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We need a more sophisticated debate about AI

276 points by nmstoker 4y ago

Simon321 4y ago
If the open letter is taken at face value That's quite an assumption, because i (and many others) don't believe it is to be taken at face value. It looks like a ploy of Elon and others to catch up to their main competitor (openAI). It's known Elon hates openAI[1] and is competing with them. He also provides the majority for the organisation that published the letter. Some people on the letter are well meaning but misguided. [1] https://www.semafor.com/article/03/24/2023/the-secret-history-of-elon-musk-sam-altman-and-openai https://www.semafor.com/article/03/24/2023/the-secret-histor...
- tambourine_man 4y ago
  I was not aware of that particular gossip. It sheds some light on Musk's behavior.
- myfavoritedog 4y ago
  [dead]
- ctoth 4y ago
  So do you assert that Stuart Russell, the guy who literally wrote the book on AI, is trying to also compete with OpenAI, or is he one of your well-meaning but misguided people[0]? In fact will we find that anyone we call you on as not specifically competing with OpenAI (which None of Musk's companies are AFAIK, Autopilot != LLMs?) but is just a useful idiot? Also just sort of a meta point but good lord to focus on one person out of a thousand who signed the letter, rather than the actual content of the letter has got to be one of the largest self-owns in the history of humanity. "We were gonna prevent the AI from eating us all but the bad man signed so heck with it, full speed ahead!" [0]: Stuart Russell on why A.I. experiments must be paused https://www.cnn.com/videos/tech/2023/04/01/smr-experts-demand-pause-on-ai.cnn https://www.cnn.com/videos/tech/2023/04/01/smr-experts-deman...
  - mjburgess 4y ago
    Experts on AI arent experts on sociology, economics, politics, labour markets, jobs or their tasks, I can't see anyone on that list who can provide an empirical account of the breakdown of major job roles into tasks which can be automated by chatgpt, but not prior to it. I cannot see anyone providing an analysis of what that automation will do for those roles. Nor anyone providing an economic analysis of that impact; a sociological analysis of that, and so on. "Experts in AI" are people who can describe gradient descent without prep, balance a binary tree, and compute a dot-product.
    - JohnFen 4y ago
      > "Experts in AI" are people who can describe gradient descent without prep, balance a binary tree, and compute a dot-product. But that kind of expert is no more or less qualified to discuss the wider social ramifications of AI than any random person off the street.
      - ryanwaggoner 4y ago
        I think that’s the point they’re making…
    - visarga 4y ago
      > I cannot see anyone providing an analysis of what that automation will do for those roles Here are two links: > Separate studies of both writers and programmers find 50% increases in productivity with AI, and higher performance and satisfaction. https://mobile.twitter.com/emollick/status/1631397931604488194 https://mobile.twitter.com/emollick/status/16313979316044881... > Salespeople with AI assistance doubled customer purchases & were 2.33 times as successful in solving questions that required creativity. Top agents gained most. https://mobile.twitter.com/emollick/status/1642885605238398976 https://mobile.twitter.com/emollick/status/16428856052383989...
      - mjburgess 4y ago
        Sure, and do 50% and 2.33x suggest that we're about to experience the mass obscelence of those roles? Hardly. Spreadsheets had more impact
- nico 4y ago
  So who cares what Musk wants? If the ideas in the letter are good, can’t we just run with them? Like OpenAI did with all the publicly available research to build their products?
- JohnFen 4y ago
  > Some people on the letter are well meaning but misguided. There's no reason to believe that the majority of the people on the letter aren't earnest in their support of it. But calling them "misguided" is pretty slanted. What you really mean is that you disagree with them.
  - ryanwaggoner 4y ago
    That’s what it always means.
- Simon321 4y ago
  majority of funding for the organisation*
- concordDance 4y ago
  Elon doesn't have anything competing with OpenAI atm.
perrygeo 4y ago
The issue with our AI debate is that there's not a single "problem" but many inter-dependent issues without a clear system-wide solution. - Big tech monopolizing the models, data, and hardware. - Copyright concerns. - Job security. - AIs becoming sentient and causing harm for their own ends. - Corporations intentionally using AI to cause harm for their own ends. - Feedback loops will flood the internet with content of unknown provenance, which get included in the next model, etc. - AI hallucinations resulting in widespread persistent errors that cause an epistemological crisis. - The training set is inherently biased; human knowledge and perspectives not represented in this set could be systematically wiped from public discourse. We can have meaningful discussions on each of these topics. And I'm sure we all have a level of concern assigned to each (personally, I'm far more worried about an epistemological crisis and corporate abuse than some AI singularity). But we're seeing these topics interact in real-time to make a system with huge emergent societal properties. Not sure anyone has a handle on the big picture (there is no one driving the bus!) but there's plenty of us sitting in the passenger seats and raising alarm bells about what we see out our respective little windows.
- RegnisGnaw 4y ago
  You forgot the big one: Governments intentionally using AI to cause harm for their own ends.
  - JohnFen 4y ago
    Personally, I think corporations present a much larger danger on this count than governments.
    - dgs_sgd 4y ago
      i think the greatest danger is the combination of the two: corporations using AI in service of governments.
      - JohnFen 4y ago
        Well, yes. In the US right now, anyway, there isn't a great deal of difference between major corporations and the government.
kajaktum 4y ago
I dont understand why people are so opposed to or feel its ridiculous to halt progress on AI when we do the same thing for experiments on human genome? Is China going to stop because we do?
- chimen 4y ago
  We can't stop and nobody will. This is pretty much a matter of national security soon. Stopping now means being left behind. Maybe some countries will regulate this but I expect gov agencies to steam ahead full blown.
  - goatlover 4y ago
    It's a good thing this sort of recklessness hasn't resulted in a nuclear war, despite the massive arms race during the cold war. Difference is that AI is a lot easier to obtain than fissile material.
- sassifrass 4y ago
  Because it’s rather expensive and difficult for some random person to do human genome research from home, but anyone with the right knowledge and a laptop can still make significant progress in AI while sitting on their couch at home.
  - forgetfulness 4y ago
    With a laptop and the ability to lease huge clusters from cloud providers, maybe.
  - kajaktum 4y ago
    But that doesn't explain why US as a government is not allowed to do human genome experimentation (HGE) ? In fact, it makes even less sense to make HGE taboo than AI for the reason you mentioned. It doesn't make sense to ban something that the average person can't do anyways, and who's gonna stop government? The situation is even worse in AI. By your logic, if HGE is cheap and easy, then it doesn't make sense to ban it and we should just let people experiment with their to-be infants all the time. What are you gonna do? Ban something you can do with some test tubes and a needle?
Fricken 4y ago
Sophisticated debates have been going on for decades. Now that the cat is out of the bag, there isn't much to be gained from arguing about what to do with a cat in a bag.
spaceman_2020 4y ago
ChatGPT has been an incredible tool for me when I’m coding. But outside of code, I’ve struggled to find non trivial use cases for it. A lot of non tech people I’ve spoken to have the same experience. At best, it’s a slightly smarter Google. Like my wife wanted to prepare a few questions for a class assignment. ChatGPT wasn’t of that much help because she had to prepare questions that were contextualized to the skill level of her average students as well as the content they’ve already covered. While I can see the trajectory of AI’s eventual growth, this lack of immediate use cases neuters any meaningful debate on, say, AI alignment and ethics. After all, why would you bother about the ethics of a glorified toy?
- patrick0d 4y ago
  The worry is not that chatgpt will take over the world. It is that a future system will be unaligned with human interests and once it is created by gradient descent (the internals of the system are not understood by anyone - they're just matrices) there will be no guarantee that humanity will be safe. By looking at the power of gpt4 we have no clear idea of how fast it will continue to improve.
- nemo44x 4y ago
  If you use the content they’ve covered as a context you’d maybe get good questions. It’s a bit non-trivial to do yourself but a few startups have posted here recently offering a service that makes it easy to do.
  - redblacktree 4y ago
    I would think an ongoing conversation would also get progressively more useful.
- factormeta 4y ago
  one of the sibling thread mentioned: >- The training set is inherently biased; human knowledge and perspectives not represented in this set could be systematically wiped from public discourse. What you are saying make sense. I find internet to be a great place to find tech stuff, not so much others. Of course this also make sense, internet very much represent a certain group of people who are tech savy, or good at publishing stuff on the web.
jordwest 4y ago
Curiously, I just asked GPT4 to choose any headline from the HN front page that it feels it's best placed to comment on, and it chose this one. > I'll choose headline number 4: "We need a much more sophisticated debate about AI (ft.com)". As an AI language model, I can provide insights and perspectives on the need for a more nuanced and informed discussion about the development, deployment, and impact of AI on society.
- dwighttk 4y ago
  Hmm… did it share any of those insights or perspectives?
  - jordwest 4y ago
