Authors on the Future of AI

#67

Post by endisneigh »

bufferoverflow wrote: post #41
endisneigh wrote: post #12

Maybe I'm too pessimistic, but I doubt we will have AGI by even 2100. I define AGI as the ability for an intelligence that is not human to do anything any human has ever done or will do with technology that does not include itself* (AGI). * It also goes without saying that by this definition I mean to say that humanity will no longer be able to meaningfully help in any qualitative way with respect to intellectual tas…

That's an unreasonable metric for AGI. You're basically requiring AGI to be smarter/better than the smartest/best humans in every single field. What you're describing is ASI. If we have AGI that is on the level of an average human (which is pretty dumb), it's already very useful. That gives you robotic paradise where robots do ALL mundane tasks.

What is your definition for AGI that isn't already met? Computers have already been superior to average humans in a variety of fields since the 90s. If we consider intelligence as the ability to acquire knowledge, then any "AGI" will be "ASI" in short order, therefore I make no distinction between the two.

Re: Thousands of AI Authors on the Future of AI

#68

Post by bbor »

michael_nielsen wrote: post #7
bbor wrote: post #2

Very interesting, especially the huge jump forward in the first figure and a possible majority of AI researchers giving >10% to the Human Extinction outcome. To AI skeptics bristling at these numbers, I’ve got a potentially controversial question: what’s the difference between this and the scientific consensus on Climate Change? Why heed the latter and not the former?

We have extremely detailed and well-tested models of climate. It's worth reading the IPCC report - it's extremely interesting, and quite accessible. I was somewhat skeptical of climate work before I began reading, but I spent hundreds of hours understanding it, and was quite impressed by the depth of the work. By contrast, our models of future AI are very weak. Something like the scaling laws paper or the Chinchilla…

Amazing response, thanks for taking the time - concise, clear, and I don’t think I’ll be using that comparison again because of you. I see now how much more convincing mathematical models are than philosophical arguments in this context, and why that allows modern climate-change-believing scientists to dismiss this (potential, very weak, uncertain) cogsci consensus.

In this light, widespread acknowledgement of xrisk will only come once we have a statistical model that shows it will. And at that point, it seems like it would be too late… Perhaps “Intelligence Explosion Modeling” should be a new sub-field under “AI Safety & Alignment” — a grim but useful line of work.

FAKE_EDIT: In fact, after looking it up, it sorta is! After a few minutes skimming I recommend Intelligence Explosion Microeconomics (Yudkowsky 2013>) to anyone interested in the above. On the pile of to-read lit it goes…

Re: Thousands of AI Authors on the Future of AI

#69

Post by endisneigh »

paxys wrote: post #53
endisneigh wrote: post #12

Maybe I'm too pessimistic, but I doubt we will have AGI by even 2100. I define AGI as the ability for an intelligence that is not human to do anything any human has ever done or will do with technology that does not include itself* (AGI). * It also goes without saying that by this definition I mean to say that humanity will no longer be able to meaningfully help in any qualitative way with respect to intellectual tas…

AGI doesn't have to mean superintelligence/singularity (which seems to be what you are describing).

What is your definition for AGI that isn't already met?

Re: Thousands of AI Authors on the Future of AI

#70

Post by endisneigh »

golol wrote: post #54
endisneigh wrote: post #12

Maybe I'm too pessimistic, but I doubt we will have AGI by even 2100. I define AGI as the ability for an intelligence that is not human to do anything any human has ever done or will do with technology that does not include itself* (AGI). * It also goes without saying that by this definition I mean to say that humanity will no longer be able to meaningfully help in any qualitative way with respect to intellectual tas…

Why define AGI like that? General intelligence is supposed to be something like human intelligence. You are talking about ASI.

I'm curious to hear your definition of AGI that hasn't already been met, given computers have been superior to humans at a large variety of tasks since the 90s.
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