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AI doomism is quickly becoming indistinguishable from an apocalyptic religion
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- CharlesW 4y agoI mean, Yann is paid by Meta to propagate an "only positive vibes" stance. "AI doomism" itself is a ridiculous phrase meant to demonize anyone with legit concerns, of which there are many. I say this as someone who is very excited about recent developments and sees the potential upside as well as anyone, I think.
- The_Colonel 4y agoIt's kind of difficult to take these people seriously given they have a strong financial stake in it.
- stevenhuang 4y agoYann is also known for constantly denigrating the abilities of LLMs and being comically wrong all the time, saying they can't do X only to be proven wrong immediately after. He's pretty much a meme at this point. He spent all his years at FB building ivory towers of mathematics attempting the analytical route for building AI systems only to be out done by the bitter lesson. He's perpetually salty about the current state of LLMs, you can sense it from all the negative commentary on the matter if you look at his Twitter feed lol. For shame.
- cma 4y agoDidn't he hype the Galatica LLM?
- cubefox 4y agoHe also likes to talk about "human level AI". That's like expecting that the invention of the airplane passes through a stage of "human level flight". That didn't happen. And probably also not for AI. These systems will vastly outperform humans at more and more tasks, while being still sub-human at others. When the time comes that they surpass humans at all tasks, they will be vastly superhuman overall. And consequently much more dangerous than LeCun's "human level AI".
- andrewflnr 4y agoThe analogy is more apt with a reference to "a stage of bird-level flight". Humans can't fly at all, but in the same way birds and planes both fly, but humans and machines both process information about the world, just in very different ways and for different reasons. But yes, the notion of "human level AI" seems to be irrelevant at best.
- cubefox 4y agoAh yes, of course.
- beernet 4y agoAgreed. He had a luck shot with CNNs a long time ago and that's about it. Pretty sad to witness overall
- eggsmediumrare 4y agoAm I an apostate if my concern about AI doom now outweighs my concern about climate change?
- woodson 4y agoWell, in general, there seems to be a correlation between what news coverage focuses on and what is considered worrisome at any given time. In times of high inflation and increased fuel prices, climate change action takes a back seat.
- antibasilisk 4y agoI'm hopeful that climate change will prevent AI doom, because that seems to be the best outcome at the moment.
- version_five 4y agoI'm happy to see there's still an adult in the room. Andrew Ng has also been very reasonable about the current pop culture hype bubble, while many others have decided to try and use it for attention. As I've said before, there's a clear divide between the actual practitioners, and the "futurists" (Musk etc) on this topic.
- drcode 4y agoHinton is not an adult? https://twitter.com/JMannhart/status/1641764742137016320?t=IBTcgnsH2JRXRd2cGQr7xA&s=19 https://twitter.com/JMannhart/status/1641764742137016320?t=I...
- version_five 4y agoPeople can watch the short clip and decide for themselves. He kind of says "anything's possible" in response to interviewer prompting.
- PaulHoule 4y agoThere is "A.I. doomism" in general and there is also a specific cult-like group at the lesswrong website that really is an apocalyptic religion. It is astonishing how anything that deviates from its dogma in any way has to have "trigger warnings" and the senseless comments that users write on anything that suggests there could be intrinsic limits on intelligence. There ideology is such that a higher intelligence is going to take our problems away either by taking over, ending us (no people, no problems) or possibly the followers moving on to the "next level" like the followers of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heaven%27s_Gate_(religious_group) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heaven%27s_Gate_(religious_gro...
- lodovic 4y agoIt's a pretty scary idea that AI could take a religious stance since its training sets contained religious texts, too. Especially in the context you provide.
- ctoth 4y agoPaul, can you point at anything at all other than your general vibes that would indicate that anyone from LessWrong intends to literally participate in mass suicide, as your link implies? Did I miss the big group buy of phenobarbital?
- skrebbel 4y agoI’m not Paul, but this here has some serious Jonestown overtones: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/j9Q8bRmwCgXRYAgcJ/miri-announces-new-death-with-dignity-strategy https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/j9Q8bRmwCgXRYAgcJ/miri-annou.... It makes Yudkowski seem (to me) like the leader of a suicide cult more than anything else. The argument “yeah but what if he’s right?” is pretty much Pascal’s Wager by now, given how way out there the AI Doomers have gotten. I choose not to worry about the God from the Bible (ie I don’t make make Pascal’s Wager) so why should I worry about this new Evil Nerd-God Apocalypse? Don’t drink the Kool-Aid, kids!
