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Sam Altman’s leap of faith

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Re: Sam Altman’s leap of faith

#91

Post by shoyer »

ngrilly wrote: post #89

In the recorded interview, Sam Altman says climate change is such a hard problem that we need strong AI first to solve it. I have doubts about this for several reasons: - Human psychology is one of the biggest obstacles (maybe the biggest) in solving climate change, and I'm not sure how a strong AI is supposed to fix that. - Building carbon-neutral energy sources is a hard problem, but most experts are optimistic abo…

No kidding. We need to solve climate change now, not whenever strong AI is ready. If we wait several decades (or centuries...) to take action, the effects will be far more severe or possibly intractable. The climate system has memory and many of the processes are effectively irreversible —- once you put CO2 up in the atmosphere or melt an ice cap, going back is vastly more expensive and orders of magnitude slower.

Re: Sam Altman’s leap of faith

#92

Post by yters »

What if AGI is logically impossible because the human mind is more powerful than a Turing machine?

The only reason we discount this possibility is because we are attached to materialism, a philosophy that is self contradictory. Seems like a pretty shaky foundation for a multi-billion tech wager.

Re: Sam Altman’s leap of faith

#93

Post by tristanm »

NhanH wrote: post #83
tristanm wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. This is in the scenario where the benefits are widely distributed. But in that case the value of the entire planet goes up; You would not necessarily need to make an investment in OpenAI in order to reap benefits. Unless you think that scenario is more likely to happen with OpenAI and not via the usual academic research + shared industry research (which I don't see why that would be the case).

Something along this line: Google increases the entire value of the whole internet by a lot, but you also benefit more by investing in it in the early day.

In the normal case of one innovation in the free market, there is a punctuated moment of growth followed by a plateau. The owners of the innovation get the biggest share of the rewards, but after the plateau the benefits become more distributed. They would need to keep innovating if they want to gain further.

In the case of AGI, there is no plateau after the initial acceleration. With recursive self improvement, there is just an exponential explosion of growth. Unless this event was initiated such that distributed rewards were specifically intended to occur, the feedback loop would prevent external pressures from incentivizing any kind of distribution of rewards.

Re: Sam Altman’s leap of faith

#94

Post by nickpsecurity »

throwawaymath wrote: post #45
alehul wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Further, the second a smart one starts getting devastating results, there will be political push-back to do something about it. People might cast votes to make rules about them that limit their power or rate of development. My fear of AGI is that it will not be able to be stopped once deployed, as you're saying. It's irreversible. It will know that we want to shut it down, and so it will be able to copy itself onto…

> think about the hacking capabilities of AGI for a moment We're discussing the hypothetical skills and capabilities of a thing which is fundamentally science fiction. The rules are treated as arbitrary. I don't see a priori why an AGI would be intrinsically good at hacking, or even why it would be capable of exponentially improving itself. This is the problem I see with any discussion of AGI. The game's rules don't…

I try to stay grounded by comparing them to both prior AI's, regular brains, savant intelligence, and combinations of them playing to each's strengths. When I do this, I realize that we already have systems in place preventing, reducing, and containing damage from all kinds of smart humans. We react to their schemes in areas like finance in cat and mouse game. The AGI's would probably be no worse than dealing with them so long as they're designed to be hard or impossible to copy themselves.

Re: Sam Altman’s leap of faith

#95

Post by boltzmannbrain »

ngrilly wrote: post #89

In the recorded interview, Sam Altman says climate change is such a hard problem that we need strong AI first to solve it. I have doubts about this for several reasons: - Human psychology is one of the biggest obstacles (maybe the biggest) in solving climate change, and I'm not sure how a strong AI is supposed to fix that. - Building carbon-neutral energy sources is a hard problem, but most experts are optimistic abo…

I agree w/ you, but devil's advocate: Perhaps arriving at "I'm not sure how" is the logic underlying Altman's conclusion. That is, for any problem x that human's attempt but cannot seem to wrap their heads around (i.e. resolve to "I'm not sure how to solve x"), then x is in the family of AGI-hard problems. Here x = climate change, and b/c we don't know how to solve x (be it challenges across tech/social/political/etc.), let's build AGI and hope it can figure that mess out.

Re: Sam Altman’s leap of faith

#96

Post by chrischen »

ngrilly wrote: post #89

In the recorded interview, Sam Altman says climate change is such a hard problem that we need strong AI first to solve it. I have doubts about this for several reasons: - Human psychology is one of the biggest obstacles (maybe the biggest) in solving climate change, and I'm not sure how a strong AI is supposed to fix that. - Building carbon-neutral energy sources is a hard problem, but most experts are optimistic abo…

The AI’s solution to global warming that humans cannot solve is to kill all humans.

Re: Sam Altman’s leap of faith

#98

Post by llamataboot »

Climate change doesn't strike me as particularly technical problem at this point, it strikes me as a political problem that is part difficulty of global coordination, part vulnerability to misinformation by bad actors, and the human biology bias to evaluate threats withshort-term & linear cause/effect models - in short, an organizing and psychology problem

Re: Sam Altman’s leap of faith

#99

Post by rdlecler1 »

I feel that most of the people that are truly bullish on AI have never actually programmed it to understand how far we have to go and how primitive the solutions actually are. I see some powerful statistical tools for categorization and optimization under finely crafted conditions but nothing else. We have a long way to go.

Re: Sam Altman’s leap of faith

#100

Post by idlewords »

tristanm wrote: post #84
idlewords wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The implication is that Altman belongs to the 'hard takeoff' sect of AI religion that believes a feedback cycle of recursive self-improvement kicks in, so that the first AI to surpass human levels of intelligence is also the last.

You think so? I think if he thought hard takeoff was a real risk, he would be devoted to actually making their research "open", in the original sense of the word when Musk was in charge. According to the hard takeoff theory, it is more likely to occur due to "hardware overhangs", where big organizations accrue lots of compute infrastructure over time, but AI progress occurs in sudden jumps. Then all that infrastructu…

I'm not up on all the epicycles in hard takeoff theory, so I'd be happy to hear more from you or other people who have followed it into more fantastical territory.
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