Statement on AI Risk • Hacker News Board

Re: Statement on AI Risk

#961

Post by Vitorystar » Thu, Jun 08, 2023, 6:31 AM UTC

patch_cable wrote: post #730

patrec wrote: post #682

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, which of the following propositions do you disagree with? 1. AIs have made rapid progress in approaching and often surpassing human abilities in many areas. 2. The fact that AIs have some inherent scalability, speed, cost, reliability and compliance advantages over humans means that many undesirable things that could previously not be done at all or at least not done at scale are becoming both feasible and cost-e…

Reading the lesswrong link, the parts I get hung up on are that it appears in these doomsday scenarios humans lose all agency. Like, no one is wondering why this computer is placing a bunch of orders to DNA factories? Maybe I’m overly optimistic about the resilience of humans but these scenarios still don’t sound plausible to me in the real world.

You could place a bunch of orders into services that syntetize DNA or proteins rn. Some people are even working on stuff like automating protein design whith AI. There's no reason why humans should notice anything word about a particular order on a service like that.

Re: Statement on AI Risk

#962

Post by dwaltrip » Sat, Jun 10, 2023, 5:47 PM UTC

tech_ken wrote: post #633

dwaltrip wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not just random text, they are predicting writings and documents produced by humans. They are “language” models. Language is used to say things about the world. This means that predicting language extremely well is best done through acquiring an understanding of the world. Take a rigorous, well-written textbook. Predicting a textbook is like writing a textbook. To write a good textbook, you need to be an expert…

>Predicting a textbook is like writing a textbook HN AGI discourse is full of statements like this (eg. all the stuff about stochastic parrots), but to me this seems massively non-obvious. Mimicking and rephrasing pre-written text is very different from conceiving of and organizing information in new ways. Textbook authors are not simply transcribing their grad school notes down into a book and selling it. They are s…

Hey, I wanted to reply to this, but just didn't find the time. I disagree with a lot of what you wrote, but your arguments are stated clearly. I appreciate that. Cheers :)

Re: Statement on AI Risk

#963

Post by CatWChainsaw » Sun, Jun 11, 2023, 8:16 PM UTC

adamsmith143 wrote: post #708

mitthrowaway2 wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is not a real risk today. Yes, clearly. But it is a risk for tomorrow. We do still care about the future, right?

No man, the future of trillions of humans is obviously much less important than 1 person getting insulted on the internet.

Especially ironic considering the "longtermism" mental illness that's in vogue with SV types.

Re: Statement on AI Risk

#964

Post by enord » Tue, Jun 13, 2023, 6:52 PM UTC

duvenaud wrote: post #826

enord wrote: post #817

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None we have made from unliving things no. «agentic» is a 5$ word of ill construction. The literature is littered with the corpses of failed definitions of «agency», «planning», «goal dorected behavior». ‘Twas the death of the Expert System AI (now it’s just constraint solvers). It will be the death of attention/transformer AI before long, I wonder what banality we will bestow upon it.

Okay, well it seems funny to both claim that there is no good definition of agency, but also be sure that we've never demonstrated any hint of it in theory or practice. Planners, optimizers, and RL agents seem agentic to some degree to me, even if our current ones aren't very competent.

You know, i thought of the right response just now, browsing my flamewars two weeks later.

«Some degree» of agency is not even near sufficient identification of agency to synthesize it ex nihilo. There is no Axiom of Choice in real life, proof of existence is not proof of construction.