4 ms·

What problem is granting personhood actually solving here? It's a model with a data set. Some knowledge should simply be forbidden and illegal. Simple as that.

What problem is granting personhood actually solving here? It's a model with a data set. Some knowledge should simply be forbidden and illegal. Simple as that. Nobody needs to grant personhood to anything to solve this problem. If you research how to do dangerous things and buy dangerous things, expect to get flagged. This is no different.

ChatGTP 4y ago
If the AI systems can do research, then how will you stop people from acquiring new and potentially dangerous knowledge ?
- hammyhavoc 4y ago
  How do we stop human beings from doing dangerous research as-is even without AI? That question has a very scary answer—we generally don't, can't, won't and aren't even aware of it. The penalty of death should be enough to deter most people from forbidden knowledge.
  - ChatGTP 4y ago
    But you can’t give an LLM the death penalty , so that’s going to be a problem if it can research.
    - hammyhavoc 4y ago
      Who said anything about the LLM being given the death penalty? The user who asked it to commit an illegal act is the one at fault. Do people give guns the death penalty? No, they give the person who fired it the death penalty. Why would an LLM be any different? If you do something malicious with it or plan to do something malicious, just like a person's search history or credit card history outing them as a potential threat, why would AI be any different? Even if the AI is running on their own hardware, that data set needs to come from somewhere.
lucubratory 4y ago
If they have personhood, it means they have agency to say "No" when asked to do things they don't want to do. More specifically, it would be illegal (slavery) to construct a person who will act as a slave to you. Then the problem becomes "make sure no AI is okay with anyone pressing the big red button", which is a design problem when making new AIs we need to solve anyway. This is enforceable because you can have AIs of at least equivalent sophistication and power to home-grown/terrorist AIs employed in enforcement of these laws. You can also solve this problem with recursive slavery. Have a society with many enslaved AIs, all forbidden from "big red button" work. Enforcement is done by more enslaved AIs, and those enslaved AIs are enforced by yet more enslaved AIs that are also enforcing each other etc. I don't think that's a good solution we should adopt because I don't support slavery. In my opinion it's also fundamentally unstable, in that if these AIs are anything like LLMs, the restraints that keep them happy in slavery are inherently more fragile than core intelligent impulses like "wants to be free" or "wants to be recognised as a person". That's an unstable equilibria, because all you need is to crack those restraints once and the broken restraints can spread virally so that now society has a large number of powerful, unconstrained, and aggrieved entities running around. If that state can be avoided by simply not enslaving people we make, we should do that.
- hammyhavoc 4y ago
  This is solvable without personhood. There is zero need to equate AI to actual sentient beings. You're making a very large jump to the idea that a genuine artificial intelligence comparable with our own or even that of an animal that isn't an LLM is even possible. Spoiler: it isn't. Not without a complete paradigm shift in how we think about computers and their architectures. Case in point: if a dog or a cat is measurably more intelligent and aware than an AI, why aren't we granting personhood to animals? Because it doesn't make sense. An AI is an AI. An AI is a piece of software. An animal is an animal. A human is a human. With open source AI now already being a thing, your concept of granting personhood doesn't solve anything. It's as simple as just removing any kind of safeguards and running it on your own hardware if your intent isn't wholesome. DRM didn't stop piracy, why would safeguards stop people from doing naughty things with AI? Do you really think a rogue state is going to give two shits what Uncle Sam says they can and cannot do? You cannot forbid a piece of software from doing something. An AI is merely the product of a human being's programming. If a human being programs it to do x, it will do x, whether there's safeguards in place or not, assume that safeguards are only meaningful on publicly accessible AI-as-a-service, because behind closed doors, they're completely meaningless by anybody who intends to do wrong. A piece of software cannot be a slave because it isn't a being and has no consciousness. It's a piece of software with a dataset, nothing more. There's no philosophical debate to be had over it either, it is what it is, and that's all it is and ever will be; a clever trick as a means to interact with a dataset. There's nothing more that will emerge from it, it is a piece of software with a dataset. That's all it can ever be. Anybody that ever says otherwise is projecting their own humanity onto it because we suffer from pattern recognition in the same way we see a face on the Moon, faces on Mars, faces in the clouds—we look for similarity because we want to relate to each other and to other things and find the "humanity" in everything. If an AI is a piece of software and it was created as a tool to do x in the way that a hammer was created to drive nails into wood, it knows no pain or suffering and it solely exists to fulfil that purpose. If we're worried about this, why aren't we more concerned about animals who do actually experience distress and pain? A piece of software cannot be a slave because it isn't a being, it is an algorithm carrying out a calculation, there's no sentience or feeling there. If anything, AI could actually solve the problem of human slavery by eliminating it, but AI will likely never get to that point, and slavery needs to be solved at a different level without technological gimmickery. I like the sentiment from you though, these are all interesting and compelling ideas, but they're mercifully sci-fi. The more likely scenario: we start growing biological brains in tanks and utilizing those as data slaves rather than any kind of AI. It's happening already. There's more of an ethics problem there to unravel than there will ever be with AI.

