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The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: Safety

aphyr.com

81–90 of 195 posts

Re: The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: Safety

#81
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh no, I'm sorry to hear that. For the future, try to avoid prevaricating when you actually have a clear sense of what you want to argue. Instead of convincing me that you've weighed both options and found luddism wanting, you just come off as dishonest. If you think stridently, write stridently.

I’m not a native speaker and you may find my writing simplistic if your standard vocabulary includes three expressions I’ve had to look up (I don’t mean this as an insult, I was just genuinely stumped I could barely understand your comment). I may think stridently (debatable) but I generally believe it is best to always try to meet in the middle if the goal is genuine discussion. This is my attempt at that.

But meeting in the middle only works if you honestly believe the middle is a valuable place to be. I don't want to dissect your writing too much, but let's look at one example.

> The 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 is very confident, strident language. You clearly believe that there is a faction of people demonizing technology, akin to luddites, who are not worthy of being taken seriously.

> This one raises a lot of important points about LLMs, but...

So here you go for the rhetorical device of weighing the opposing view. Except, you don't weight it at all. You are not at all specific about what those points are. It's just a way to signal that you're being thoughtful without having to actually engage with the opposing viewpoint.

> I do think that safety is important... But I think it's better not to be a luddite.

Again, the rhetoric of moderation but not at all moderate in content.

It was a clear mistake to think that this was LLM writing. But I suspect the reason I made this mistake is that AI writing influences people to mimic surface level aspects of its style. AI writing tends to actually do the "You might say A is true, but B has some valid points, however A is ultimately correct." Your writing seems like that if you aren't reading it closely, but underneath that is a very human self-assuredness with a thin veneer of charitability.

Re: The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: Safety

#82
post #71

There's really only one thing we need to do to avoid the apocalypse, and that is to not hand over the launch codes to a LLM. Seems easy enough, I'm actually pretty confident in even the most incompetent of current world leaders in this particular task.

You don't think a human using an LLM to generate content that convinces another human to press the launch button is a concern? Sure seems like there's more than one thing we need to do.

Re: The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: Safety

#84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its usually the educated and elite PMC types who have grievance with technology. They secured their status and have lucrative jobs mostly with the help of technology and they are too scared to have anything threaten their position in society. It is highly hypocritical to behave this way but they don't seem to have the self awareness to observe it objectively. Ask any poor person in India what their sentiment is with…

> The world is far more democratic now than before and I attribute it to technology because it reduces information asymmetry That is fantasy. Information technology has created an unprecedented level of information asymmetry and the gap is widening everyday as the total computing capacity grows. Before information era, the ruling class was roughly as blind as peasants. Population census took years, and sometimes outr…

Take two countries. One with open access to information in the way you described and another country where internet is not allowed. Which one do you think will be more democratic?

(hint: there already exist examples like such)

Without information, there is no way a voter may know which person to vote for and whether to believe in them at all and you are easily susceptible towards manipulation.

It will become more clear when you try to answer this hypothetical: if your objective were to bring in more democracy in North Korea, would you allow the global internet to proliferate if you could? According to your theory, it would just make it worse in general.

Re: The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: Safety

#85

The Garden of Eden story is an apocryphal fable. But it sort of has a relevant twang to it. Geoffrey Hinton will not have his liver pecked out every day like Prometheus does.

Are you sure? In some mythologies, the basilisk is notably birdlike, I believe.

Re: The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: Safety

#86
post #32

The 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…

> 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!".

I think the point was never to bring a solution or show any essence of reality. The point was being polemical and signalling savviness through cynicism.

Re: The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: Safety

#88

"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.

> precise alignment with me personally, or even with my own business

Seems like a strawman, I don't think anyone means this when talking about alignment.

More general goals, like avoiding paperclip maximization, are broadly applicable to humanity.

Re: The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: Safety

#89

"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.

Interesting you single out commercial and government entities but not people. What defines the difference? Bureaucracy? Concentration of resources? Legal theory? I guess I'm trying to wonder why this line of thinking (in theory) doesn't turn to paranoia about everybody. I don't know much ethics or political theory or anything.

You can tell that broad alignment between people is natural just by looking at the effort that corporations and governments make to undermine it. Alignment between people is perhaps not a state of nature, but it really is a pretty normal consequence of a fairly small amount of education and of middle-class existence that is left to itself (i.e. without brain-washing and deliberately working to create out-groups). If you're eating enough and have a few brain cells to rub together, then you definitely want that for your neighbors too because it promotes stability.

Re: The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: Safety

#90
post #82
post #71

There's really only one thing we need to do to avoid the apocalypse, and that is to not hand over the launch codes to a LLM. Seems easy enough, I'm actually pretty confident in even the most incompetent of current world leaders in this particular task.

You don't think a human using an LLM to generate content that convinces another human to press the launch button is a concern? Sure seems like there's more than one thing we need to do.

Honestly? I really don't! What kind of content do you think would trigger that? If humans were launching nukes based on Facebook posts we'd all be long dead! A good deep fake might trick your grandma, but it's not very likely to fool military intelligence.
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