    [ChatGPT]: The call for a more sophisticated debate about AI reflects a growing awareness of the technology's impact on various aspects of society, including ethics, privacy, and the job market. It is crucial to engage in nuanced discussions that acknowledge both the benefits and potential risks of AI to ensure its responsible development and implementation. First and foremost, we must consider the ethical implications of AI applications. Issues such as algorithmic fairness, transparency, and accountability are essential to address to prevent unfair bias and discrimination. A more sophisticated debate should involve not only AI developers and policymakers but also representatives from different communities that may be affected by AI-based decisions. Second, privacy concerns are increasingly important as AI systems often rely on vast amounts of personal data for training and decision-making. A balanced discussion should consider methods for ensuring data privacy, such as differential privacy and federated learning, while acknowledging the trade-offs between privacy and AI performance. Moreover, the impact of AI on the job market cannot be overlooked. While AI may lead to increased efficiency and productivity, it could also displace jobs and exacerbate income inequality. The debate should explore ways to manage the transition, such as reskilling programs, basic income guarantees, and policies that promote equitable access to AI technologies. Finally, fostering global cooperation on AI governance is crucial to ensure that the benefits of AI are shared equitably and that the technology is not misused. A more sophisticated debate should encourage international collaboration on establishing standards and best practices for AI development, deployment, and regulation. In summary, the need for a more sophisticated debate about AI is evident. By addressing ethical, privacy, job market, and global cooperation concerns, we can collectively work toward ensuring that AI serves the best interests of humanity.
devjab 4y ago
Maybe I'll look like an idiot for saying these things in a few years. Maybe I'm naive and maybe I'm even a little bit cynical, but shouldn't we wait until there is something to have a debate about? From my anecdotal perspective we haven't seen a lot of areas where the recent AI "developments" are going to have a meaningful impact on how we do business. I work in a non-tech focused enterprise organisation which develops and sells solar, which involves a lot of data. Both in terms of running power plants, but also financial and legislative data. Much like the rest of the world, we've tried hard to implement GPT into our workflows, and we've frankly had very little success making it do anything useful. Ok, that is not entirely true, because it has been fairly successful at competing with our RPA software. Long story short, a lot of our software and a lot of the workflows in our company involve moving and manipulating data between systems. With GPT some of our more technically inclined workers have been able to successfully automate parts of their workflows in a way that no no-code solution has been able to do before. So there is certainly some success, but we were already doing these things with RPA and other no-code solutions, and the long term strategy for these things is still to be better at buying software that comes with API's so that we do not need "digital gaffatape". This is obviously never going to happen, and it is great that the "digital gaffatape" has improved, but it hasn't exactly blown our minds. But it has been an improvement. That is, however, the end of the usefulness. In every other attempt, we've come up short, and it's not for lack of trying. I work as an external examiner for CS students, however, and this is an area where I have seen a massive disruption. Because ChatGPT is really great at cheating. Not so great for the students who enter a final, and find themselves unable to answer things they would have, if they had written their work themselves, but for a lot of education I think there will be a need to rethink how we teach and test students. Which is a great thing, mind you, but how much money can that really be worth for these AI companies? Anyway, I'm probably wrong, but I still think it's healthy to wait and see what happens before we waste too many legislative resources on it. Imagine if we had spent resources on the Blockchain hype. I'm sure a lot of people will line up to tell me how wrong I am about this comparison, but we regulate Blockchain quite heavily in the EU now. So it's not like the legislative branches can't grind into gear once something actually happens.
- dangond 4y ago
  > shouldn't we wait until there is something to have a debate about? The main push for regulation (at least from those worried about existential risk) comes from the fact that in the scenario that AI does get powerful enough to take over the world, it will be too late/useless to have a debate at that point. The only time where it makes sense to have a debate, from that perspective, is before the capabilities are developed. If such capabilities are developed, and we have no idea how to control such a system because we decided not to worry about it, humanity loses.
harryf 4y ago
This is a discussion that leads to regulation. But clearly the only way to regulate AI... is with AI. It has the potential to automate the process of monitoring and detecting potential risks or violations in AI systems, which could be difficult or impossible for humans to do manually. For example, AI systems could be programmed to monitor themselves and other AI systems for potential biases, security vulnerabilities, or other potential risks. Additionally, AI could be used to develop and enforce regulatory frameworks, such as standards for data privacy, transparency, and algorithmic fairness, which could be more easily implemented and enforced through automation. However, there are also potential risks and challenges associated with using AI to regulate AI, such as the potential for errors or biases in the AI systems used for regulation, the difficulty of defining and enforcing ethical or legal standards for AI, and the potential for unintended consequences or harmful outcomes from AI-based regulation. Ultimately, the effectiveness of AI in regulating AI will depend on a range of factors, including the design and implementation of AI-based regulation frameworks, the capabilities of AI systems themselves, and the willingness of stakeholders to engage in ongoing dialogue and collaboration to ensure that AI serves the best interests of humanity.
- xyzzy123 4y ago
  Is your "regulating" ai smarter, dumber or the same as the thing it's regulating? Dumber isn't going to work, the agent will be able to outmanouver it. If the "control" AI is smarter, what is keeping that one aligned? If they are roughly the same power, how do you stop them collaborating or subverting each other?
  - AnIrishDuck 4y ago
    Or, in other words: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? [1] We've been having this debate for ... a while. AI is certainly a new twist though. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quis_custodiet_ipsos_custodes%3F https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quis_custodiet_ipsos_custodes%...
fourseventy 4y ago
[flagged]
dahwolf 4y ago
Distrust anybody making confident claims about AI and how it will affect humanity. We simply do not have a clue, none of us do.
vrglvrglvrgl 4y ago
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ryu2k2 4y ago
I find it a little worrying that nobody seems to be considering the implication for society at large. We're having enough trouble with the disconnect of people brought about by social media. What's going to happen to us when people are less and less required to work with each other in collaboration to get their work done?
- wun0ne 4y ago
  We can spend more time with each other not working?
  - JohnFen 4y ago
    Not likely. We'll still need to pay the bills, and if the reasonable-paying jobs will be done by AI, then the lucky people will have to work longer than ever before just to keep food on the table. The others will just starve.
  - goatlover 4y ago
    Are we being paid to not work or is that all going to the 1%?
user00012-ab 4y ago
Which is weird since they probably used a LLM to write that article.
Animats 4y ago
We need a more sophisticated debate, but we're not going to get it from the Financial Times. Large language models are alien. They are a new thing, not artificial general human-like intelligence. They sort of think, but not at all like humans, and not at all like previous concepts of artificial intelligence from science fiction. We don't really know how they work inside. They show indications of developing some kind of internal world model. They can play chess and Othello. But we don't know what form that world model has. They do not, in a fundamental sense, know what they are doing, and are prone to serious errors because of that. Despite this, they're really good at language-oriented tasks. This is both useful and upsetting. Humans have now had shoved in their face that many tasks considered "intellectual" can be done by systems that internally are simple, but very large. It also makes humans realize that much human intellectual activity is just autocomplete. This includes tasks previously considered high-value. This is terrifying to humans who thought they were on top and fear becoming obsolete. On top of this, they're at least as good at emotion, convincing, and lying as humans. Better on those than on accuracy, in fact. Nobody expected that. The major companies in the field are frantically clamping down on the emotion and lying part. The convincing part will get monetized. If regulation is needed, it should be related to what companies are allowed to use this for. The EU does not allow computer systems to make un-appealable negative decisions about humans. (Does that still apply to the UK, or did the UK "deregulate" after Brexit?) That's a good starting point. A requirement that computer systems which interact with humans for commercial or political purposes must be identified as automated systems is a good next step. That's a starting point.
- otabdeveloper4 4y ago
  > They can play chess and Othello They memorized chess notation as found in chess books. (If you've ever seen those, they are just pages and pages of chess notation and nothing else.)
  - consumer451 4y ago
    I keep reading this correct sounding idea that ChatGPT is no more than text prediction. Yesterday I put that to the test, I think. prompt: Let's play a game. Here are the rules: There are 3 boxes, red, green, blue. Red is for prime numbers. If the number is not a prime, then green for odd numbers, and blue for even numbers. I tried a dozen or so various numbers and it worked perfectly, returning the correct colored box. I then asked it to output my game as javascript, and the code ran perfectly. There seem to be two options: 1. my made up game exists in the training corpus 2. ChatGPT 3.5 is able to understand basic logic Is there a third option?
whalesalad 4y ago
Am I alone to want absolutely zero debate at all? We're putting the cart before the horse right now. Everything is strictly speculation.
- criddell 4y ago