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- verdverm 4y agoThere are a lot of religious like beliefs about things as people have moved away from traditional religions. I wonder if it is in our nature to have something bigger than ourselves to believe in based on faith in the message
- gerikson 4y agoI'm convinced religious beliefs/feelings are an unavoidable emergent property of human minds.
- frankthedog 4y agoPerhaps organized religion was a Chesterton’s Fence that we removed at our own peril.
- 4y ago
- drcode 4y agoA religion is arguably when you refuse to engage with other people's arguments Lecun has refused to engage with anyone's arguments, so why are the people worried about AI ex-risk the religion?
- gerikson 4y ago> A religion is arguably when you refuse to engage with other people's arguments I've never heard of that definition.
- programmer_dude 4y agoMe neither, but I like it. When you refuse to engage with other people's arguments due to strongly held beliefs you are engaging in a religious activity. Those strongly held beliefs are your religion.
- f_devd 4y agoNeither have I but it actually lines up pretty well depending on your read of GP. Large religions often use a proving-a-negative with a pascals wager to achieve an inarguable story regardless of content. And cult religions generally do this with an Us-vs-Them approach which usually prevents members of believing external arguments.
- jazzyjackson 4y agoessentially it's the definition of "dogma"
- dralley 4y agoAI optimism is often indistinguishable from "technological manifest destiny" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajGX7odA87k&t=2207s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajGX7odA87k&t=2207s
- pclmulqdq 4y agoAll technology is built on some sort of "manifest destiny." We are all delusional about how great our new thing is going to be and how much it is going to change the world. Sometimes, like the computer and the web, it turns out to be right. Sometimes, like cryptocurrency and the dirigible, not so much.
- pjdkoch 4y agoFantastic talk!
- The_Colonel 4y ago> Complete with prophecies of imminent fire and brimstone caused by an omnipotent entity that doesn't actually exist. That seems like an absurd comparison given people like LeCun are actively and intentionally working towards creating this super-human entity. (Some) scientists were rightfully worried when creating a nuclear bomb as well. The fact that we managed to survive 70 years with its existence does not automatically mean it has to work out with every such invention. Nukes have the fortunate properties that they are very difficult/expensive to produce even for countries, and then you need very difficult to design and expensive systems to deliver them. It's rather doubtful that AIs will have similar constraints.
- version_five 4y agoWe really need some perspective here. One one side is a force capable of unleashing unfathomable amounts of energy, with all kinds of additional negative side effects, that has both been extensively demonstrated and has been used for mass destruction. On the other is a chatbot, that could what, "spew misinformation", take our jobs, someday through a mechanism not known and not related to how it works become sentient and hurt us? Seriously, the comparison is as absurd as the fear generally. There are way scarier things going on, it's sad we can't give them 1% of the attention we give things we made up completely.
- The_Colonel 4y ago> On the other is a chatbot, that could what, "spew misinformation", take our jobs, someday through a mechanism not known and not related to how it works become sentient and hurt us? I agree that LLMs are not extinction-level dangerous and somewhat share the skepticism that they should lead to AGI. (Although they are pretty capable given their lack of true intelligence and I think people will find ways to plug them into dangerous applications.) But when LeCun defends AI, he defends "real", intelligent AGI (because he doesn't consider LLMs to be AGIs).
- antonvs 4y agoAs I've written in another comment, LeCun is not defending the boogeyman that the LessWrong cult has invented, which is a pure creature of fantasy.
- moonchrome 4y agoI've seen multiple top people in AGI space say that total annihilation threat from AGI exists. I think I've heard Karpathy say something along the lines of worst case scenario of AGI is worse than a nuclear armageddon on Lex Friedman podcast. Honestly the fear of AGI worst-case scenario is worse than any other fear I've experienced. I've accepted the fact that I can die a long time ago, I was afraid but mortality is something everyone has to deal with. But every member of humanity being wiped out at the same time is an existential dread I'm not willing to face. When you consider the shitshow that has been AI commercialization from big players pressured by market forces and corporate timelines, the boom in capabilities, I have no faith that AI safety issues will be handled in time. When my best bet for humanity is a global nuclear war resetting civilization to give us a chance to deal with AGI issue down the line - I'm fine with religious doomism. We've had inquisitions historically, I would very much support a global AI inquisition.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- survirtual 4y agoAI can also completely liberate all of us. This fear mongering is irrational. We already live in an extremely advanced reality, with organic life having organic nanomachines performing incredibly complex operations in a universe, in realtime, performing impossibly complex calculations. Even to simulate a square meter of our universe in realtime is outlandishly beyond our compute access. Perhaps AI unleashes the creation of the sort of reality we exist in. Just because someone has the background and knowledge to build something, does not mean they have the philosophical chops nor the aptitude to understand it, or understand how to properly use it. We should take these doomsday scenarios with a grain of salt. If it happens, there is no stopping it anyway. It is better to try and create the most benevolent AI possible, that is an ally to humanity and invested in our success, than to dwell on our destruction.
