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Safe Superintelligence Inc.

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Re: Safe Superintelligence Inc.

#691

Post by m3kw9 »

stoniejohnson wrote: post #527
m3kw9 wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do people always think that a superintelligent being will always be destructive/evil to US? I rather have the opposite view where if you are really intelligent, you don’t see things as a zero sum game

I think the common line of thinking here is that it won't be actively antagonist to , rather it will have goals that are orthogonal to ours. Since it is superintelligent, and we are not, it will achieve its goals and we will not be able to achieve ours. This is a big deal because a lot of our goals maintain the overall homeostasis of our species, which is delicate! If this doesn't make sense, here is an ungrounded, n…

It builds stuff? First they would have to do that over our dead bodies which means they already somehow able to build stuff without competing with us for resources, it’s a chicken or the egg problem you see?

Re: Safe Superintelligence Inc.

#692

Post by ToucanLoucan »

whimsicalism wrote: post #643
ToucanLoucan wrote: post #503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do you think the internet has returned us to pre-women's-suffrage levels of misogyny? Well in the States at least we did just revoke a sizable amount of their bodily autonomy so, the situation may not be that bad, yet, but I wouldn't call it good by any measurement. Any my objection isn't "that sexism exists in society," that is probably going to be true as a statement until the sun explodes, and possibly after tha…

I am firmly in favor of abortion rights but still I do not think that is even remotely a good bellwether to measure sexism/misogyny. 1. Women are more likely than men to be opposed to abortion rights. 2. Many people who are opposed to abortion rights have legitimately held moral concerns that are not simply because they have no respect for women's rights. 3. Roe v. Wade was the decision of 9 people. It absolutely did…

> 2. Many people who are opposed to abortion rights have legitimately held moral concerns that are not simply because they have no respect for women's rights.

Then they are free to not get an abortion. I don't get an abortion every day, it's pretty easy to accomplish. They do not get to use the letter of law to interfere in other people's medical decisions and care, and they most definitely should not have the ability to use the letter of the law to get unhealthy women killed to suit their precious morals.

Like, genuinely, if you are near a woman who is having a serious medical condition where her baby is killing her, there is no, and I repeat, NO version of that where letting an adult, alive, otherwise viable person die in the hopes that the clump of cells killing her might make it. That does not make sense under any moral system at all. We don't even take organs from recently deceased people without their permission before they croak, and some people think they have the right to demand someone lay down their entire actual life in the hope a baby MIGHT be born and live? Fuck that. Stupid.

> 3. Roe v. Wade was the decision of 9 people.

Sod public opinion. The public is wrong all the goddamn time. One would argue they're wrong more often than they aren't, and the more of em there are, and the louder they are, the more likely they're fucking wrong.

> Social media facilitates communication. As long as there is sexism and freedom of communication, there will be people making money off of facilitating sexist communication because there will be people making money off of facilitating communication writ large.

This is such a defeatist attitude. There will also always be revenge porn, child abuse material, beheading videos and people putting monkeys in blenders. Do we allow that everywhere too then? Since we cannot guarantee total blackout on objectionable content, we just wild west it? Fucking nonsense. We decide constantly by way of moderation on every service and website that exists what is permitted, and what is not, and there is no reason at all that those same things cannot be enshrined in law, with steep penalties for services that fuck up and host it.

Re: Safe Superintelligence Inc.

#695

Post by bbor »

majormajor wrote: post #526
bbor wrote: post #498

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, an entire industry of researchers, which used to be divided, is now uniting around calls to slow development and emphasize safety (like, “dissolve companies” emphasis not “write employee handbooks” emphasis). They’re saying, more-or-less in unison, that GPT3 was an unexpected breakthrough in the Frame Problem, based on Judea Pearl’s prescient predictions. If we agree on that, there are two options: 1. They’ve a…

I would read the existence of this company as evidence that the entire industry is not as united as all that, since Sutskever was recently at another major player in the industry and thought it worth leaving. Whether that's a disagreement between what certain players say and what they do and believe, or just a question of extremes... TBD.

He didn't leave because of technical reasons, he left because of ethical ones. I know this website is used to seeing this whole thing as "another iPhone moment" but I promise you it's bigger than that. Either that or I am way more insane than I know!

E: Jeez I said "subreddit" maybe I need to get back to work

Re: Safe Superintelligence Inc.

#696

Post by lazide »

TaylorAlexander wrote: post #683
lazide wrote: post #626

Earlier quoted context omitted.

