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No one thinks a chatbot will run amok. What people are worried about is the pace of progress being so fast that we cannot preempt the creation of dangerous tech

No one thinks a chatbot will run amok. What people are worried about is the pace of progress being so fast that we cannot preempt the creation of dangerous technology without having a sufficient guardrails in place long before the AI becomes potentially dangerous. This is eminently reasonable.

gumballindie 3y ago
AI is software, it doesnt become it is made. And this type of legislation wont prevent bad actors from training malicious tools.
- hackinthebochs 3y ago
  Your claim is assuming we have complete knowledge of how these systems work and thus are in full control of their behavior in any and all contexts. But this is plainly false. We do not have anywhere near a complete mechanistic understanding of how they operate. But this isn't that unusual, many technological advancements happened before the theory. For AI systems that can act in the real world, this state of affairs has the potential to be very dangerous. It is important to get ahead of this danger rather than play catch up once the danger is demonstrated.
  - gumballindie 3y ago
    The real danger right now is people like sam altman making policy and an eager political class that will be long dead by the time we have to foot the bill. Everything else is bad scifi. We were told the same about computer viruses and how they can bring nuclear wars and as usual the only real danger was humans and bad politics.
    - NumberWangMan 3y ago
      I need to make a montage of the thousands of hacker news commenters typing "The REAL danger of AI is ..." followed by some mundane issue. I'm sorry to pick on you, but do people not get that the non-human intelligence has the potential to be such a powerful and dangerous thing that, yes, it is the real danger? If you think it's not going to be powerful, or not dangerous, please say why! Not that current models are not dangerous, but why the trend is toward something other than machine intelligence that can reason about the world better than humans can. Why is this trend of machines getting smarter and smarter going to suddenly stop? Or if you agree that these machines are going to get smarter than us, how are we going to control them?
      - gumballindie 3y ago
        Interesting. I am of the opinion that ai is not intelligent hence i dont see much point in entertaining the various scenarios deriving from that possibility. There is nothing dangerous in current ai models or ai itself other than the people controlling it. If it were intelligent then yeah maybe but we are not there yet and unless we adapt the meaning of agi to fit a marketing narrative we wont be there anytime soon. But if it were intelligent and the conclusion it reaches, once it’s done ingesting all our knowledge, is that it should be done with us then we probably deserve it. I mean what kind of a species takes joy in “freeing” up people and causing mass unemployment, starts wars over petty issues, allows for famine and thrives on the exploitation of others while standing on piles of nuclear bombs. Also we are literally destroying the planet and constantly looking for ways to dominate each other. We probably deserve a good spanking.
        NumberWangMan 3y ago
        That's easy to say in the abstract, but when it comes down to the people you love actually getting hurt, it's a lot harder. > There is nothing dangerous in current ai models or ai itself other than the people controlling it. Totally agree! but... > If it were intelligent then yeah maybe but we are not there yet and unless we adapt the meaning of agi to fit a marketing narrative we wont be there anytime soon. That's the bit where I don't agree. I don't think we can say with certainty how long it will be, and it may be just years. I never imagined it would be so soon that we have AI that can imitate a human almost perfectly, and actually "understand" questions from college level examinations to write answers that pass them.
diputsmonro 3y ago
Yes, thank you. AI is dangerous, but not for the sci-fi reasons, just for completely cynical and greedy ones. Entire industries stand to be gutted, and people's careers destroyed. Even if an AI is only 80% as good, it has <1% of the cost, which is an ROI that no corporation can afford to ignore. That's not even to mention the political implications of photo and audio deepfakes that are getting better and better by the week. Most of the obvious tells we were laughing at months ago are gone. And before anyone makes the comparison, I would like to remind everyone that the stereotypical depiction of Luddites as small-minded anti-technology idiots is a lie. They embraced new technology, just not how it was used. Their actual complaints - that skilled workers would be displaced, that wealth and power would be concentrated in a small number of machine owners, and that overall quality of goods would decrease - have all come to pass. In a time of unprecedented wealth disparity, general global democratic backsliding, and near universal unease at the near-unstoppable power of a small number of corporations, we really do not want to go through another cycle of wealth consolidation. This is how we get corporate feifdoms. There is another path - if our ability to live and flourish wasn't directly tied to our individual economic output. But nobody wants to have that conversation.
- hackinthebochs 3y ago
  I couldn't agree more. I fear the world where 90% of people are irrelevant to the economic output of the world. Our culture takes it as axiomatic that more efficiency is good. But its not clear to me that it is. The principle goal of society should be the betterment of the lives of people. Yes, efficiency has historically been a driver of widespread prosperity, but it's not obvious that there isn't a local maximum past which increased efficiency harms the average person. We may already be on the other side of the critical point. What I don't get is why we're all just blindly barreling forward and allowing trillion dollar companies to engage in an arms race to see how fast they can absorb productive work. The fact that few people are considering what society looks like in a future with widespread AI and whether this is a future we want is baffling.
  - iavael 3y ago
    This won’t be the first time. First world already had same situation during industrialisation, when economic no longer required 90% of population growing food. And this transformation still regularly happens in one or another third world country. People worry about such changes too much. When this will happen again it wouldn’t be a walk in a park for many people, but neigher this would be a disaster. And BTW when people spend less resources to get more goods and services - that’s the definition of prospering society. Of course having some people changing jobs because less manpower is needed to do same amount of work is an inevitable consequence of a progress.