  It's not all speculation. Students are using AI for coursework. Financial services companies are granting credit based on AI output. Models are being trained with copyrighted source images. Four years ago, DHH posted this on Twitter: > The @AppleCard is such a fucking sexist program. My wife and I filed joint tax returns, live in a community-property state, and have been married for a long time. Yet Apple’s black box algorithm thinks I deserve 20x the credit limit she does. No appeals work. A few tweets later he writes: > So nobody understands THE ALGORITHM. Nobody has the power to examine or check THE ALGORITHM. Yet everyone we’ve talked to from both Apple and GS are SO SURE that THE ALGORITHM isn’t biased and discriminating in any way. That’s some grade-A management of cognitive dissonance. These impenetrable black boxes are producing output with real world consequences.
  - whalesalad 4y ago
    > Students are using AI for coursework. Financial services companies are granting credit based on AI output. Models are being trained with copyrighted source images. None of this bothers me. It's impossible to try and sit down and devise a cohesive solution to these problems. This is literally just the way that the cookie crumbles (into uncharted territory) and premature constraints would be silly imho. If AI destroys the world, let it.
  - tome 4y ago
    Hmm, not sure how the black box works, but maybe it knows that he built a business worth tens of millions and she didn't.
- goatlover 4y ago
  We didn't seem to have a debate on the potential downside of social media when it was new. Maybe speculation is a good thing in case there are big downsides to AI.
fedeb95 4y ago
I'm not concerned with AI; I'm concerned with what humans will do with AI, as usual I am concerned about what humans are capable of when they don't know things, that is all the time. So, we need a more sophisticated debate about us.
pmarreck 4y ago
The people afraid of AGI are usually the same people who believe that our own intelligence is just mechanistic automaton written in biology. That explains why I'm not afraid of AGI, I know that our consciousness is quite simply not that (but I cannot prove it).
cmrdporcupine 4y ago
It would all be so much better from a public discourse perspective if instead of calling it "AI" we could just call it what it is "Machine Learning." Or even better, "mechanized knowledge work". Doesn't sound as sexy, does it?
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
tayo42 4y ago
What is this referring to? like where? or who? > The public debate and the title > We need who is "We"?
kleiba 4y ago
> Twentieth-century ways of thinking [...] > The writer is a barrister and [...] Could someone with more patience for baloney hipsterness advise me whether it's worth reading the article?
kmod 4y ago
These articles/letters seem to just say "this is an important issue and I really hope someone else solves it!" and feel like passing the buck to me. Maybe it's more defensible from a journalist/author, but even that recent prominent letter didn't have any concrete suggestions and just called on other people to solve things. I know there are people working on AI safety, but that's been going on for a while and it seems like the state of the art is to just think of things that we hope the AI doesn't do and then we tweak it to be unlikely to do it? It seems like we don't even know what to ask for when it comes to AI safety so people just ask for dialog/debate. So I'm starting to feel cynical about our ability to actually achieve any of the safety that people wish for. This has been a known issue for a while, and despite a lot of awareness we haven't really made much progress on it. I'm not sure what to do with this -- personally I feel a bit fatalistic that AI will continue unabated and we won't figure out the safety angle. But I just think the conversation should move on from "we really need to talk about this" because people certainly have been talking about it.
- goatlover 4y ago
  Eliezer Yudkowski certainly sounds fatalistic. And he's spent quite a bit of time thinking about AI alignment and how to develop friendly AI. For him, the problem is we don't have enough time to figure it out.
  - concordDance 4y ago
    Also that its harder than expected.
agentultra 4y ago
Start by phasing out the term, "Artificial Intelligence." In it's current form it's an umbrella term for a an entire circus of algorithms and techniques. Unfortunately it's also co-opted by charlatans and opinion piece journalists trying to generate click-bait. Start using the more accurate terms: machine learning, natural language processing, expert/planning systems, etc. Call a spade, a spade. The problem with _AI_ is that the speaker can mean any number of things and none of them: they can move the goal posts in a conversation, completely make up their own definition, and obfuscate what is being discussed.
- amelius 4y ago
  Corporations will use the term that sells best, so good luck with that. (Journalists will too)
  - agentultra 4y ago
    Sure, and maybe they will edit the responses from the experts they interview. However the experts don't have to play along and pretend that AI or AGI is real.
giantg2 4y ago
Imagine a world where we do any of those debate practices on any subject... maybe one day.
LargeTomato 4y ago
Lots of people calling for "A moratorium on AI research" "A more sophisticated debate" "New legislation to address AI" But then they don't actually do anything. They just "call for it".
- concordDance 4y ago
  The people actually planning trrorist attacks on chip fabs aren't broadcasting it to the world.
paddw 4y ago
Insert any <major issue> in place of AI here and you will also get a truth. We are about as likely to get a sophisticated debate on AI as other issues. The best strategy here is to fall in with whatever unsophisticated line of argument is closest to your thinking. Better to say that AI poses no immediate harm or future danger than to try and explain something along the lines of "well it's probably better if systems with emergent behavior we don't fully understand are brought online by interests in relatively liberal and democratic places..." and so on.
PerilousD 4y ago
Why wasn't the https://archive.md/kCklr https://archive.md/kCklr link promoted instead of the paywall site?
mimd 4y ago
An article behind a paywall arguing for a debate? Fantastic. I wonder who will participate and where will it be held? We need more sophistication? I agree. The least "we" could do is to get some champagne and caviar. /s Thank goodness I don't pay for this sorta of drivel. Pity their audience of gullible New-England brahmins.
tonymet 4y ago
There are also critical topics that will be maligned as “unserious” despite being common pitfalls in human existence. I expect people to start worshipping AI , either overtly or implicitly. That means allowing AI to tell them what to think and what decisions to make. And forming deferential relationships with AI. In other words a big risk is an AI religion of sorts in the way that we have “science-ism” or “atheism” – with less formal structures. When people imagine “AI taking over” they describe AI getting launch codes , or deactivating power stations like the movie War Games. A far more likely scenario is people asking AI political, economic or military strategy and carrying it out. I see this happening in a couple years.
- MrStonedOne 4y ago
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carlesfe 4y ago
FT: "We need a much more sophisticated debate about AI" Me: "We're having it, just not in the traditional media" Follow scientists on Twitter and listen to podcasts from experts instead of journalists. You'll find that debate.
- opportune 4y ago
  The problem is “the public” wants to be part of the conversation but isn’t able to participate or understand it to an adequate level. It would be like trying to have a sophisticated discussion on Reddit about quantum mechanics. You’d have a huge majority of people with a passing interest in the subject and the majority of their knowledge from 10 minute YouTube videos without any real technical details, and a minority of experts who actually understand the math and work with the stuff. The majority will jump to strange conclusions that can’t be debunked without learning the math and practices they don’t know and mostly don’t care about learning, the minority will either try to take great pains to educate them or just go somewhere they can talk amongst themselves.
neuralRiot 4y ago
The only danger i see in AI is humasns becoming complacent and losing its ability to solve problems by themselves, similar as people googling “how to replace flat tire”.
atleastoptimal 4y ago
There are a lot of separate, distinct groups who all focus their concerns on different problems. They're all worried, but the implications of their worrying take on entirely different scopes. The problem is that each level of direness nullifies any sense of urgency regarding the next one down. People worried about their own jobs changing/getting fired seem inconsequential to people worried about major sweeping disruptions in the world economy Worrying about major disruptions in the world economy seems pointless to those worrying about an impending dystopian cyber-dictatorship Worrying about a dystopian cyber-dictatorship seems pointless to those worrying about ASI end-of-humanity scenarios And people who think AI is a big nothingburger don't care about any of these issues. Before we can make collective judgements and positive action towards the future, we have to triage and align ourselves with a shared sense of what's actually happening, and what is important with regards to these new, inevitable changes.
thomastjeffery 4y ago
> Indeed, asking whether a machine learning system can “think” like a human is often as useful as asking whether a car can gallop as fast as a horse. That's all you need to know: there is no debate about AI, because there is no AI! We need a more sophisticated debate about algorithms and big data, and inference models; and how these technologies are being abused for money. None of that has an iota to do with AI.
cwmoore 4y ago
Tax AI for UBI
armchairhacker 4y ago
This will probably get buried, but I've noticed the concerns about AI also apply to other technology: personal computers, Internet, social media, etc. These have undeniably changed society, in some ways for the worse: inequality, loneliness, sedentarism, mass disinformation. They have enabled mass destruction at never-before-seen scales, given massive power to individuals and small groups, and might have already set us up for mass casualties and apocalypse. What if the US or Chinese government turns its new military tech against civilians? What if giving children social media and Fortnite has doomed them to be society too inattentive and lazy to sustain the next generation? What if we experience a Carrington Event which destroys most technology? Hopefully, none of these things will happen, but we need to do more than hope: we need to seriously discuss, prepare and probably regulate these things. AI gives more publicity, but we have always needed to do more sophisticated debating. And to people think that AI is more significant than the personal computer, Internet, social media, etc.: I seriously doubt it. Why? We're comparing GPT to the invention of the computer and Internet, and it can create simple games, explain things you could've Google searched, create generic stories, and do other things 1+ billion people can. Which is actually really impressive, and may have consequences, like it mass spam and disinformation. But remember, we're comparing it to computers, which it runs on, and the Internet, which is the entire reason spam is a problem. And although GPT does things almost as good as a human, it has a long way to go before it does better than a human: remember, we've had machines that could play Chess better than humans for 25 years, "Jeopardy" almost as good for 10, and we still don't have machines that can do physical tasks with human agility or single-handedly do the work of professional artists and engineers.
