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We're talking about hypothetical situations for a technology that, as far as we can tell anyway, hasn't been invented yet. All we have is assumptions. The ques

We're talking about hypothetical situations for a technology that, as far as we can tell anyway, hasn't been invented yet. All we have is assumptions. The question is, which assumptions do we think are warranted and why? I don't think the "we can just turn it off" assumption is a safe one at all because it relies heavily on there being only one system you wish to turn off and it being a fairly weak system. Though, I do believe the priors suggest that this scenario is actually a possibility. It's just that, so what if it's a possibility? What happens after you turn it off? Is it the last AGI to come into existence and humanity just stops trying to build them? Does someone wind up turning it back on? What I think is more worth being concerned about is something that starts out looking benign and grows in capability over time. Eventually it could establish enough defense mechanisms to make it non-trivial to disable. The other possibility, and the one I'm finding more and more likely, is that consumers will increasingly integrate locally run models into their lives , as well as models served up by APIs that they will have credentials for. Eventually some threshold of capability is reached in both these types of models where, on their own they're not that powerful, but they either might begin to interact in surprising ways or potentially be leveraged by another more powerful system. The idea in this scenario is there may be 10s or even 100s of millions of things that would need to be turned off.

smoldesu 3y ago
What is the tangible threat of AGI though? Let's do a thought experiment. I have the world's first AGI installed on my computer, named ERNIE, running in llama.cpp. This AGI is infinitely intelligent, confidently moreso than any living human. It can spit out text at 100 tokens/second and encode entire books in less than a minute. What does this AI do, then? Ostensibly nothing. It can output the entire Library of Babel for all it cares, but it's not harmful until I put it in control of a system. You could argue that a multimodal model has different ways of interacting with the world, but it's still a computer. All of it's actions and outputs are quantized as static data that is either encoded as text or some other significant representation. It inherantly does nothing, and if you ascribe power-seeking behavior to it then it's ultimately limited by the runtime you provide. Providing an overly dangerous runtime has been considered developer-error since 1995. So - to prevent AGI from being shitty and ruining everything, compel human operators to not allow them to be shitty and ruin everything. Like how we punish people that let their kindergartner control a construction crane.

smoldesu 3y ago

What is the tangible threat of AGI though? Let's do a thought experiment. I have the world's first AGI installed on my computer, named ERNIE, running in llama.cpp. This AGI is infinitely intelligent, confidently moreso than any living human. It can spit out text at 100 tokens/second and encode entire books in less than a minute. What does this AI do, then? Ostensibly nothing. It can output the entire Library of Babel for all it cares, but it's not harmful until I put it in control of a system. You could argue that a multimodal model has different ways of interacting with the world, but it's still a computer. All of it's actions and outputs are quantized as static data that is either encoded as text or some other significant representation. It inherantly does nothing, and if you ascribe power-seeking behavior to it then it's ultimately limited by the runtime you provide. Providing an overly dangerous runtime has been considered developer-error since 1995. So - to prevent AGI from being shitty and ruining everything, compel human operators to not allow them to be shitty and ruin everything. Like how we punish people that let their kindergartner control a construction crane.