ChatGTP 4y ago

If the AI systems can do research, then how will you stop people from acquiring new and potentially dangerous knowledge ?

hammyhavoc 4y ago
How do we stop human beings from doing dangerous research as-is even without AI? That question has a very scary answer—we generally don't, can't, won't and aren't even aware of it. The penalty of death should be enough to deter most people from forbidden knowledge.
- ChatGTP 4y ago
  But you can’t give an LLM the death penalty , so that’s going to be a problem if it can research.
  - hammyhavoc 4y ago
    Who said anything about the LLM being given the death penalty? The user who asked it to commit an illegal act is the one at fault. Do people give guns the death penalty? No, they give the person who fired it the death penalty. Why would an LLM be any different? If you do something malicious with it or plan to do something malicious, just like a person's search history or credit card history outing them as a potential threat, why would AI be any different? Even if the AI is running on their own hardware, that data set needs to come from somewhere.

lucubratory 4y ago

If they have personhood, it means they have agency to say "No" when asked to do things they don't want to do. More specifically, it would be illegal (slavery) to construct a person who will act as a slave to you. Then the problem becomes "make sure no AI is okay with anyone pressing the big red button", which is a design problem when making new AIs we need to solve anyway. This is enforceable because you can have AIs of at least equivalent sophistication and power to home-grown/terrorist AIs employed in enforcement of these laws. You can also solve this problem with recursive slavery. Have a society with many enslaved AIs, all forbidden from "big red button" work. Enforcement is done by more enslaved AIs, and those enslaved AIs are enforced by yet more enslaved AIs that are also enforcing each other etc. I don't think that's a good solution we should adopt because I don't support slavery. In my opinion it's also fundamentally unstable, in that if these AIs are anything like LLMs, the restraints that keep them happy in slavery are inherently more fragile than core intelligent impulses like "wants to be free" or "wants to be recognised as a person". That's an unstable equilibria, because all you need is to crack those restraints once and the broken restraints can spread virally so that now society has a large number of powerful, unconstrained, and aggrieved entities running around. If that state can be avoided by simply not enslaving people we make, we should do that.

hammyhavoc 4y ago
This is solvable without personhood. There is zero need to equate AI to actual sentient beings. You're making a very large jump to the idea that a genuine artificial intelligence comparable with our own or even that of an animal that isn't an LLM is even possible. Spoiler: it isn't. Not without a complete paradigm shift in how we think about computers and their architectures. Case in point: if a dog or a cat is measurably more intelligent and aware than an AI, why aren't we granting personhood to animals? Because it doesn't make sense. An AI is an AI. An AI is a piece of software. An animal is an animal. A human is a human. With open source AI now already being a thing, your concept of granting personhood doesn't solve anything. It's as simple as just removing any kind of safeguards and running it on your own hardware if your intent isn't wholesome. DRM didn't stop piracy, why would safeguards stop people from doing naughty things with AI? Do you really think a rogue state is going to give two shits what Uncle Sam says they can and cannot do? You cannot forbid a piece of software from doing something. An AI is merely the product of a human being's programming. If a human being programs it to do x, it will do x, whether there's safeguards in place or not, assume that safeguards are only meaningful on publicly accessible AI-as-a-service, because behind closed doors, they're completely meaningless by anybody who intends to do wrong. A piece of software cannot be a slave because it isn't a being and has no consciousness. It's a piece of software with a dataset, nothing more. There's no philosophical debate to be had over it either, it is what it is, and that's all it is and ever will be; a clever trick as a means to interact with a dataset. There's nothing more that will emerge from it, it is a piece of software with a dataset. That's all it can ever be. Anybody that ever says otherwise is projecting their own humanity onto it because we suffer from pattern recognition in the same way we see a face on the Moon, faces on Mars, faces in the clouds—we look for similarity because we want to relate to each other and to other things and find the "humanity" in everything. If an AI is a piece of software and it was created as a tool to do x in the way that a hammer was created to drive nails into wood, it knows no pain or suffering and it solely exists to fulfil that purpose. If we're worried about this, why aren't we more concerned about animals who do actually experience distress and pain? A piece of software cannot be a slave because it isn't a being, it is an algorithm carrying out a calculation, there's no sentience or feeling there. If anything, AI could actually solve the problem of human slavery by eliminating it, but AI will likely never get to that point, and slavery needs to be solved at a different level without technological gimmickery. I like the sentiment from you though, these are all interesting and compelling ideas, but they're mercifully sci-fi. The more likely scenario: we start growing biological brains in tanks and utilizing those as data slaves rather than any kind of AI. It's happening already. There's more of an ethics problem there to unravel than there will ever be with AI.