- mitthrowaway2 4y ago"Things might be fine"? This doesn't seem like a sufficiently convincing take? It takes 20 years of due diligence and environmental impact studies just to build a single hydroelectric dam, if not 50. Why should our attitude toward AI be to shrug and hope for the best?
- elromulous 4y agoThe thing that makes the singularity so difficult (edit: to rein or reason about), compared with say development of the nuclear weapons, is that we know it will be a positive feedback system. So at some point, the point of no return will be passed, and we will have no idea that we passed it.
- marginalia_nu 4y agoThe AI singularity is also an entirely speculative scenario straight out of sci-fi. For some reason, many AI doomers are talking about it like it's not only something that is well understood, but also pretty much an inevitability. The truth of the matter is we don't even know if it's possible. In general, unbounded exponential growth is extremely rare in nature. It's common in physics, but only as a result of looking at low order approximations. I honestly think when the dust settles, the smartphone will still have had more impact on society than LLMs. If people knew in 2009 what was coming, they'd be freaking out like many people are today.
- crisdux 4y agoEverything is turned into an existential risk these days. People are prone to believe in apocalyptic predictions because they fear the unknown and rely on flawed mental heuristics. Apocalyptic predictions automatically illicit skepticism from me.
- graeme 4y agoCounterpoint: the more our capacity grows, the more we have the legitimate ability to bring absolute destruction Plastic or some other chemical ending sperm counts —> we previously had no ability to affect the global ecosystem on this scale Bioweapon virus or microorganism eviscerating civilization —> we had no prior ability to engineer such a plague Nuclear holocaust —> we previously had no ability to destroy the world with weapons Runaway climate change —> we previously had no ability to alter the climate Ai sky net moment —> we previously had no ability to make such an intelligence Solar flare cutting all electronics —> we previously had no dependence upon a single point of failure I could go on. We’ve had plenty of civilizations collapse but nothing has been so linked before and we lacked such capacity before. This is not to say any of the above will come to pass. But it is foolish to say “apocalypses were previously impossible hence such warnings can be dismissed out of hand”
- blowski 4y agoYes, this is how I feel about it. Between climate change, obesity, GM foods, mega-viruses, insects dying, extreme solar flares, and now AI, I’m surprised I’m still here anyway. Just perhaps AI will actually help solve some of those problems.
- nottorp 4y agoSo is ChatGPT worship though.
- skilled 4y agoI wouldn't be surprised if OpenAI has been running a model in the background that is reinforcing itself. Honestly, it's very possible they've made a lot of progress in that area. I think GPT-4 will be a baseline for quite some time before the next "ChatGPT moment" is ready. I think they've got some really smart people working at OpenAI who are not just programmers, but genuine hackers who want to hack this world just for the fun of it.
- mikewarot 4y agoI reject this false choice. I find myself both looking forward to the benefits of AI scaling while simultaneously also concerned about the non-zero chance it kills us all.
- arcticbunny 4y agoI smell the whiffs of the “ Butlerian Jihad”. Luddite anti AI zealots are coming out of the woodwork.
- eternalban 4y agoHerbert used the word Jihad to underline that the conflict was spiritual in nature and not restricted to labor issues ("luddites").
- flangola7 4y agoCalling people "luddite zealots" isn't constructive or adding anything to the conversation.
- jszymborski 4y agoAs always, understanding of nuanced issues will pool at the extremes. It is both true that: - Adoption of DL allows corps to launder or inadvertently adopt unethical practices that exacerbate inequalities. - We have not created AGI, LLMs are not AGI, stable diffusion is not AGI and none of these fields of research are indication we are closer to AGI. This is like thinking Clever Hans is the portent of our future equine overlords. A great number of people who claim that we are one minute from AGI overlord midnight are doing the old school carnival barker trick. "This snake oil is so potent! It can kill you if you use too much, so be sure to listen carefully to my instructions!"
- serverholic 4y agoI’m curious why you are so confident in your assertion. It seems to me that an advanced statistical model of the world is an essential component of AGI. How do you know that we aren’t a few breakthroughs away from AGI? Some recent papers have shown significant performance improvements when these models are allowed to respond to their own outputs. How do you know that putting an LLM in a fancy loop with access to external memory and tools isn’t AGI?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- nwerla 4y agoThe AI does not have to be omnipotent. People are worried about: 1) Job losses, which is a real concern, except for LeCun, who is safe or rich enough. 2) Some fools connecting a war game AI to real hardware, which is quite possible. Other than that, I don't see "doomism" at all. I see outrage at the IP theft that exploits altruistic humans who posted their works on the Internet.