gumballindie 3y ago

AI is software, it doesnt become it is made. And this type of legislation wont prevent bad actors from training malicious tools.

hackinthebochs 3y ago
Your claim is assuming we have complete knowledge of how these systems work and thus are in full control of their behavior in any and all contexts. But this is plainly false. We do not have anywhere near a complete mechanistic understanding of how they operate. But this isn't that unusual, many technological advancements happened before the theory. For AI systems that can act in the real world, this state of affairs has the potential to be very dangerous. It is important to get ahead of this danger rather than play catch up once the danger is demonstrated.
- gumballindie 3y ago
  The real danger right now is people like sam altman making policy and an eager political class that will be long dead by the time we have to foot the bill. Everything else is bad scifi. We were told the same about computer viruses and how they can bring nuclear wars and as usual the only real danger was humans and bad politics.
  - NumberWangMan 3y ago
    I need to make a montage of the thousands of hacker news commenters typing "The REAL danger of AI is ..." followed by some mundane issue. I'm sorry to pick on you, but do people not get that the non-human intelligence has the potential to be such a powerful and dangerous thing that, yes, it is the real danger? If you think it's not going to be powerful, or not dangerous, please say why! Not that current models are not dangerous, but why the trend is toward something other than machine intelligence that can reason about the world better than humans can. Why is this trend of machines getting smarter and smarter going to suddenly stop? Or if you agree that these machines are going to get smarter than us, how are we going to control them?
    - gumballindie 3y ago
      Interesting. I am of the opinion that ai is not intelligent hence i dont see much point in entertaining the various scenarios deriving from that possibility. There is nothing dangerous in current ai models or ai itself other than the people controlling it. If it were intelligent then yeah maybe but we are not there yet and unless we adapt the meaning of agi to fit a marketing narrative we wont be there anytime soon. But if it were intelligent and the conclusion it reaches, once it’s done ingesting all our knowledge, is that it should be done with us then we probably deserve it. I mean what kind of a species takes joy in “freeing” up people and causing mass unemployment, starts wars over petty issues, allows for famine and thrives on the exploitation of others while standing on piles of nuclear bombs. Also we are literally destroying the planet and constantly looking for ways to dominate each other. We probably deserve a good spanking.
      - NumberWangMan 3y ago
        That's easy to say in the abstract, but when it comes down to the people you love actually getting hurt, it's a lot harder. > There is nothing dangerous in current ai models or ai itself other than the people controlling it. Totally agree! but... > If it were intelligent then yeah maybe but we are not there yet and unless we adapt the meaning of agi to fit a marketing narrative we wont be there anytime soon. That's the bit where I don't agree. I don't think we can say with certainty how long it will be, and it may be just years. I never imagined it would be so soon that we have AI that can imitate a human almost perfectly, and actually "understand" questions from college level examinations to write answers that pass them.

diputsmonro 3y ago

Yes, thank you. AI is dangerous, but not for the sci-fi reasons, just for completely cynical and greedy ones. Entire industries stand to be gutted, and people's careers destroyed. Even if an AI is only 80% as good, it has <1% of the cost, which is an ROI that no corporation can afford to ignore. That's not even to mention the political implications of photo and audio deepfakes that are getting better and better by the week. Most of the obvious tells we were laughing at months ago are gone. And before anyone makes the comparison, I would like to remind everyone that the stereotypical depiction of Luddites as small-minded anti-technology idiots is a lie. They embraced new technology, just not how it was used. Their actual complaints - that skilled workers would be displaced, that wealth and power would be concentrated in a small number of machine owners, and that overall quality of goods would decrease - have all come to pass. In a time of unprecedented wealth disparity, general global democratic backsliding, and near universal unease at the near-unstoppable power of a small number of corporations, we really do not want to go through another cycle of wealth consolidation. This is how we get corporate feifdoms. There is another path - if our ability to live and flourish wasn't directly tied to our individual economic output. But nobody wants to have that conversation.

hackinthebochs 3y ago
I couldn't agree more. I fear the world where 90% of people are irrelevant to the economic output of the world. Our culture takes it as axiomatic that more efficiency is good. But its not clear to me that it is. The principle goal of society should be the betterment of the lives of people. Yes, efficiency has historically been a driver of widespread prosperity, but it's not obvious that there isn't a local maximum past which increased efficiency harms the average person. We may already be on the other side of the critical point. What I don't get is why we're all just blindly barreling forward and allowing trillion dollar companies to engage in an arms race to see how fast they can absorb productive work. The fact that few people are considering what society looks like in a future with widespread AI and whether this is a future we want is baffling.
- iavael 3y ago
  This won’t be the first time. First world already had same situation during industrialisation, when economic no longer required 90% of population growing food. And this transformation still regularly happens in one or another third world country. People worry about such changes too much. When this will happen again it wouldn’t be a walk in a park for many people, but neigher this would be a disaster. And BTW when people spend less resources to get more goods and services - that’s the definition of prospering society. Of course having some people changing jobs because less manpower is needed to do same amount of work is an inevitable consequence of a progress.