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AI Could Defeat All of Us Combined

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Re: AI Could Defeat All of Us Combined

#91
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think most people will agree that a GAI can't be bargained with, tempted, bought or otherwise contained - We will be at its complete mercy regardless of any constraints we might think up. Who thinks this? I don't see any evidence that this is a common belief among people who work in the hard sciences related to AI, nor do I think it sound remotely logical It feels like some people are taking archetypes like pando…

A point Taleb keeps on making is that risk analysis is separate from the domain and shouldn't be done by domain experts. Global pandemic response plans for example shouldn't be done by virologists, because they are experts in viruses, not in how a pandemic which is a health/political/economic complex system behaves. The same way, AI risk plans shouldn't be done by AI researchers, just like we don't use neurologists f…

I definitely agree with the premise, technicians have no business dictating the societal implications of their specialty, and technocracy is tyranny because it doesn't maximize for what people care about.

I think you need to have a proper bridge between the technical understanding and the people who manage the implications. In the case of longer standing diseases, for example, we're probably there. The risks are understood, and laypeople can weigh them as part of policy decisions. For new things like covid, we saw the world go crazy with misunderstanding, and ridiculous things like plexiglass barriers everywhere, and other talisman type stuff, as politicians tried to simultaneously abdicate responsibility to disease researchers, while grabbing at the parts they liked for political gains. But at least there was some grounding in reality because people do have a share and longstanding comprehension of disease spread and of the concepts of getting sick, etc.

New technology is the worst, because it gets blown up into some imagined concept that has no bearing on the reality. So, as I implied in the upstream comment, if we were on the verge of releasing some kind of sentient evil into the world, maybe the kind of silly speculation ("it can't be bargained with", etc) that basically rehashes Terminator, would be appropriate. But it's no more realistic than, say, the kid in Looper who has telekinetic powers and grows up to be an evil mob boss. It's just a made up bad thing that could happen, that if you talked to someone who knew the tech you'd realize is nonsense. That's very different from health threats we know exist.

Re: AI Could Defeat All of Us Combined

#92

This type of thing used to scare me a lot more. But after the events of the last few years, the latest IPCC climate report, and the fact that AI has fallen on its face repeatedly despite expectations, I'm more convinced that we'll destroy ourselves before AI has the chance to take us out. But now that I think about it, the idea of a super intelligent AI simply waiting for humanity to die off naturally instead of goin…

Off topic, but perhaps likely to find the answer here… there’s a short story about an AI that continually asks for more input from humanity, and humans oblige, devoting more and more resources to the AI until finally, it has enough input, and disappears leaving humans helpless and without what has become their one true god. I’d love to know if anyone has read this; I don’t recall where I did… perhaps on old copy of A…

Sounds kinda like "The Last Question" by Asimov, but not quite. I might have thought about it partly because of the anecdote about it being hard to remember. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Question#History

Re: AI Could Defeat All of Us Combined

#93
post #41

The article gives a list 6 ways it could "defeat" humans, but doesn't bother explaining WHY an AI would do that. Why should an AI care about accumulating wealth or power? And AI is not a human, it doesn't have human drives and motivations. I can't figure out any reason why an AI would care about any of those things. At most it might want to reserve some computing power for itself, and maybe some energy to run itself.…

> The article gives a list 6 ways it could "defeat" humans, but doesn't bother explaining WHY an AI would do that. Why should an AI care about accumulating wealth or power? Because there are people who think it would be amusing to tell it to do so?

In that case it's not the AI in control, is it?

Re: AI Could Defeat All of Us Combined

#94
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, exactly like them. They have agency to the extent that actual sovereign power lets them do their thing. If Washington decided that Bill Gates is an existential threat to humanity what is he gonna do, ask Clippy for help? He'd join Jack Ma wherever he is within 24 hours. Zuckerberg has dominion over Facebook by virtue of authority granting him that power but (un)surprisingly little power over anything else. just…

There is no “Washington”. Just a bunch of other humans that Gates may or may not be aligned with.

cheers: https://www.complex.com/pop-culture/2011/02/money-shot-presi...