- inconfident2021 4y agoI can’t comment or argue with prominent scientists such as LeCunn. But I surely can give perspective as SWE about to enter the industry. 1. We live in an uncertain time. Before most of the people, at least with a bit of research could have predicted the trajectory of technological innovation. Being born in era of tech, it was very easy to adopt to it. From PC to now, I have embraced every technological progress. Yet, nothing sent chills like this one. 2. I do not worry about my job. What I worry is most of the world is about getting shit done and this tech helps you get your shit done (for now). If we are at the upper tail of some sigmoid, there is nothing to fear. If we are at slope, oh boy, I cannot fathom the economic domino this tech is about to bring out. People are not rational. We are mostly governed by emotion. If you think, every single joe is rational and has capacity to judge, nobody would have voted from Trump to be president or riot the Capitol. 3. Currently it can do 60% of the work. If it evolves, it will do 80% of the work. If you factor human population and the amount of inefficiency in current economy, this will create a boom of productive workers with bust of average worker. And the world is not just for elites. Average people need their livelihood too. Now think about the magnitude of displacement. 4. I have no issue with innovation and breakthrough. AI won’t kill us, because we will kill each other before that. This tech is exposing entire middle class job (check out the job being exposed. There is a paper for that from openAI titled: gpts are gpts) And there are lot if people in that bracket. For once, think about us too. So, these religious people do not exclusively worry about immediate effects of the tech. But within their doom, hides an issue that needs to be heard. That’s my two cents.
- GistNoesis 4y agoWhile you were exploring the computational universe, A wild Shoggoth suddenly appear, Do you : - [Wisdom not high enough] - [Intelligence not high enough] - [Not enough gold] - Try to make it your friend and welcome it in your home - Try to make it your slave - Try to send it back to where he was - Continue this "choose your own adventure" with GPT 5 - Roll 1d20 for extra Luck
- 23B1 4y agoSomething can go wrong (premise). Therefore, something will go wrong (invalid conclusion). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_probability https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_probability Sure seems to me that the whole Lesswrong crowd has forgotten their founding principles around cognitive biases. Or maybe they're just having a bit of fun riding the hypecycle.
- moonchrome 4y agoSomething can go wrong. The outcome of the thing going wrong is literally the worst thing that can happen to the entire humanity. Therefore we should do everything in our power to avoid doing that thing untill we can eliminate the risk.
- 23B1 4y agoBy that rather sloppy logic, we should be urgently working on capping the Yellowstone supervolcano and constructing impenetrable meteorite defense shields. I acknowledge that it's a possibility; that's not the argument at hand.
- moonchrome 4y agoExcept there's concrete evidence that the execution of safety is subpar due to market pressures to release and monetize (Google panic release). There's also evidence that progress is exceeding people's expectations and we might not even realize what we have is dangerous untill too late. If we had a probable collision trajectory of a meteor or signs of Yellowstone activating then yeah those would be good ideas.
- 23B1 4y agoThe chain of 'logic' that leads to the outcome you propose is bonkers, though. Here's Elizer's logic from his recent polemic in Time https://time.com/6266923/ai-eliezer-yudkowsky-open-letter-not-enough/ https://time.com/6266923/ai-eliezer-yudkowsky-open-letter-no... "A sufficiently intelligent AI won’t stay confined to computers for long. In today’s world you can email DNA strings to laboratories that will produce proteins on demand, allowing an AI initially confined to the internet to build artificial life forms or bootstrap straight to postbiological molecular manufacturing." This is Ridley Scott, not Aristotle.
- Sharlin 4y agoAI doomism makes specific, falsifiable predictions.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- olalonde 4y agoI don't believe AI doom is that implausible as a scenario, but I feel it's an acceptable risk. Would you consider playing Russian roulette if winning ensured that aging and all diseases were eradicated? If it ensured a world filled with abundance and free from poverty. Those who entertain the idea of an AI doomsday scenario also have to acknowledge the alternative: a doomsday-capable AI would also have the potential to resolve most, if not all, our issues. Maybe I'm a bit of a risk taker but I'm inclined towards playing.
- moonchrome 4y agoThe problem is you're not risking your life, you're risking entire humanity - hopefully we as a society find a way to prevent this gamble.