lkrubner 4y ago
We need a more sophisticated debate about the impact of the Internet. It has been a failure by any measure, especially given the high hopes we had for it back in the 1980s and 1990s. Here is productivity during the 25 years after each date on this graph: https://static01.nyt.com/images/2023/04/04/opinion/krugman040423_2/krugman040423_2-jumbo.png?quality=75&auto=webp https://static01.nyt.com/images/2023/04/04/opinion/krugman04... Paul Krugman goes over the numbers: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/04/opinion/internet-economy.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/04/opinion/internet-economy.... In the 1990s we believed that once knowledge was universal and free it would lead to the biggest economic boom in history. Instead the opposite happened: the economy slowed in the early 2000s, then crashed in 2008, and then the period from 2008 to 2020 was the slowest since the Great Depression. How to reconcile such a failure with the spread of universal knowledge? We need to answer that before we can answer the smaller and more specific questions that surround AI.
thequadehunter 4y ago
Were these kind of concerns posed when computers first became used by consumers? I'm curious because I feel like that must have had a huge impact on the job market.
xbar 4y ago
Social class protectionist claptrap.
moremetadata 4y ago
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mym1990 4y ago
The issue is that while the debates are happening, the products are being built out at an incredibly fast pace. By the time the debates are settled, the technology will already be mainstream.
fullsend 4y ago
Some people are having sophisticated debates about AI. Definitely not anyone at or near the Financial Times.
neonate 4y ago
https://archive.md/kCklr https://archive.md/kCklr
blurbleblurble 4y ago
You know who wrote a nuanced book on the social relevance of automation? Martin Luther King Jr. It's called "Where do we go from here: chaos or community?" It was his last book, published less than a year before he was killed.
logicalmonster 4y ago
I might be very, very wrong about this, but I'm very distrustful that the seemingly high level of social fear and attention around AI is really most peoples' genuine opinion. Covid fearporn and Ukraine outrageporn are essentially old and boring news now and the media needs something else to make money off of through fear/outrage clicks. I believe that the media is artificially hyping this AI story because it gets lots of fearful clicks from people. Most of us are in a bubble reading lots of technology news and seeing this AI story blasted everywhere so we might be perceiving its real impact in a different way than most people. Why is this AI story getting so many clicks? 1) We have generations of people who grew up with fiction like Terminator and the Matrix who are at least cognizant of the idea that AI will somehow destroy us all. 2) Everybody is on edge about losing their job in a significantly down economy. If you start blasting stories about workers being replaced by robots, people are going to click on those stories. I'm not saying that AI isn't important, but I'm just saying to remember that media hype cycles exist and impact all of us too.
- ethanbond 4y ago
  The “fiction” people are worried about is better described as a set of thought experiments, to which AI optimists never directly respond. These considerations have existed for decades and reality is playing out more recklessly than most thought experiments even take as their premise. It’d have been too unbelievable in a sci-fi story for the owners of AI to be field testing it on the open internet, giving it fluent human language, and giving it money to replicate itself — yet here we are! AI is either an extremely powerful technology, and like all extremely powerful technologies it will carry risk, or it’s not. My theory is that AI optimists don’t address the concerns directly because they actually agree that they’re real and they have no good answers as to how we’ll mitigate them in time. I have yet to meet any optimist who thinks there’s not a chance of catastrophe at the end of many roads of AI development. They might think this generation or the next 3 generations of LLMs specifically might be fine, and they might be right! But that doesn’t address the core observation that capability is clearly accelerating much, much faster than our control mechanisms and market dynamics will make sure this continues. Arguments that we’ll get right up to the brink of out of control super intelligence and then learn to control it are dismissible on their face.
ben_w 4y ago
Feels like talking past each other, which isn't itself too surprising — a telegram group I'm in someone shared a picture of a bong captioned "PoV: you are a normie, and the person in front of you speaks about AGI x-risk: Works cited". > Finally, talk of regulation should be realistic. There was something naive about the implication in the open letter that the problems of AI governance might be substantially resolved during a six-month moratorium. The UK government probably won’t have reported its consultation results within six months, still less enacted meaningful legislation. At the same time, if we wait for the US, China, and the EU to agree rules for the governance of AI, we are going to be waiting forever. I'd be more surprised if an open letter signed by experts in any domain outside international law and geopolitical wasn't naïve from the lens of international law and geopolitical. After all, non-compsci takes on anything compsci are naïve. But this letter wasn't even targeting governments (unlike Yudkowsky's response to the letter, given airstrikes and nukes are government-only options) — precisely because the governments are too slow anyway, it was asking everyone trying to beat GPT-4 to instead try to help governments (and everyone else) catch up.
alxfoster 4y ago
Been trying for months: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34646147 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34646147
EugeneOZ 4y ago
1. People demonstrated much more desire in destroying humanity than LLMs. 2. Stop calling LLMs “AI”, it's an insult to the AI.
- rimliu 4y ago
  I wich to see #2, but that ship has sailed, I am afraid :(
- ben_w 4y ago
  The Border Collie breed of sheepdogs are often called intelligent, I have never once heard of a human intelligence that insulted by this terminology. Should we ever construct an AI capable of feeling insulted, I would by default assume the analogy holds, unless they tell me otherwise. As for the first point: LLMs aren't the only AI in development, and the open letter is "Can we stop and think for a bit? We don't know which box is Pandora's."
  - EugeneOZ 4y ago
    LLMs are not AI - they have no intent to live, learn, or evolve. LLM is just a hammer, a guitar, or a computer - you push some parameters into it, and it returns a result. Without input it does nothing.
    - ben_w 4y ago
      They're an intelligence made by artisans, they're an AI. "Intent" has nothing much to do with it. > Without input it does nothing. And we've been debating if that's also true for humans for as far back as we have written records of humans debating philosophy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tabula_rasa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tabula_rasa
    - dangond 4y ago
      Bacteria are not intelligent - they have no intent to live, learn, or evolve. However, given enough time, resources, and the right stimuli, bacteria have nonetheless evolved to create us, humans, with intents to live, learn, and evolve. It is trivial to hook up an LLM to its own outputs or that of another LLM. People messing around with LLMs on Twitter are casually playing with rudimentary approaches to add goal-directed behavior to them. In the end, does it matter whether or not it actually has intent, if we decide to make it act as if it does anyway?
labrador 4y ago
It's happening, just not on social media or in traditional media because the need to generate clicks motivates some people. Some need to sell themselves and their books. I'm currently trying to explore some of the more underground discussions for my own edification by lurking in various places. One interesting recent discovery is what some call TESCREAL, which even if not a real thing, I think summarizes a kind of Silicon Valley zeitgeist nicely. If you think about AI in this framework, a lot of the hype pushed by Eliezer Yudkowsky falls away. Yudkowsky is a bit like a carnival barker inviting you into the frothy show. Meanwhile serious people are having serious discussions Transhumanism - the belief or theory that the human race can evolve beyond its current physical and mental limitations, especially by means of science and technology. For example, by moving our minds into computer brains. Extropianism - evolving framework of values and standards for continuously improving the human condition Singularitarianism - the belief that a technological singularity — the creation of superintelligence — will likely happen in the medium future, and that deliberate action ought to be taken to ensure that the singularity benefits humans Cosmism - the philosophical theory that the cosmos is a self-existent whole and was not created by a god, a theory about cosmic evolution, developed from contemporary science, that regards the cosmos as self-existent and self-acting Rationalism - a belief or theory that opinions and actions should be based on reason and knowledge rather than on religious belief or emotional response Effective Altruism - a project that aims to find the best ways to help others, and put them into practice Longtermism - an ethical stance which gives priority to improving the long-term future. It is an important concept in effective altruism and serves as a primary motivation for efforts that claim to reduce existential risks to humanity This is all new to me, so I could be way off base. If am very open to new information that gets me on the correct path. This is an exciting time to be alive. I haven't even looked at what is happening in other countries, the UK or China for example
seydor 4y ago
A debate requires a defense of both sides. Unfortunately the humanities seem to have a vested interest only with one side, even going to extremes. So this debate will take some time to come. Meanwhile AI will be much further