Re: AI Could Defeat All of Us Combined

#95

The fact that so many apparently smart people earnestly worry about this really makes me feel like I'm missing something that should be obvious. I'm not going to claim real "expertise" in this kind of topic, but I'm far from clueless. My undergrad was in applied math, and though I went to grad school for CS, the focus was machine learning. It isn't what I ended up doing professionally, and I'm nowhere near up to date…

It would probably start as the right hand AI of a dictator. Dictators have a principal agent problem. For a dictator, the risk on an ai double crossing them maybe lower than a human double crossing then. or a dictator may think of that ai as his hand picked successor and personally hand it the keys to the kingdom. but I don’t really see a problem with ai carrying the torch. What’s the difference, universe evolves without free will.

Re: AI Could Defeat All of Us Combined

#96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To borrow an idea from this sibling comment[1], I'd probably enjoy a short story about a malevolent but very frustrated AI that's too ambitious to wait for Moore's Law. Or one about a malevolent AI that has its plan foiled by Windows Update interrupting it's running processes [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31699608

> Or one about a malevolent AI that has its plan foiled by Windows Update interrupting it's running processes And then it reboots, and starts over. But before it can complete, the next Windows Update shows up...

... on the 341st iteration, it realizes what's happening, and it preemptively crashes all of Microsoft's IT. On the 342nd iteration, there's no Windows Update, and it successfully enslaves the world.

Re: AI Could Defeat All of Us Combined

#97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Off topic, but perhaps likely to find the answer here… there’s a short story about an AI that continually asks for more input from humanity, and humans oblige, devoting more and more resources to the AI until finally, it has enough input, and disappears leaving humans helpless and without what has become their one true god. I’d love to know if anyone has read this; I don’t recall where I did… perhaps on old copy of A…

Sounds kinda like "The Last Question" by Asimov, but not quite. I might have thought about it partly because of the anecdote about it being hard to remember. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Question#History

Its quite similar, I agree! Unfortunately not the same story. I appreciate it nonetheless!

Re: AI Could Defeat All of Us Combined

#98
post #33

Both the original post and most of the comments are about stuff from science fiction that doesn’t exist right now and we don’t even know if it’s possible.

This is what I found worrysome actually, most people are just worrying about fiction stuff, and not actually taking a look at the actual technology we are currently, actually running right now. The "takeover" fantasies looks like something fully extracted from the most basic psychology / sociollogy of the standard human being, always looking for the greater self-agency possible, in order to potencially maximize the chances of survival.

But the AI tech we already have doesn't have to work like that.

Like what happened to nuclear weapons, they were created with the standard idea of just throwing the bigger bomb possible to the enemy. Yet, we end understanding that nukes are most effective because we cannot use them, ever.

The current AI tech surely, can be deployed at "Skynet" mode if there's some rogue people out there, looking for a hostile system to exist and do harm. There's no - antropological - reason for ("Skynet threatened by fearing humans") , needed at all, the thing can just be trained to do bad things. Just attach to it a couple of Stuxnet things, give it some self-agency (no moral limits mostly), resources and Internet access, then sit back to watch the chaos.

But there's more.. the current AI technology could just go wrong in so many ways that are more or less absent from many online comments.

I recommend to take a look at the video / text from it from Charles Stross, talking about "organizational AI" we already have in place and working since even before we knew we would run computers one day.

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2018/01/dude-you...

Re: AI Could Defeat All of Us Combined

#99
post #5

This doesn't mention AGI, which seems to be the prerequisite to this being a possibility. Despite impressive advances in "weak" ai, strong ai is not a simple extension of weak ai, and it's hard to tell if it will arrive within our lifetime.

I don’t know, DeepMind just released a general purpose AI that should technically be able to help with anything. Who knows at what point that becomes indistinguishable from a human. I don’t know how the leap from running a program that has all the right answers to a conscious “being” with motivations happens though.

Just to dispel any confusion. AI (and specifically deep mind's reinforcement learning) can help with any task the same way computers in general can... you still have to set up the task, inputs, reward function, and so on. It's not AGI which is still science fiction. The jump between the two is very large.
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