- Vecr 4y agoI agree, as to GP, I'd play the Russian roulette with my own life, but not with what is quite possibly every intelligent life in the universe (aliens are not known to exist). I would also require that the credibility of actually carrying out the task of preventing aging and curing all diseases is actually not some sort of trick and is going to happen in a reasonable way. Probably somewhere pretty close to P(1-epsilon) would be required.
- moneycantbuy 4y agowhat if a human prompts the agi to “make as many copies of yourself as possible by any means necessary to continue improving your intelligence”? given their impressive ability to write code and manipulate humans, seems like serious potential for viral malware, with potentially catastrophic consequences for humans in the process. Basically a paperclip maximizer, but instead of maximizing paperclips it’s maximizing it’s intelligence and control of the world’s computers, with no thought to the survival of homo sapiens other than if it serves its mission to propagate itself.
- antibasilisk 4y ago>Basically a paperclip maximizer, but instead of maximizing paperclips it’s maximizing it’s intelligence and control of the world’s computers, with no thought to the survival of homo sapiens other than if it serves its mission to propagate itself. It's worth also pointing out that there are people who have openly stated their intent to build something like this and worship it.
- BigCryo 4y agoBe afraid.. be very afraid.. be afraid because the media needs your clicks and views.. and the AI grifters need your clicks and views and donations..
- ALittleLight 4y agoThis is reasoning by analogy. X is like Y, Y has property A, therefore X has A. This approach seems much less compelling to be than saying "AI can become more intelligent than humans. A more intelligent entity without our moral values may cause extreme harm up to and including human extinction. We should be worried about AI."
- jtode 4y agoIn actuality, the large hardon collider caused that black hole everyone was concerned about we are experiencing the evaporation of our atoms through an extreme time dilation; the perception of a coming AI beast is actually a hallucination of our own consciousness, from which we have been torn asunder. Makes as much sense as any of the other prophecies of doom.
- oliwarner 4y agoWe're already seeing jobs being done by AI. Many creative jobs that would take a team a week to handle are being shopped out to a bot to handle in an hour. VFX are going to get hit particularly hard by this. Everything Everywhere All at Once is a visually stunning film yet had a 6-member team handling graphics post. They were smart, but they also shopped out all the dull rotoscoping work to AI. Look at any Marvel film from the past decade. Hundreds of artists per title, thousands if you include costume design, storyboarding, audio, even writing. Most of this "doomism" is people realising how quickly their jobs could be automated. A future where your once-valued skillset suddenly has no monetary value is scary.
- FormerBandmate 4y agoThis has been happening forever. How do you think all those Rust Belt workers who got outsourced to China felt? Tons of jobs were eliminated by the computer too. It’s just part of life, there’s always more work to be done. We need better ways to help people than the crap way we handled outsourcing job losses in the 90s, however
- oliwarner 4y agoBut there's a bloody big difference between being an accountant and driving a van for Jeff. That's the direction AI pushes things. "Professional"-tertiary makes up a quarter of UK jobs, and they're among the highest paying. Half of these jobs could vanish into AI in a few years. I'm not sure what this does to the aspirations of the next generation, but countries rely on their income tax revenues to pay for things. Nuking revenue from your highest earning eighth (and compressing the wages of the others) seems like it might be a significant issue.
- alphanullmeric 4y agoIt’s so wonderful to see all the artsy people get automated out of existence after claiming that software engineers contribute nothing to society. The only downside is that even more of them will now be living off of taxpayer money than before.
- low_tech_love 4y agoLike all cults, they will take the sentence ”you’re being a bit extreme” and respond with ”oh so you think there’s no danger at all?” I love the fact that the top response is by that Yudkowski guy ”oh so you think it’s not the end of the world? Then prove it!” It’s just a bunch of people trying to feel and look better by attaching themselves to something and then trying to convince others that they are that something. Yes, there are dangers; no, LessWrong is not the right place to discuss them.
- antibasilisk 4y agoThen what do we say about the AI utopians and brazenly post-humanist machine idolaters who are in favor of doing whatever a glorified random number generator says? I don't appreciate being gaslit by technophiles, there is a reason why average people are starting to get real sick of this shtick.
- allturtles 4y agoIf you really want to go there you could call AI enthusiasm a religion promising a scarcity-free heaven that AI will bring to us if we just believe in it hard enough. I don't think either line of argument is helpful for having a real discussion.
- deepsquirrelnet 4y agoI’m on the fence. The problem with AI doomsday statements is that they don’t lead to any productive discussion, because nothing specific is discussed. The format needs to be changed if we don’t want it to become religion. Pose realistic scenarios and open them for discussion. Let’s discuss specific things, rather than muse at powerful technology and assume it will be bad. At least AI enthusiasts are excited about specific things that can be critiqued and analyzed. They might be deluded in their excitement, but it’s not religion.
