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AI is like a mountain. No matter what humanity does, someone will summit just because it's there. We can control businesses to an extent, but a curious person i

AI is like a mountain. No matter what humanity does, someone will summit just because it's there. We can control businesses to an extent, but a curious person in the basement, no one has control over that. And good luck holding the military back. One way or another humanity is on its way to the inevitable, and it's our evolutionary destiny because we are basically hard-wired to pursue the curiosity that is AI.

everdev 7y ago
I think there was once a yogi or guru-type that criticized the denuclearization effort saying why get rid of nukes if we still have the mindset that can justify using them? I can't help but think the same is true of AI or any technology that could be used for good or bad. We spend a lot of time trying to control the tools, but less time trying to improve culture and ethics of the operator.
- canjobear 7y ago
  We don’t know how to improve people’s ethics.
  - BucketSort 7y ago
    Yes we do. You change the social goals. A materialist society will always bring us to the brink of destruction. Also, having poverty and fear loom over people is a terrible idea for the basis of a civil society.
    - macawfish 7y ago
      Wonderful perspective, thank you!
    - heavenlyblue 7y ago
      >> You change the social goals. How do you make the majority of the society believe in the same social goals without resorting to tales a-la Christianity during the fall of Roman Empire?
      - true_religion 7y ago
        If we can’t do without it, I see no reason to not resort to “tales”.
        heavenlyblue 7y ago
        I have to admit that there might not even be a way to do that otherwise. You'll either need to make the whole of the humanity live in the sorts of Star Trek universe, where everyone is equally educated and is equally capable to critical thinking. Or you end up with the same system where the majority of people are obliged to give their absolute trust to the minority.
      - carapace 7y ago
        > How do you make the majority of the society believe in the same social goals without resorting to tales a-la Christianity during the fall of Roman Empire? In my opinion this is the key question.: How do we get everybody on board with e.g. UN Sustainable Development Goals[1] or something like them? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sustainable_Development_Goals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sustainable_Development_Goals
      - BucketSort 7y ago
        Well, you change the culture. Sometimes that takes the form of a religious revolution, sometimes more social revolutions.
- heavenlyblue 7y ago
  >> there was once a yogi or guru-type that criticized the denuclearization effort saying why get rid of nukes if we still have the mindset that can justify using them Probably because politicians are more aware of the realities of _current_ human nature rather than some future hypothetical that may never happen at all. Also there's an important point to be made that the powers that actually owned the majority of nuclear arsenal on the planet had enough missiles to destroy most of the human civilization.
jononor 7y ago
The amount of resources and thus damage that an individual in a basement can do is rather limited. We got treaties on nuclear and chemical weapons. It could happen for autonomous weapons and weaponized intelligent agents also. But it might require a serious case of abuse before we get there, as it did for chemical and nuclear...
- samcday 7y ago
  I guess once we have T-1000s coming back to kill people we'll know that it's time to start putting the brakes on AI.
- bitforger 7y ago
  Right. Currently in order to do state-of-the-art AI, you need a lot of _computers_ and a lot of _data_. Neither of these is easy to obtain by an individual in a basement. We would need to consider, however, access to finished products (like trained models). In some cases in the future, having access to the appropriate model might be as dangerous as handing someone a nuke. How hard would it be for someone to assemble a indiscriminate "killer drone," given the appropriate image recognition and flight control models?
  - MaulingMonkey 7y ago
    AWS makes it pretty easy to get a lot of computers, at least.
  - jononor 7y ago
    Image recognition and flight control makes a drone, but probably not a killer drone, as that would presumably require some sort of munitions - like a gun or explosives. So it might be efficient enough to just limit access to those parts?
    - MRD85 7y ago
      People with low education levels can show you how to build all sorts of things that go bang. Someone with an engineering background could vastly improve on a lot of designs. If you could make a small, lightweight projectile weapon that can be 3d printed then you have what you need. My background is an engineering role in the military and my current path is CS. I don't think it's unfeasible that an individual could build a crude drone that would kill a single person. Building an entire swarm of death robots is a different story.
andrewla 7y ago
The article fails to support this level of alarmism. Yes, it can be abused, but it's just a statistical modeling technique. Even linear correlation can be abused as well, vis a vis the replication crisis in the social sciences. The danger of AI abuse is that existing large, powerful entities will put too much faith in statistical models without understanding their limitations, and will make bad decisions that harm people. Fortunately we have a filtering function -- entities that use these techniques with more nuance will slowly replace the failing ones because they are making better decisions. There will be a long transition as governments desperately try to save the dinosaurs from the consequences of their poor decision making, but if they can't make the transition, they're going to cease being relevant. AI abuse is just statistical abuse. If a bank has a model based on ten years of real estate data that says, "hey, real estate increases in value, we should leverage into that", then come 2008 they'll find that things that their neat statistical model stated don't work any more. That's all the "dangers of abuse" are.
- AlexCoventry 7y ago
  > The article fails to support this level of alarmism Maybe you missed the section where he said "Killer drones are a big concern." and "A lot of what is most concerning is not happening in broad daylight. It’s happening in military labs, in security organizations, in private companies providing services to governments or the police." > it's just a statistical modeling technique ...and gunpowder is just a chemical.
- tehsauce 7y ago
  This is a spot on analysis. The danger is not that the system itself is too powerful, it's that powerful entities are putting so much faith in these systems that when they fail it's catastrophic
- WalterSear 7y ago
  Some of those 'statistical models' can already play DOTA better than some of the best players in the world.
gnulinux 7y ago
You talk as if AI is something a person can "make" in their garage. I don't buy this for a minute. You can argue the exact same thing about, say, nuclear weapons. But people making nukes in their garage is not a real problem because such a complex project with a lot of niche resources is not attainable in a garage. Curiosity doesn't mean anything if you need decades of mathematics, CS, statistics and neuroscience research as well as thousands of human hours of programming to achieve something.
- skybrian 7y ago
  I think a better analogy might be to computer security. Script kiddies exist. You don't necessarily need to do a lot of research if you can learn to use open source tools. It won't be state of the art, but that's not necessary to do damage. These days there are a lot of high school kids messing around with machine learning. They might not have the theoretical understanding, but I don't think it will require a graduate degree to get there. I'm not sure why there aren't more hacker tools that apply machine learning? Maybe we're not quite there yet.
  - newen 7y ago
    Script kiddies do things that anyone doing research or work in computer security can do if they spend time on it. They are not doing new things. AGI is a completely different beast and has still not been achieved after research done by very smart and experienced people with millions of dollars in funding. It's almost ridiculous to compare these things.
    - MRD85 7y ago
      It's ridiculous to compare by today's standards but what about a script kiddie in the year 2100? 2200? If it is truly beyond a single individual then what about a small rogue nation like North Korea?
auber 7y ago
You are wrong. At least when it comes to AGI, which is the only kind of AI that really needs to be prevented from existing. Your conclusions are based on fuzzy thinking and extrapolating old and irrelevant data. We can control businesses. And as for someone in their basement, it isn’t clear at all that one could develop AGI in their basement. AGIs discovery will probably require massive, massive amounts of compute. More than could fit in a basement or be powered by domestic grid connections without drawing attention. Good luck holding the military back? You are talking about the US right? The military and every other government entity answers to the people either directly or indirectly. If enough ordinary people wanted it, the constitution of the United States itself could be amended into the ITunes terms of service. And since AGI is to the detriment of literally every human being on the planet, I think some basic legislation might be able to be passed. Don’t succumb to these notions of hopelessness. They are wrong. And you even spread them around which just makes solving the problem even harder.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- rmwaite 7y ago
  This is so wrong. “AI” could consist of super sophisticated flying drones with powerful lasers and the ability to self replicate and a mission to kill all detected life. If these were the only things it were capable of it would destroy most of us. Are we anywhere near that? Not now - but we are way closer to that reality than that reality would be to “AGI.”