His paycheck is already dependent on people believing this world view. It’s important to not lose sight of that.

I mean I think he can write his own ticket. If he said "AGI is possible but not with autoregressive approaches" he could still get funding. People want to get behind whatever he is gonna work on. But a certain amount of hype about his work is needed for funding, yes.

Kinda, as long as it’s cool. If he said ‘this is all just plausible text generation’, I think you’d find his options severely limited compared to the alternatives.

Re: Safe Superintelligence Inc.

#697

Post by bnralt »

johnthewise wrote: post #549
ilrwbwrkhv wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no "superintelligence" or "AGI". People are falling for marketing gimmicks. These models will remain in the word vector similarity phase forever. Till the time we understand consciousness, we will not crack AGI and then it won't take brute forcing of large swaths of data, but tiny amounts. So there is nothing to worry. These "apps" might be as popular as Excel, but will go no further.

If you described Chatgpt to me 10 years ago, I would have said it's AGI.

Probably. If you had shown ChatGPT to the LessWrong folks a decade ago, most would likely have called it AGI and said it was far to dangerous to share with the public, and that anyone who thought otherwise was a dangerous madman.

Re: Safe Superintelligence Inc.

#698

Post by lazide »

greatpostman wrote: post #639
lazide wrote: post #626

Earlier quoted context omitted.

His paycheck is already dependent on people believing this world view. It’s important to not lose sight of that.

Dude he’s probably worth > 1 Billion.

As long as the stock is hot, sure.

If he crashes it by undermining what is making it hot, he’ll be worth a lot less. Depending on how hard he crashes the party, maybe worthless.

Though this party is going hard enough right now, I doubt he alone could do it.

Re: Safe Superintelligence Inc.

#699

Post by philwelch »

insane_dreamer wrote: post #644
philwelch wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Social coordination problems exist within a specific set of constraints, and that set of constraints can itself be altered. For instance, climate change is often treated as a social coordination problem, but if you could produce enough energy cheaply enough, you could solve the greenhouse gas problem unilaterally.

OK, lets play this out. Lets say an AI discovers cold fusion. Given the fact that it would threaten to render extinct one of the largest global economic sectors (oil/gas), how long do you think it would take for it to actually see the light of day? We can't even wean ourselves off coal.

If you had enough energy because of “cold fusion”, you wouldn’t need the world to switch to it. You could just use it to synthesize hydrocarbon fuels from the air and water. I don’t think this is a panacea, but in principle, if a single medium-sized developed country actually had a big enough qualitative breakthrough in energy production, they could probably afford to either undercut the actual oil and gas industry or else just eat the cost of sucking all the extra CO2 out of the atmosphere. (Personally I think there are other possible approaches that may present easier solutions or mitigations; I don’t think this is literally the exact way we end up addressing climate change.)

Part of the supposed “social coordination problem”, from a certain perspective advanced by some environmentalists is the belief that ordinary people need to make serious qualitative sacrifices in their lives for the sake of stopping climate change. They might retreat to the motte of “the oil and gas companies are running the world” but in reality, their version of the “social coordination problem” is that ordinary people like being able to drive places or cook on a gas stove, and they’re frustrated and annoyed that they can’t scold them into abandoning these preferences. I personally am of the opinion that these people are creating more social coordination problems than they’re solving.

Nonetheless, as far fetched as it might seem that technological innovation can solve these problems, it seems even more far fetched that social coordination is going to solve them. And there’s a long history of these types of problems being either solved or made completely irrelevant by technological change. Which sometimes introduces completely new sets of problems, but then those get solved too.

Re: Safe Superintelligence Inc.

#700

Post by richrichie »

hackerlight wrote: post #389
insane_dreamer wrote: post #66

I understand the concern that a "superintelligence" will emerge that will escape its bounds and threaten humanity. That is a risk. My bigger, and more pressing worry, is that a "superintelligence" will emerge that does not escape its bounds, and the question will be which humans control it. Look no further than history to see what happens when humans acquire great power. The "cold war" nuclear arms race, which brough…

China can not win this race and I hate that this comment is going to be controversial among the circle of people that need to understand this the most. It is damn frightening that an authoritarian country is so close to number one in the race to the most powerful technology humanity has invented, and I resent people who push for open source AI for this reason alone. I don't want to live in a world where the first sup…

US is no angel and it cannot be the only one which wins the race. We have hard evidence of how monopoly power gets abused in the case of the US e.g. as the sole nuclear power, it used nukes on civilians.

We need every one to win this race to keep things on balance.

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