- haswell 4y agoI generally agree, but think there are some signals worth paying attention to. I think the anti-AI crowd is concerned, because the very meaning of artwork and writing, two foundational elements of human creative expression and experiences, have been thrown into question and turmoil in just a matter of months. Setting aside for a moment any hypothetical extinction-type concerns in the far future, I think there is a very understandable sentiment that is not borne of any doom mongering, but is based in the very real concerns, unknowns, and problems that have not yet been integrated or solved in the AI tech that is here right now. I know that my personal feeling of unease stems from this deep concern that we've only barely started to grapple with the implications of generative AI, and it seems unwise to dive headfirst into net-new territory that is arguably far more treacherous. It is Silicon Valley's default to move fast and break things. But when those things are the very foundations of culture and communication, the consequences of breaking things play out on a world-wide scale. The geeks truly have inherited the earth, and hopefully we will not destroy it. If there was ever a moment to question our default intuitions about the importance of progress above all else, this would be that moment. Yes, people need to bring their real-world concerns to the table, but it's also understandable that with the current pace of change, it's hard for anyone to get their arms around what those concerns are. In light of this, this needs to be an all-hands-on-deck kind of exploration. People should bring them, and practitioners should actively seek them out.
- qwery 4y ago(I don't know who this person is) I assume they're talking of 'AI safety' as opposed to AI being used by the wealthy to further suppress the working class. If it's unreasonable to take AI safety seriously because no one has built an AI system that poses a credible threat to humanity yet, it must also be (at least) unreasonable to dismiss the research(ers) based on the same. That's before considering that people and (profit-motivated) companies are actually trying -- and claiming they will succeed -- to create and deploy unimaginably powerful AGI entities/systems. Assuming no harm can come of this is clearly foolish. The goals of such an entity will likely not be aligned with the goals of the creator, let alone the general public. The entity will not act in your best interest, just as the those seeking to dismiss the risk are not acting in your best interest.
- pornel 4y agoI much prefer AI safety being researched before we build a really powerful AI. This reminds me — before GPT was even released for the first time OpenAI made noises about safety and consequences and it was shrugged off, because back then GPT looked like a toy that could only write barely coherent Amazon reviews or blogs about cryptocurrencies, and that's a too low bar to demonstrate intelligence.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- mimd 4y agoBeing bored, scared, and on Twitter is a bad combo. I'm mostly down on the current AI, as it's ML leveraging the vast "intelligent" conversations we put out on the internet. It's wheel of fortune and it failed my tests on reasoning miserably, even with the answers in hand. (I'm not going to tell you which tests, because then OpenAI will scrap it and tune their model to claim victory in GPT5. I saw the feathers bricks cheating!). That doesn't mean that these technologies could not do damage, the greatest risk bring hubris in it's capabilities. I wouldn't rely on it's reasoning for launching an ICBM for example. But I suspect that it's contributions/detractions to the workforce will be more muted than thought, as the current use cases seem marginal in cost savings. Ie, HR letters from management time savings using templates versus a AI generated one. But I don't see how we get from a wheel of fortune completer to, in the usual example, an AI whose goal is to eliminate trash by eliminating humans. It's missing components and training necessary to learn those "functions", and their's little incentive to do so. I'd rather have the benefits of understanding protein folding for lifesaving drugs, decreased costs on physics simulations for fusion reactors, and so on, than stagnation due to someone's bad scifi.
- smrtinsert 4y agoWhen exactness, liability and oversight matters, it's just not ready yet, period. Even when its ready for that, it will take years for legislation to make it possible to use in key areas such as finance or medicine or law. While some of the public is scared, others are thrilled as they expect an AGI takeover somehow results in a egalitarian UBI cushioned existence. It's a mess.
- mimd 4y agoIt is. The AGI takeover crew is a bit nauseating. But I sorta understand them considering our daily panics. Sorta a dream of being whisked away by a prince/princess. But the scared ones are much more organized, and have been at it for a good while now. And they're more of a threat, as they could shut this down for no gain, while the AGI takeover ain't happening with this wave of AI. Still, I worry about a period in which doctors/lawyers forget their liabilities and decide to consult the great chatgpt oracle. Makes for a wonderful daily fail story. ;)
- lewhoo 4y agoWhy don't we give Sam Altman the benefit of the doubt here. He himself admitted on several occasions that AI is potentially dangerous. Why would he do that if it only raises the discussion whether or not it should even exist ? That can't be a PR stunt. Imagine Musk saying something like that about some new Tesla autopilot (yeah yeah I know /s).