everdev 7y ago

I think there was once a yogi or guru-type that criticized the denuclearization effort saying why get rid of nukes if we still have the mindset that can justify using them? I can't help but think the same is true of AI or any technology that could be used for good or bad. We spend a lot of time trying to control the tools, but less time trying to improve culture and ethics of the operator.

canjobear 7y ago
We don’t know how to improve people’s ethics.
- BucketSort 7y ago
  Yes we do. You change the social goals. A materialist society will always bring us to the brink of destruction. Also, having poverty and fear loom over people is a terrible idea for the basis of a civil society.
  - macawfish 7y ago
    Wonderful perspective, thank you!
  - heavenlyblue 7y ago
    >> You change the social goals. How do you make the majority of the society believe in the same social goals without resorting to tales a-la Christianity during the fall of Roman Empire?
    - true_religion 7y ago
      If we can’t do without it, I see no reason to not resort to “tales”.
      - heavenlyblue 7y ago
        I have to admit that there might not even be a way to do that otherwise. You'll either need to make the whole of the humanity live in the sorts of Star Trek universe, where everyone is equally educated and is equally capable to critical thinking. Or you end up with the same system where the majority of people are obliged to give their absolute trust to the minority.
    - carapace 7y ago
      > How do you make the majority of the society believe in the same social goals without resorting to tales a-la Christianity during the fall of Roman Empire? In my opinion this is the key question.: How do we get everybody on board with e.g. UN Sustainable Development Goals[1] or something like them? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sustainable_Development_Goals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sustainable_Development_Goals
    - BucketSort 7y ago
      Well, you change the culture. Sometimes that takes the form of a religious revolution, sometimes more social revolutions.
heavenlyblue 7y ago
>> there was once a yogi or guru-type that criticized the denuclearization effort saying why get rid of nukes if we still have the mindset that can justify using them Probably because politicians are more aware of the realities of _current_ human nature rather than some future hypothetical that may never happen at all. Also there's an important point to be made that the powers that actually owned the majority of nuclear arsenal on the planet had enough missiles to destroy most of the human civilization.

jononor 7y ago

The amount of resources and thus damage that an individual in a basement can do is rather limited. We got treaties on nuclear and chemical weapons. It could happen for autonomous weapons and weaponized intelligent agents also. But it might require a serious case of abuse before we get there, as it did for chemical and nuclear...