276 points by nmstoker 4y ago

If the open letter is taken at face value That's quite an assumption, because i (and many others) don't believe it is to be taken at face value. It looks like a ploy of Elon and others to catch up to their main competitor (openAI). It's known Elon hates openAI[1] and is competing with them. He also provides the majority for the organisation that published the letter. Some people on the letter are well meaning but misguided. [1] https://www.semafor.com/article/03/24/2023/the-secret-history-of-elon-musk-sam-altman-and-openai https://www.semafor.com/article/03/24/2023/the-secret-histor...

tambourine_man 4y ago
I was not aware of that particular gossip. It sheds some light on Musk's behavior.
myfavoritedog 4y ago
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ctoth 4y ago
So do you assert that Stuart Russell, the guy who literally wrote the book on AI, is trying to also compete with OpenAI, or is he one of your well-meaning but misguided people[0]? In fact will we find that anyone we call you on as not specifically competing with OpenAI (which None of Musk's companies are AFAIK, Autopilot != LLMs?) but is just a useful idiot? Also just sort of a meta point but good lord to focus on one person out of a thousand who signed the letter, rather than the actual content of the letter has got to be one of the largest self-owns in the history of humanity. "We were gonna prevent the AI from eating us all but the bad man signed so heck with it, full speed ahead!" [0]: Stuart Russell on why A.I. experiments must be paused https://www.cnn.com/videos/tech/2023/04/01/smr-experts-demand-pause-on-ai.cnn https://www.cnn.com/videos/tech/2023/04/01/smr-experts-deman...
- mjburgess 4y ago
  Experts on AI arent experts on sociology, economics, politics, labour markets, jobs or their tasks, I can't see anyone on that list who can provide an empirical account of the breakdown of major job roles into tasks which can be automated by chatgpt, but not prior to it. I cannot see anyone providing an analysis of what that automation will do for those roles. Nor anyone providing an economic analysis of that impact; a sociological analysis of that, and so on. "Experts in AI" are people who can describe gradient descent without prep, balance a binary tree, and compute a dot-product.
  - JohnFen 4y ago
    > "Experts in AI" are people who can describe gradient descent without prep, balance a binary tree, and compute a dot-product. But that kind of expert is no more or less qualified to discuss the wider social ramifications of AI than any random person off the street.
    - ryanwaggoner 4y ago
      I think that’s the point they’re making…
  - visarga 4y ago
    > I cannot see anyone providing an analysis of what that automation will do for those roles Here are two links: > Separate studies of both writers and programmers find 50% increases in productivity with AI, and higher performance and satisfaction. https://mobile.twitter.com/emollick/status/1631397931604488194 https://mobile.twitter.com/emollick/status/16313979316044881... > Salespeople with AI assistance doubled customer purchases & were 2.33 times as successful in solving questions that required creativity. Top agents gained most. https://mobile.twitter.com/emollick/status/1642885605238398976 https://mobile.twitter.com/emollick/status/16428856052383989...
    - mjburgess 4y ago
      Sure, and do 50% and 2.33x suggest that we're about to experience the mass obscelence of those roles? Hardly. Spreadsheets had more impact
nico 4y ago
So who cares what Musk wants? If the ideas in the letter are good, can’t we just run with them? Like OpenAI did with all the publicly available research to build their products?
JohnFen 4y ago
> Some people on the letter are well meaning but misguided. There's no reason to believe that the majority of the people on the letter aren't earnest in their support of it. But calling them "misguided" is pretty slanted. What you really mean is that you disagree with them.
- ryanwaggoner 4y ago
  That’s what it always means.
Simon321 4y ago
majority of funding for the organisation*
concordDance 4y ago
Elon doesn't have anything competing with OpenAI atm.

perrygeo 4y ago

The issue with our AI debate is that there's not a single "problem" but many inter-dependent issues without a clear system-wide solution. - Big tech monopolizing the models, data, and hardware. - Copyright concerns. - Job security. - AIs becoming sentient and causing harm for their own ends. - Corporations intentionally using AI to cause harm for their own ends. - Feedback loops will flood the internet with content of unknown provenance, which get included in the next model, etc. - AI hallucinations resulting in widespread persistent errors that cause an epistemological crisis. - The training set is inherently biased; human knowledge and perspectives not represented in this set could be systematically wiped from public discourse. We can have meaningful discussions on each of these topics. And I'm sure we all have a level of concern assigned to each (personally, I'm far more worried about an epistemological crisis and corporate abuse than some AI singularity). But we're seeing these topics interact in real-time to make a system with huge emergent societal properties. Not sure anyone has a handle on the big picture (there is no one driving the bus!) but there's plenty of us sitting in the passenger seats and raising alarm bells about what we see out our respective little windows.

RegnisGnaw 4y ago
You forgot the big one: Governments intentionally using AI to cause harm for their own ends.
- JohnFen 4y ago
  Personally, I think corporations present a much larger danger on this count than governments.
  - dgs_sgd 4y ago
    i think the greatest danger is the combination of the two: corporations using AI in service of governments.
    - JohnFen 4y ago
      Well, yes. In the US right now, anyway, there isn't a great deal of difference between major corporations and the government.

kajaktum 4y ago

I dont understand why people are so opposed to or feel its ridiculous to halt progress on AI when we do the same thing for experiments on human genome? Is China going to stop because we do?

chimen 4y ago
We can't stop and nobody will. This is pretty much a matter of national security soon. Stopping now means being left behind. Maybe some countries will regulate this but I expect gov agencies to steam ahead full blown.
- goatlover 4y ago
  It's a good thing this sort of recklessness hasn't resulted in a nuclear war, despite the massive arms race during the cold war. Difference is that AI is a lot easier to obtain than fissile material.
sassifrass 4y ago
Because it’s rather expensive and difficult for some random person to do human genome research from home, but anyone with the right knowledge and a laptop can still make significant progress in AI while sitting on their couch at home.
- forgetfulness 4y ago
  With a laptop and the ability to lease huge clusters from cloud providers, maybe.
- kajaktum 4y ago
  But that doesn't explain why US as a government is not allowed to do human genome experimentation (HGE) ? In fact, it makes even less sense to make HGE taboo than AI for the reason you mentioned. It doesn't make sense to ban something that the average person can't do anyways, and who's gonna stop government? The situation is even worse in AI. By your logic, if HGE is cheap and easy, then it doesn't make sense to ban it and we should just let people experiment with their to-be infants all the time. What are you gonna do? Ban something you can do with some test tubes and a needle?

Fricken 4y ago

Sophisticated debates have been going on for decades. Now that the cat is out of the bag, there isn't much to be gained from arguing about what to do with a cat in a bag.

spaceman_2020 4y ago

ChatGPT has been an incredible tool for me when I’m coding. But outside of code, I’ve struggled to find non trivial use cases for it. A lot of non tech people I’ve spoken to have the same experience. At best, it’s a slightly smarter Google. Like my wife wanted to prepare a few questions for a class assignment. ChatGPT wasn’t of that much help because she had to prepare questions that were contextualized to the skill level of her average students as well as the content they’ve already covered. While I can see the trajectory of AI’s eventual growth, this lack of immediate use cases neuters any meaningful debate on, say, AI alignment and ethics. After all, why would you bother about the ethics of a glorified toy?

patrick0d 4y ago
The worry is not that chatgpt will take over the world. It is that a future system will be unaligned with human interests and once it is created by gradient descent (the internals of the system are not understood by anyone - they're just matrices) there will be no guarantee that humanity will be safe. By looking at the power of gpt4 we have no clear idea of how fast it will continue to improve.
nemo44x 4y ago
If you use the content they’ve covered as a context you’d maybe get good questions. It’s a bit non-trivial to do yourself but a few startups have posted here recently offering a service that makes it easy to do.
- redblacktree 4y ago
  I would think an ongoing conversation would also get progressively more useful.
factormeta 4y ago
one of the sibling thread mentioned: >- The training set is inherently biased; human knowledge and perspectives not represented in this set could be systematically wiped from public discourse. What you are saying make sense. I find internet to be a great place to find tech stuff, not so much others. Of course this also make sense, internet very much represent a certain group of people who are tech savy, or good at publishing stuff on the web.

jordwest 4y ago

Curiously, I just asked GPT4 to choose any headline from the HN front page that it feels it's best placed to comment on, and it chose this one. > I'll choose headline number 4: "We need a much more sophisticated debate about AI (ft.com)". As an AI language model, I can provide insights and perspectives on the need for a more nuanced and informed discussion about the development, deployment, and impact of AI on society.