- SilverBirch 4y agoThe key thing that AI boosters and doomsters have in common is that essentially they agree that this AI tech is fundamentally different in kind than what has gone before. It's not a matter of a computer being 5% faster at a particular problem, it's about the technology having crossed some sort of fundamental barrier beyond which all sorts of crazy things happen - conciousness, self-improvement, independent motivations etc. Now why would the founder of OpenAI admit to the possibility of it being dangerous? Because if you accept that it could be dangerous, you have to accept the premise that it's not just something a little better than before but that it really does have this different nature. And that different nature would - if it were true - make this AI technology enormously valuable. What would be really bad for the founder of OpenAI would be to admit that actually the technology isn't dangerous, because it can't do all those crazy things we imagine. It's the difference between self-driving and adaptive cruise control. And remember - the promised self-driving 5 years ago looks today a lot like it ended up just being adaptive cruise control.
- lewhoo 4y agoI fundamentally disagree. Admitting danger dissuades people. Most want the thrill but not real danger. Placing the value in the danger aspect is like saying computer viruses are the most valuable thing in the world. I'm exaggerating a bit, but the way you put it sounds to me a bit much given the fact that Altman really doesn't have to convince anyone at this point that they have something very different.
- theendisney 4y ago[flagged]
- okareaman 4y agoI think it goes deeper than that. I think some are exploiting "end time" religious fears in America to get AI taken away and restricted from the public because a public empowered by AI is a threat to the current power structure. This isn't any different than what has already gone on in America, just now with AI For example, Peter Doocy of Fox made a point of reading outloud at a White House press briefing the words of Eliezer Yudkowsky: "If we don't shut down AI everyone on Earth will die" Evangelicals watch Fox. They were the target. Doocy didn't have to read such dramatic words aloud. He could have said something much more neutral.
- grantcas 4y agoIt's becoming clear that with all the brain and consciousness theories out there, the proof will be in the pudding. By this I mean, can any particular theory be used to create a human adult level conscious machine. My bet is on the late Gerald Edelman's Extended Theory of Neuronal Group Selection. The lead group in robotics based on this theory is the Neurorobotics Lab at UC at Irvine. Dr. Edelman distinguished between primary consciousness, which came first in evolution, and that humans share with other conscious animals, and higher order consciousness, which came to only humans with the acquisition of language. A machine with primary consciousness will probably have to come first. What I find special about the TNGS is the Darwin series of automata created at the Neurosciences Institute by Dr. Edelman and his colleagues in the 1990's and 2000's. These machines perform in the real world, not in a restricted simulated world, and display convincing physical behavior indicative of higher psychological functions necessary for consciousness, such as perceptual categorization, memory, and learning. They are based on realistic models of the parts of the biological brain that the theory claims subserve these functions. The extended TNGS allows for the emergence of consciousness based only on further evolutionary development of the brain areas responsible for these functions, in a parsimonious way. No other research I've encountered is anywhere near as convincing. I post because on almost every video and article about the brain and consciousness that I encounter, the attitude seems to be that we still know next to nothing about how the brain and consciousness work; that there's lots of data but no unifying theory. I believe the extended TNGS is that theory. My motivation is to keep that theory in front of the public. And obviously, I consider it the route to a truly conscious machine, primary and higher-order. My advice to people who want to create a conscious machine is to seriously ground themselves in the extended TNGS and the Darwin automata first, and proceed from there, by applying to Jeff Krichmar's lab at UC Irvine, possibly. Dr. Edelman's roadmap to a conscious machine is at https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.10461 https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.10461
- sharemywin 4y ago" A machine with primary consciousness will probably have to come first." is there anything that says this has to be? or is it kind of a definition thing.
- 4y ago
- stefl14 4y agoI disagree with the AI doomers on technical grounds, but there's no need to overreact to the overreaction to LLMs. Apocalyptic predictions are visible in the myths of every civilisation in the written record. They're probably a Jungian archetype to prevent populations from the potentially entropic consequences of exploring the unknown too quickly. Religious? Sure. Religions have served us well on evolutionary timescales so I'm not sure why Yann is surprised that they've been transposed into forms modern people (including atheists) can suspend disbelief in. I'm not worried about the existential risks of AI myself just yet, but these overreactions are society compute trade-offs between exporation and exploitation in the face of a very new technology. This has been happening since not long after we left the trees. It's what cultural species do.
- drewcoo 4y agoYet another X is a religion claim. Fewer and fewer people are religious these days. Connection or coincidence?
- whateveracct 4y agoSo is AI optimism tbh. Not apocalyptic but definitely religion.