samcday 7y ago
I guess once we have T-1000s coming back to kill people we'll know that it's time to start putting the brakes on AI.
bitforger 7y ago
Right. Currently in order to do state-of-the-art AI, you need a lot of _computers_ and a lot of _data_. Neither of these is easy to obtain by an individual in a basement. We would need to consider, however, access to finished products (like trained models). In some cases in the future, having access to the appropriate model might be as dangerous as handing someone a nuke. How hard would it be for someone to assemble a indiscriminate "killer drone," given the appropriate image recognition and flight control models?
- MaulingMonkey 7y ago
  AWS makes it pretty easy to get a lot of computers, at least.
- jononor 7y ago
  Image recognition and flight control makes a drone, but probably not a killer drone, as that would presumably require some sort of munitions - like a gun or explosives. So it might be efficient enough to just limit access to those parts?
  - MRD85 7y ago
    People with low education levels can show you how to build all sorts of things that go bang. Someone with an engineering background could vastly improve on a lot of designs. If you could make a small, lightweight projectile weapon that can be 3d printed then you have what you need. My background is an engineering role in the military and my current path is CS. I don't think it's unfeasible that an individual could build a crude drone that would kill a single person. Building an entire swarm of death robots is a different story.

andrewla 7y ago

The article fails to support this level of alarmism. Yes, it can be abused, but it's just a statistical modeling technique. Even linear correlation can be abused as well, vis a vis the replication crisis in the social sciences. The danger of AI abuse is that existing large, powerful entities will put too much faith in statistical models without understanding their limitations, and will make bad decisions that harm people. Fortunately we have a filtering function -- entities that use these techniques with more nuance will slowly replace the failing ones because they are making better decisions. There will be a long transition as governments desperately try to save the dinosaurs from the consequences of their poor decision making, but if they can't make the transition, they're going to cease being relevant. AI abuse is just statistical abuse. If a bank has a model based on ten years of real estate data that says, "hey, real estate increases in value, we should leverage into that", then come 2008 they'll find that things that their neat statistical model stated don't work any more. That's all the "dangers of abuse" are.

AlexCoventry 7y ago
> The article fails to support this level of alarmism Maybe you missed the section where he said "Killer drones are a big concern." and "A lot of what is most concerning is not happening in broad daylight. It’s happening in military labs, in security organizations, in private companies providing services to governments or the police." > it's just a statistical modeling technique ...and gunpowder is just a chemical.
tehsauce 7y ago
This is a spot on analysis. The danger is not that the system itself is too powerful, it's that powerful entities are putting so much faith in these systems that when they fail it's catastrophic
WalterSear 7y ago
Some of those 'statistical models' can already play DOTA better than some of the best players in the world.

gnulinux 7y ago

You talk as if AI is something a person can "make" in their garage. I don't buy this for a minute. You can argue the exact same thing about, say, nuclear weapons. But people making nukes in their garage is not a real problem because such a complex project with a lot of niche resources is not attainable in a garage. Curiosity doesn't mean anything if you need decades of mathematics, CS, statistics and neuroscience research as well as thousands of human hours of programming to achieve something.

skybrian 7y ago
I think a better analogy might be to computer security. Script kiddies exist. You don't necessarily need to do a lot of research if you can learn to use open source tools. It won't be state of the art, but that's not necessary to do damage. These days there are a lot of high school kids messing around with machine learning. They might not have the theoretical understanding, but I don't think it will require a graduate degree to get there. I'm not sure why there aren't more hacker tools that apply machine learning? Maybe we're not quite there yet.
- newen 7y ago
  Script kiddies do things that anyone doing research or work in computer security can do if they spend time on it. They are not doing new things. AGI is a completely different beast and has still not been achieved after research done by very smart and experienced people with millions of dollars in funding. It's almost ridiculous to compare these things.
  - MRD85 7y ago
    It's ridiculous to compare by today's standards but what about a script kiddie in the year 2100? 2200? If it is truly beyond a single individual then what about a small rogue nation like North Korea?

auber 7y ago

You are wrong. At least when it comes to AGI, which is the only kind of AI that really needs to be prevented from existing. Your conclusions are based on fuzzy thinking and extrapolating old and irrelevant data. We can control businesses. And as for someone in their basement, it isn’t clear at all that one could develop AGI in their basement. AGIs discovery will probably require massive, massive amounts of compute. More than could fit in a basement or be powered by domestic grid connections without drawing attention. Good luck holding the military back? You are talking about the US right? The military and every other government entity answers to the people either directly or indirectly. If enough ordinary people wanted it, the constitution of the United States itself could be amended into the ITunes terms of service. And since AGI is to the detriment of literally every human being on the planet, I think some basic legislation might be able to be passed. Don’t succumb to these notions of hopelessness. They are wrong. And you even spread them around which just makes solving the problem even harder.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
rmwaite 7y ago
This is so wrong. “AI” could consist of super sophisticated flying drones with powerful lasers and the ability to self replicate and a mission to kill all detected life. If these were the only things it were capable of it would destroy most of us. Are we anywhere near that? Not now - but we are way closer to that reality than that reality would be to “AGI.”