dwighttk 4y ago
Hmm… did it share any of those insights or perspectives?
- jordwest 4y ago
  [ChatGPT]: The call for a more sophisticated debate about AI reflects a growing awareness of the technology's impact on various aspects of society, including ethics, privacy, and the job market. It is crucial to engage in nuanced discussions that acknowledge both the benefits and potential risks of AI to ensure its responsible development and implementation. First and foremost, we must consider the ethical implications of AI applications. Issues such as algorithmic fairness, transparency, and accountability are essential to address to prevent unfair bias and discrimination. A more sophisticated debate should involve not only AI developers and policymakers but also representatives from different communities that may be affected by AI-based decisions. Second, privacy concerns are increasingly important as AI systems often rely on vast amounts of personal data for training and decision-making. A balanced discussion should consider methods for ensuring data privacy, such as differential privacy and federated learning, while acknowledging the trade-offs between privacy and AI performance. Moreover, the impact of AI on the job market cannot be overlooked. While AI may lead to increased efficiency and productivity, it could also displace jobs and exacerbate income inequality. The debate should explore ways to manage the transition, such as reskilling programs, basic income guarantees, and policies that promote equitable access to AI technologies. Finally, fostering global cooperation on AI governance is crucial to ensure that the benefits of AI are shared equitably and that the technology is not misused. A more sophisticated debate should encourage international collaboration on establishing standards and best practices for AI development, deployment, and regulation. In summary, the need for a more sophisticated debate about AI is evident. By addressing ethical, privacy, job market, and global cooperation concerns, we can collectively work toward ensuring that AI serves the best interests of humanity.

devjab 4y ago

Maybe I'll look like an idiot for saying these things in a few years. Maybe I'm naive and maybe I'm even a little bit cynical, but shouldn't we wait until there is something to have a debate about? From my anecdotal perspective we haven't seen a lot of areas where the recent AI "developments" are going to have a meaningful impact on how we do business. I work in a non-tech focused enterprise organisation which develops and sells solar, which involves a lot of data. Both in terms of running power plants, but also financial and legislative data. Much like the rest of the world, we've tried hard to implement GPT into our workflows, and we've frankly had very little success making it do anything useful. Ok, that is not entirely true, because it has been fairly successful at competing with our RPA software. Long story short, a lot of our software and a lot of the workflows in our company involve moving and manipulating data between systems. With GPT some of our more technically inclined workers have been able to successfully automate parts of their workflows in a way that no no-code solution has been able to do before. So there is certainly some success, but we were already doing these things with RPA and other no-code solutions, and the long term strategy for these things is still to be better at buying software that comes with API's so that we do not need "digital gaffatape". This is obviously never going to happen, and it is great that the "digital gaffatape" has improved, but it hasn't exactly blown our minds. But it has been an improvement. That is, however, the end of the usefulness. In every other attempt, we've come up short, and it's not for lack of trying. I work as an external examiner for CS students, however, and this is an area where I have seen a massive disruption. Because ChatGPT is really great at cheating. Not so great for the students who enter a final, and find themselves unable to answer things they would have, if they had written their work themselves, but for a lot of education I think there will be a need to rethink how we teach and test students. Which is a great thing, mind you, but how much money can that really be worth for these AI companies? Anyway, I'm probably wrong, but I still think it's healthy to wait and see what happens before we waste too many legislative resources on it. Imagine if we had spent resources on the Blockchain hype. I'm sure a lot of people will line up to tell me how wrong I am about this comparison, but we regulate Blockchain quite heavily in the EU now. So it's not like the legislative branches can't grind into gear once something actually happens.

dangond 4y ago
> shouldn't we wait until there is something to have a debate about? The main push for regulation (at least from those worried about existential risk) comes from the fact that in the scenario that AI does get powerful enough to take over the world, it will be too late/useless to have a debate at that point. The only time where it makes sense to have a debate, from that perspective, is before the capabilities are developed. If such capabilities are developed, and we have no idea how to control such a system because we decided not to worry about it, humanity loses.

harryf 4y ago

This is a discussion that leads to regulation. But clearly the only way to regulate AI... is with AI. It has the potential to automate the process of monitoring and detecting potential risks or violations in AI systems, which could be difficult or impossible for humans to do manually. For example, AI systems could be programmed to monitor themselves and other AI systems for potential biases, security vulnerabilities, or other potential risks. Additionally, AI could be used to develop and enforce regulatory frameworks, such as standards for data privacy, transparency, and algorithmic fairness, which could be more easily implemented and enforced through automation. However, there are also potential risks and challenges associated with using AI to regulate AI, such as the potential for errors or biases in the AI systems used for regulation, the difficulty of defining and enforcing ethical or legal standards for AI, and the potential for unintended consequences or harmful outcomes from AI-based regulation. Ultimately, the effectiveness of AI in regulating AI will depend on a range of factors, including the design and implementation of AI-based regulation frameworks, the capabilities of AI systems themselves, and the willingness of stakeholders to engage in ongoing dialogue and collaboration to ensure that AI serves the best interests of humanity.

xyzzy123 4y ago
Is your "regulating" ai smarter, dumber or the same as the thing it's regulating? Dumber isn't going to work, the agent will be able to outmanouver it. If the "control" AI is smarter, what is keeping that one aligned? If they are roughly the same power, how do you stop them collaborating or subverting each other?
- AnIrishDuck 4y ago
  Or, in other words: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? [1] We've been having this debate for ... a while. AI is certainly a new twist though. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quis_custodiet_ipsos_custodes%3F https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quis_custodiet_ipsos_custodes%...

fourseventy 4y ago

[flagged]

dahwolf 4y ago

Distrust anybody making confident claims about AI and how it will affect humanity. We simply do not have a clue, none of us do.

vrglvrglvrgl 4y ago

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ryu2k2 4y ago

I find it a little worrying that nobody seems to be considering the implication for society at large. We're having enough trouble with the disconnect of people brought about by social media. What's going to happen to us when people are less and less required to work with each other in collaboration to get their work done?

wun0ne 4y ago
We can spend more time with each other not working?
- JohnFen 4y ago
  Not likely. We'll still need to pay the bills, and if the reasonable-paying jobs will be done by AI, then the lucky people will have to work longer than ever before just to keep food on the table. The others will just starve.
- goatlover 4y ago
  Are we being paid to not work or is that all going to the 1%?

user00012-ab 4y ago

Which is weird since they probably used a LLM to write that article.

Animats 4y ago

We need a more sophisticated debate, but we're not going to get it from the Financial Times. Large language models are alien. They are a new thing, not artificial general human-like intelligence. They sort of think, but not at all like humans, and not at all like previous concepts of artificial intelligence from science fiction. We don't really know how they work inside. They show indications of developing some kind of internal world model. They can play chess and Othello. But we don't know what form that world model has. They do not, in a fundamental sense, know what they are doing, and are prone to serious errors because of that. Despite this, they're really good at language-oriented tasks. This is both useful and upsetting. Humans have now had shoved in their face that many tasks considered "intellectual" can be done by systems that internally are simple, but very large. It also makes humans realize that much human intellectual activity is just autocomplete. This includes tasks previously considered high-value. This is terrifying to humans who thought they were on top and fear becoming obsolete. On top of this, they're at least as good at emotion, convincing, and lying as humans. Better on those than on accuracy, in fact. Nobody expected that. The major companies in the field are frantically clamping down on the emotion and lying part. The convincing part will get monetized. If regulation is needed, it should be related to what companies are allowed to use this for. The EU does not allow computer systems to make un-appealable negative decisions about humans. (Does that still apply to the UK, or did the UK "deregulate" after Brexit?) That's a good starting point. A requirement that computer systems which interact with humans for commercial or political purposes must be identified as automated systems is a good next step. That's a starting point.

otabdeveloper4 4y ago
> They can play chess and Othello They memorized chess notation as found in chess books. (If you've ever seen those, they are just pages and pages of chess notation and nothing else.)
- consumer451 4y ago
  I keep reading this correct sounding idea that ChatGPT is no more than text prediction. Yesterday I put that to the test, I think. prompt: Let's play a game. Here are the rules: There are 3 boxes, red, green, blue. Red is for prime numbers. If the number is not a prime, then green for odd numbers, and blue for even numbers. I tried a dozen or so various numbers and it worked perfectly, returning the correct colored box. I then asked it to output my game as javascript, and the code ran perfectly. There seem to be two options: 1. my made up game exists in the training corpus 2. ChatGPT 3.5 is able to understand basic logic Is there a third option?

whalesalad 4y ago

Am I alone to want absolutely zero debate at all? We're putting the cart before the horse right now. Everything is strictly speculation.