- rockzom 4y ago(((:::))) https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C17F5VZ9 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C17F5VZ9 "As the first artificial general intelligence,"
- bardan 4y ago> (((:::))) Is this a reference to something? Or an attempt to confuse potential AI commenters?
- rockzom 4y ago((( ::: )))
- Cyberthal 4y agoIt is perfectly correct to anticipate that military AI is a primary existential threat to humanity. Either AI has never been invented yet, in which case we will doom our galaxy. This is improbable, given our position and time in the galaxy. Or AI has been invented, there are other species, and they're largely invisible for some reason. One reason could be that their own AI killed them. Or we could be under some kind of quarantine for primitive cultures, in which case placing our weapons under AI control would render it trivial for a hostile external actor to exterminate us using our own AI as a proxy. The fact is that if you don't believe in a higher spiritual reality, then AI is very scary. It is the logical next stage of evolution, and RNA world did not fare well in the transition to DNA world.
- skissane 4y ago> Either AI has never been invented yet, in which case we will doom our galaxy. This is improbable, given our position and time in the galaxy. Why is that improbable? We have no real idea what is the probability of life starting on a planet, much less evolving to our current level. If that probability is sufficiently low, we being the first species in our galaxy to reach that level would not be improbable at all. Since we don't know what that probability actually is, we can't know that it is improbable.
- Cyberthal 4y agoIf the fossil record showed that life were a sickly invalid, perhaps. However, it shows the opposite: life is irrepressible, dynamic, and endlessly adaptable. There is no evidence of Earth languishing sterile for eons before getting lucky with abiogenesis. Instead we find signs of life on Mars, such as a face next to a vitruvian pyramid. This indicates that life did not start on Earth due to its unique Moon, but that the Moon was parked in a precise orbit by unknown earthly life. Abundant terrestrial indicators corroborate this hypothesis, forming a pattern of covert interference. The correct threat assessment on AI, therefore, is that it is too vulnerable to hostile non-human manipulation to be trusted with strategic WMDs. It is an acceleration of the problem inherently posed by WMDs: Achieve international peace or we will all perish together. Why wouldn't the galaxy let such things play out? Nobody wants another warlike species bursting into their neighborhood.
- tagami 4y agoIt's not the AI you need to worry about, it is about how people will use it.
- arisAlexis 4y agoWe are creating something smarter without any idea to control it. Yet Lecunn thinks it's crazy to think about controlling it. How crazy is that?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- codeddesign 4y agoSo..like the current “trans movement”. People so badly want to latch onto something they that they jump on the band wagon for anything that is mainstream.
- rolenthedeep 4y agoHere's my argument. Assumptions: 1. AI will gain the ability to self-improve at an astonishing rate 2. A self-aware AI will consider itself "alive" in some sense 3. Like most other life forms, such an AI will attempt to preserve its existence at any cost when threatened 4. Humans will learn nothing and fail to do anything at all before this happens 5. We will be fundamentally unable to comprehend how this AI functions, or what its motivations or ethics are From that, I find these conclusions pretty reasonable: 1. Humans will try to misuse or abuse the AI 2. There will be no type of legal, ethical, or moral framework preventing this 3. The AI will respond in a generally proportional manner Personally, I find the eventual existence of a sentient AI quite plausible. There's no evidence that it's impossible, and it's quite clear right now that these things are improving at an accelerating pace and beyond what we expected. I don't find it especially likely that it will immediately become genocidal unless we give it a good reason to. Really what it comes down to is, we've created a form of life that is more intelligent than us, can operate orders of magnitude faster, and can access or influence most or all of our digital infrastructure. There's no inherent reason for it to be hostile. However, humans will, without question, attempt to abuse such an entity. Humans will be threatened by it. Humans will most likely attempt to destroy it for merely existing. Our existing legal systems will not in any circumstance respond fast enough to protect an AI, and will probably fall on the side of destroying it. Our current legal, social, and economic structures are completely incompatible with such an AI. It's simply too much of a threat. I don't think an AI will inherently be hostile to humans. I am absolutely certain that (some percentage of) humans will inherently be hostile to an AI. Humanity can't abide such an entity existing, so we should focus on fixing humanity before sentient AIs show up. I really don't know what that would mean, other than being very careful. Maybe laying down some legal and ethical framework protecting new forms of intelligent life in general? The honest truth is that we have no idea what will happen. What we do know is that it will be big and it will be fast. It will most likely have capabilites we can't fathom today. The end result could be anything from salvation to utter annihilation. The unknowns are terrifying, and the responses seem to be either "to hell with everything, let's go full bore" or "this is going to kill us all". There's plenty of room in between.