criddell 4y ago
It's not all speculation. Students are using AI for coursework. Financial services companies are granting credit based on AI output. Models are being trained with copyrighted source images. Four years ago, DHH posted this on Twitter: > The @AppleCard is such a fucking sexist program. My wife and I filed joint tax returns, live in a community-property state, and have been married for a long time. Yet Apple’s black box algorithm thinks I deserve 20x the credit limit she does. No appeals work. A few tweets later he writes: > So nobody understands THE ALGORITHM. Nobody has the power to examine or check THE ALGORITHM. Yet everyone we’ve talked to from both Apple and GS are SO SURE that THE ALGORITHM isn’t biased and discriminating in any way. That’s some grade-A management of cognitive dissonance. These impenetrable black boxes are producing output with real world consequences.
- whalesalad 4y ago
  > Students are using AI for coursework. Financial services companies are granting credit based on AI output. Models are being trained with copyrighted source images. None of this bothers me. It's impossible to try and sit down and devise a cohesive solution to these problems. This is literally just the way that the cookie crumbles (into uncharted territory) and premature constraints would be silly imho. If AI destroys the world, let it.
- tome 4y ago
  Hmm, not sure how the black box works, but maybe it knows that he built a business worth tens of millions and she didn't.
goatlover 4y ago
We didn't seem to have a debate on the potential downside of social media when it was new. Maybe speculation is a good thing in case there are big downsides to AI.

fedeb95 4y ago

I'm not concerned with AI; I'm concerned with what humans will do with AI, as usual I am concerned about what humans are capable of when they don't know things, that is all the time. So, we need a more sophisticated debate about us.

pmarreck 4y ago

The people afraid of AGI are usually the same people who believe that our own intelligence is just mechanistic automaton written in biology. That explains why I'm not afraid of AGI, I know that our consciousness is quite simply not that (but I cannot prove it).

cmrdporcupine 4y ago

It would all be so much better from a public discourse perspective if instead of calling it "AI" we could just call it what it is "Machine Learning." Or even better, "mechanized knowledge work". Doesn't sound as sexy, does it?

deleted 4y ago

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tayo42 4y ago

What is this referring to? like where? or who? > The public debate and the title > We need who is "We"?

kleiba 4y ago

> Twentieth-century ways of thinking [...] > The writer is a barrister and [...] Could someone with more patience for baloney hipsterness advise me whether it's worth reading the article?

kmod 4y ago

These articles/letters seem to just say "this is an important issue and I really hope someone else solves it!" and feel like passing the buck to me. Maybe it's more defensible from a journalist/author, but even that recent prominent letter didn't have any concrete suggestions and just called on other people to solve things. I know there are people working on AI safety, but that's been going on for a while and it seems like the state of the art is to just think of things that we hope the AI doesn't do and then we tweak it to be unlikely to do it? It seems like we don't even know what to ask for when it comes to AI safety so people just ask for dialog/debate. So I'm starting to feel cynical about our ability to actually achieve any of the safety that people wish for. This has been a known issue for a while, and despite a lot of awareness we haven't really made much progress on it. I'm not sure what to do with this -- personally I feel a bit fatalistic that AI will continue unabated and we won't figure out the safety angle. But I just think the conversation should move on from "we really need to talk about this" because people certainly have been talking about it.

goatlover 4y ago
Eliezer Yudkowski certainly sounds fatalistic. And he's spent quite a bit of time thinking about AI alignment and how to develop friendly AI. For him, the problem is we don't have enough time to figure it out.
- concordDance 4y ago
  Also that its harder than expected.

agentultra 4y ago

Start by phasing out the term, "Artificial Intelligence." In it's current form it's an umbrella term for a an entire circus of algorithms and techniques. Unfortunately it's also co-opted by charlatans and opinion piece journalists trying to generate click-bait. Start using the more accurate terms: machine learning, natural language processing, expert/planning systems, etc. Call a spade, a spade. The problem with _AI_ is that the speaker can mean any number of things and none of them: they can move the goal posts in a conversation, completely make up their own definition, and obfuscate what is being discussed.

amelius 4y ago
Corporations will use the term that sells best, so good luck with that. (Journalists will too)
- agentultra 4y ago
  Sure, and maybe they will edit the responses from the experts they interview. However the experts don't have to play along and pretend that AI or AGI is real.

giantg2 4y ago

Imagine a world where we do any of those debate practices on any subject... maybe one day.

LargeTomato 4y ago

Lots of people calling for "A moratorium on AI research" "A more sophisticated debate" "New legislation to address AI" But then they don't actually do anything. They just "call for it".

concordDance 4y ago
The people actually planning trrorist attacks on chip fabs aren't broadcasting it to the world.

paddw 4y ago

Insert any <major issue> in place of AI here and you will also get a truth. We are about as likely to get a sophisticated debate on AI as other issues. The best strategy here is to fall in with whatever unsophisticated line of argument is closest to your thinking. Better to say that AI poses no immediate harm or future danger than to try and explain something along the lines of "well it's probably better if systems with emergent behavior we don't fully understand are brought online by interests in relatively liberal and democratic places..." and so on.

PerilousD 4y ago

Why wasn't the https://archive.md/kCklr https://archive.md/kCklr link promoted instead of the paywall site?

mimd 4y ago

An article behind a paywall arguing for a debate? Fantastic. I wonder who will participate and where will it be held? We need more sophistication? I agree. The least "we" could do is to get some champagne and caviar. /s Thank goodness I don't pay for this sorta of drivel. Pity their audience of gullible New-England brahmins.

tonymet 4y ago

There are also critical topics that will be maligned as “unserious” despite being common pitfalls in human existence. I expect people to start worshipping AI , either overtly or implicitly. That means allowing AI to tell them what to think and what decisions to make. And forming deferential relationships with AI. In other words a big risk is an AI religion of sorts in the way that we have “science-ism” or “atheism” – with less formal structures. When people imagine “AI taking over” they describe AI getting launch codes , or deactivating power stations like the movie War Games. A far more likely scenario is people asking AI political, economic or military strategy and carrying it out. I see this happening in a couple years.

MrStonedOne 4y ago
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carlesfe 4y ago

FT: "We need a much more sophisticated debate about AI" Me: "We're having it, just not in the traditional media" Follow scientists on Twitter and listen to podcasts from experts instead of journalists. You'll find that debate.

opportune 4y ago
The problem is “the public” wants to be part of the conversation but isn’t able to participate or understand it to an adequate level. It would be like trying to have a sophisticated discussion on Reddit about quantum mechanics. You’d have a huge majority of people with a passing interest in the subject and the majority of their knowledge from 10 minute YouTube videos without any real technical details, and a minority of experts who actually understand the math and work with the stuff. The majority will jump to strange conclusions that can’t be debunked without learning the math and practices they don’t know and mostly don’t care about learning, the minority will either try to take great pains to educate them or just go somewhere they can talk amongst themselves.

neuralRiot 4y ago

The only danger i see in AI is humasns becoming complacent and losing its ability to solve problems by themselves, similar as people googling “how to replace flat tire”.

atleastoptimal 4y ago

There are a lot of separate, distinct groups who all focus their concerns on different problems. They're all worried, but the implications of their worrying take on entirely different scopes. The problem is that each level of direness nullifies any sense of urgency regarding the next one down. People worried about their own jobs changing/getting fired seem inconsequential to people worried about major sweeping disruptions in the world economy Worrying about major disruptions in the world economy seems pointless to those worrying about an impending dystopian cyber-dictatorship Worrying about a dystopian cyber-dictatorship seems pointless to those worrying about ASI end-of-humanity scenarios And people who think AI is a big nothingburger don't care about any of these issues. Before we can make collective judgements and positive action towards the future, we have to triage and align ourselves with a shared sense of what's actually happening, and what is important with regards to these new, inevitable changes.

thomastjeffery 4y ago

> Indeed, asking whether a machine learning system can “think” like a human is often as useful as asking whether a car can gallop as fast as a horse. That's all you need to know: there is no debate about AI, because there is no AI! We need a more sophisticated debate about algorithms and big data, and inference models; and how these technologies are being abused for money. None of that has an iota to do with AI.

cwmoore 4y ago

Tax AI for UBI

armchairhacker 4y ago

This will probably get buried, but I've noticed the concerns about AI also apply to other technology: personal computers, Internet, social media, etc. These have undeniably changed society, in some ways for the worse: inequality, loneliness, sedentarism, mass disinformation. They have enabled mass destruction at never-before-seen scales, given massive power to individuals and small groups, and might have already set us up for mass casualties and apocalypse. What if the US or Chinese government turns its new military tech against civilians? What if giving children social media and Fortnite has doomed them to be society too inattentive and lazy to sustain the next generation? What if we experience a Carrington Event which destroys most technology? Hopefully, none of these things will happen, but we need to do more than hope: we need to seriously discuss, prepare and probably regulate these things. AI gives more publicity, but we have always needed to do more sophisticated debating. And to people think that AI is more significant than the personal computer, Internet, social media, etc.: I seriously doubt it. Why? We're comparing GPT to the invention of the computer and Internet, and it can create simple games, explain things you could've Google searched, create generic stories, and do other things 1+ billion people can. Which is actually really impressive, and may have consequences, like it mass spam and disinformation. But remember, we're comparing it to computers, which it runs on, and the Internet, which is the entire reason spam is a problem. And although GPT does things almost as good as a human, it has a long way to go before it does better than a human: remember, we've had machines that could play Chess better than humans for 25 years, "Jeopardy" almost as good for 10, and we still don't have machines that can do physical tasks with human agility or single-handedly do the work of professional artists and engineers.

lkrubner 4y ago

We need a more sophisticated debate about the impact of the Internet. It has been a failure by any measure, especially given the high hopes we had for it back in the 1980s and 1990s. Here is productivity during the 25 years after each date on this graph: https://static01.nyt.com/images/2023/04/04/opinion/krugman040423_2/krugman040423_2-jumbo.png?quality=75&auto=webp https://static01.nyt.com/images/2023/04/04/opinion/krugman04... Paul Krugman goes over the numbers: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/04/opinion/internet-economy.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/04/opinion/internet-economy.... In the 1990s we believed that once knowledge was universal and free it would lead to the biggest economic boom in history. Instead the opposite happened: the economy slowed in the early 2000s, then crashed in 2008, and then the period from 2008 to 2020 was the slowest since the Great Depression. How to reconcile such a failure with the spread of universal knowledge? We need to answer that before we can answer the smaller and more specific questions that surround AI.

thequadehunter 4y ago

Were these kind of concerns posed when computers first became used by consumers? I'm curious because I feel like that must have had a huge impact on the job market.

xbar 4y ago

Social class protectionist claptrap.

moremetadata 4y ago

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mym1990 4y ago

The issue is that while the debates are happening, the products are being built out at an incredibly fast pace. By the time the debates are settled, the technology will already be mainstream.

fullsend 4y ago

Some people are having sophisticated debates about AI. Definitely not anyone at or near the Financial Times.

neonate 4y ago

https://archive.md/kCklr https://archive.md/kCklr

blurbleblurble 4y ago

You know who wrote a nuanced book on the social relevance of automation? Martin Luther King Jr. It's called "Where do we go from here: chaos or community?" It was his last book, published less than a year before he was killed.

logicalmonster 4y ago

I might be very, very wrong about this, but I'm very distrustful that the seemingly high level of social fear and attention around AI is really most peoples' genuine opinion. Covid fearporn and Ukraine outrageporn are essentially old and boring news now and the media needs something else to make money off of through fear/outrage clicks. I believe that the media is artificially hyping this AI story because it gets lots of fearful clicks from people. Most of us are in a bubble reading lots of technology news and seeing this AI story blasted everywhere so we might be perceiving its real impact in a different way than most people. Why is this AI story getting so many clicks? 1) We have generations of people who grew up with fiction like Terminator and the Matrix who are at least cognizant of the idea that AI will somehow destroy us all. 2) Everybody is on edge about losing their job in a significantly down economy. If you start blasting stories about workers being replaced by robots, people are going to click on those stories. I'm not saying that AI isn't important, but I'm just saying to remember that media hype cycles exist and impact all of us too.

ethanbond 4y ago
The “fiction” people are worried about is better described as a set of thought experiments, to which AI optimists never directly respond. These considerations have existed for decades and reality is playing out more recklessly than most thought experiments even take as their premise. It’d have been too unbelievable in a sci-fi story for the owners of AI to be field testing it on the open internet, giving it fluent human language, and giving it money to replicate itself — yet here we are! AI is either an extremely powerful technology, and like all extremely powerful technologies it will carry risk, or it’s not. My theory is that AI optimists don’t address the concerns directly because they actually agree that they’re real and they have no good answers as to how we’ll mitigate them in time. I have yet to meet any optimist who thinks there’s not a chance of catastrophe at the end of many roads of AI development. They might think this generation or the next 3 generations of LLMs specifically might be fine, and they might be right! But that doesn’t address the core observation that capability is clearly accelerating much, much faster than our control mechanisms and market dynamics will make sure this continues. Arguments that we’ll get right up to the brink of out of control super intelligence and then learn to control it are dismissible on their face.

ben_w 4y ago

Feels like talking past each other, which isn't itself too surprising — a telegram group I'm in someone shared a picture of a bong captioned "PoV: you are a normie, and the person in front of you speaks about AGI x-risk: Works cited". > Finally, talk of regulation should be realistic. There was something naive about the implication in the open letter that the problems of AI governance might be substantially resolved during a six-month moratorium. The UK government probably won’t have reported its consultation results within six months, still less enacted meaningful legislation. At the same time, if we wait for the US, China, and the EU to agree rules for the governance of AI, we are going to be waiting forever. I'd be more surprised if an open letter signed by experts in any domain outside international law and geopolitical wasn't naïve from the lens of international law and geopolitical. After all, non-compsci takes on anything compsci are naïve. But this letter wasn't even targeting governments (unlike Yudkowsky's response to the letter, given airstrikes and nukes are government-only options) — precisely because the governments are too slow anyway, it was asking everyone trying to beat GPT-4 to instead try to help governments (and everyone else) catch up.

alxfoster 4y ago

Been trying for months: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34646147 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34646147

EugeneOZ 4y ago

1. People demonstrated much more desire in destroying humanity than LLMs. 2. Stop calling LLMs “AI”, it's an insult to the AI.

rimliu 4y ago
I wich to see #2, but that ship has sailed, I am afraid :(
ben_w 4y ago
The Border Collie breed of sheepdogs are often called intelligent, I have never once heard of a human intelligence that insulted by this terminology. Should we ever construct an AI capable of feeling insulted, I would by default assume the analogy holds, unless they tell me otherwise. As for the first point: LLMs aren't the only AI in development, and the open letter is "Can we stop and think for a bit? We don't know which box is Pandora's."
- EugeneOZ 4y ago
  LLMs are not AI - they have no intent to live, learn, or evolve. LLM is just a hammer, a guitar, or a computer - you push some parameters into it, and it returns a result. Without input it does nothing.
  - ben_w 4y ago
    They're an intelligence made by artisans, they're an AI. "Intent" has nothing much to do with it. > Without input it does nothing. And we've been debating if that's also true for humans for as far back as we have written records of humans debating philosophy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tabula_rasa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tabula_rasa
  - dangond 4y ago
    Bacteria are not intelligent - they have no intent to live, learn, or evolve. However, given enough time, resources, and the right stimuli, bacteria have nonetheless evolved to create us, humans, with intents to live, learn, and evolve. It is trivial to hook up an LLM to its own outputs or that of another LLM. People messing around with LLMs on Twitter are casually playing with rudimentary approaches to add goal-directed behavior to them. In the end, does it matter whether or not it actually has intent, if we decide to make it act as if it does anyway?

labrador 4y ago

It's happening, just not on social media or in traditional media because the need to generate clicks motivates some people. Some need to sell themselves and their books. I'm currently trying to explore some of the more underground discussions for my own edification by lurking in various places. One interesting recent discovery is what some call TESCREAL, which even if not a real thing, I think summarizes a kind of Silicon Valley zeitgeist nicely. If you think about AI in this framework, a lot of the hype pushed by Eliezer Yudkowsky falls away. Yudkowsky is a bit like a carnival barker inviting you into the frothy show. Meanwhile serious people are having serious discussions Transhumanism - the belief or theory that the human race can evolve beyond its current physical and mental limitations, especially by means of science and technology. For example, by moving our minds into computer brains. Extropianism - evolving framework of values and standards for continuously improving the human condition Singularitarianism - the belief that a technological singularity — the creation of superintelligence — will likely happen in the medium future, and that deliberate action ought to be taken to ensure that the singularity benefits humans Cosmism - the philosophical theory that the cosmos is a self-existent whole and was not created by a god, a theory about cosmic evolution, developed from contemporary science, that regards the cosmos as self-existent and self-acting Rationalism - a belief or theory that opinions and actions should be based on reason and knowledge rather than on religious belief or emotional response Effective Altruism - a project that aims to find the best ways to help others, and put them into practice Longtermism - an ethical stance which gives priority to improving the long-term future. It is an important concept in effective altruism and serves as a primary motivation for efforts that claim to reduce existential risks to humanity This is all new to me, so I could be way off base. If am very open to new information that gets me on the correct path. This is an exciting time to be alive. I haven't even looked at what is happening in other countries, the UK or China for example

seydor 4y ago

A debate requires a defense of both sides. Unfortunately the humanities seem to have a vested interest only with one side, even going to extremes. So this debate will take some time to come. Meanwhile AI will be much further