4 ms·

> plausible dangers Name three. There are 50,000 gun related deaths in the United States per year, are any of them a bigger threat than gun violence? I struggl

> plausible dangers Name three. There are 50,000 gun related deaths in the United States per year, are any of them a bigger threat than gun violence? I struggle to find a single thing AI can do, sans being hooked up to nuclear weapons and time travelling robots with german accents, that's even imaginatively more dangerous than what this country already allows and decides doesn't require useful regulations. I'm sorry if that's too political for HN but you know what, it actually does matter to compare real dangers (car accidents, gun violence) to conceived and made up ones (gender indifferent bathrooms, AI) when deciding how governments should prioritize policy and regulations.

JohnFen 3y ago
So, because we haven't been able to resolve a highly political and divisive issue (gun deaths), that means we shouldn't try to resolve other dangerous issues? > I struggle to find a single thing AI can do How about job loss? If AI can do what proponents say, then it's easy to see that a large amount of job loss will result. If even 20% of people can no longer earn a living, people will die.
- mrguyorama 3y ago
  It's also important to note here that even if you believe that all these ML models are not even close to "AI", that doesn't stop your naive boss from buying their hype and replacing you with it. There's good reason to talk about how society should handle that even if ChatGPT is all hot air.
- kyledrake 3y ago
  > How about job loss? This is called creative destruction, and it's not even remotely a new problem created by this particular technology, it's a constant and ongoing mechanism of market capitalism by which technology streamlines or improves something that then requires less labor to accomplish. When the 400k+ telephone switch operators lost their jobs to digitization, it didn't cause a mass die off of humans, and while I won't say it was a zero bad consequences event, they mostly found other work, work that was probably more interesting and more productive. We certainly could have regulated telephone digitization to prevent this "danger" and instead employed 4.5 million people, or about 3 percent of the labor force, to operate the phone network today as it would have existed technologically in the 1970s, but I'm happy we skipped the scare mongering and went the digitization route, which probably also was a prerequisite for the internet to be able to be used by.. users (which mostly used digital phone services via modems to connect). Would even consumer internet access exist today if they decided to regulate the "danger" of losing analog phone operator jobs? Either way, I fail to see how allowing only licensed and government regulated companies to work on machine learning will do anything to improve anyone's job prospects moving forward, as increasingly onerous requirements created by people that like to say things like "the internet is a bunch of tubes" make it so only a few rent-seeking monopolies will be able to do anything (legally) with the technology. I'm not 100% against government regulation, but it's early, things are relatively benign so far (sans self driving cars), let's wait until there's some actual non-sci-fi concerns that emerge and then tackle them as specific things to regulate, rather than wrapping the whole thing into a giant regulatory framework that incorrectly calls it AI before we even learn what the problems are going to be.
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    > it's not even remotely a new problem created by this particular technology True. But this technology (again, if the proponents are correct) threatens to do it on a truly unprecedented scale. It was bad enough -- barely tolerable in some cases -- in history. Getting it even worse seems like something nobody would want, let alone cheerlead. I am deeply, deeply concerned that there are people willing to gamble with the lives of innocent others (not to mention society itself) like this. It's something we need to be addressing now, before it happens.
fragsworth 3y ago
I won't name three but the one everyone's really afraid of is the theoretical fast/hard "take-off" runaway problem. It is plausible that a smart enough AI given any instruction, without guardrails, will ultimately destroy the world in its attempt to do that thing. See the wiki on Instrumental Convergence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_convergence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_convergence and in particular, read about the "paperclip maximizer". Paperclips are just an example. It remains to be seen if this is ultimately a real problem. If it turns out that it is, then not regulating the development of these systems in advance may be a huge mistake.
NumberWangMan 3y ago
Existential threat is a really hard thing to grapple with. You can't wait for real-world evidence of danger to deal with it. If there's a possibility of an asteroid coming that will wipe out life on earth, waiting until our telescopes can see it to start taking action may not give us enough time to react. We have to plan for the theoretical possibility. Maybe we'll never be able to create artificial superintelligence. Maybe artificial superintelligence will be much easier to align than we thing. Maybe it'll be hard, but manageable, possibly because we have more time to work on the problem than we think. All of those are possibilities, but the fact that if you ask 100 people about it, you'll get 100 different opinions, means that we have very little idea how things will go. Given that, I don't like the approach of wing it / hope for the best. If we end up stifling AI innovation unnecessarily, that may mean that our techno-utopia is delayed for a few years, but we get there in the end. On the other hand, if we under-react and things turn out really bad, we may not get another try. Scenarios where AGI kills a billion people are really bad, but scenarios where we create it and end up permanently disempowered or dead are worse. I wonder sometimes if people are just really dissatisfied with their lives, that they react with such vitriol to the idea of AI progress being delayed. I know we have a lot of problems, but how many of them are technological vs. having poor human institutions and incentive structures? AI probably won't help much with that.
- BeFlatXIII 3y ago
  > If there's a possibility of an asteroid coming that will wipe out life on earth, waiting until our telescopes can see it to start taking action may not give us enough time to react. How would we even know what to do until we have a concrete target?
  - Vecr 3y ago
    They can test deflection methods on other asteroids, build large spacecraft launchers and have them ready to go, do surveys to make sure the N-body predictions are as accurate as possible, etc. Some of that's being done (NEOWISE, DART) but if you want to deflect a planet killer you need a lot more.
  - NumberWangMan 3y ago

JohnFen 3y ago

So, because we haven't been able to resolve a highly political and divisive issue (gun deaths), that means we shouldn't try to resolve other dangerous issues? > I struggle to find a single thing AI can do How about job loss? If AI can do what proponents say, then it's easy to see that a large amount of job loss will result. If even 20% of people can no longer earn a living, people will die.

mrguyorama 3y ago
It's also important to note here that even if you believe that all these ML models are not even close to "AI", that doesn't stop your naive boss from buying their hype and replacing you with it. There's good reason to talk about how society should handle that even if ChatGPT is all hot air.
kyledrake 3y ago
> How about job loss? This is called creative destruction, and it's not even remotely a new problem created by this particular technology, it's a constant and ongoing mechanism of market capitalism by which technology streamlines or improves something that then requires less labor to accomplish. When the 400k+ telephone switch operators lost their jobs to digitization, it didn't cause a mass die off of humans, and while I won't say it was a zero bad consequences event, they mostly found other work, work that was probably more interesting and more productive. We certainly could have regulated telephone digitization to prevent this "danger" and instead employed 4.5 million people, or about 3 percent of the labor force, to operate the phone network today as it would have existed technologically in the 1970s, but I'm happy we skipped the scare mongering and went the digitization route, which probably also was a prerequisite for the internet to be able to be used by.. users (which mostly used digital phone services via modems to connect). Would even consumer internet access exist today if they decided to regulate the "danger" of losing analog phone operator jobs? Either way, I fail to see how allowing only licensed and government regulated companies to work on machine learning will do anything to improve anyone's job prospects moving forward, as increasingly onerous requirements created by people that like to say things like "the internet is a bunch of tubes" make it so only a few rent-seeking monopolies will be able to do anything (legally) with the technology. I'm not 100% against government regulation, but it's early, things are relatively benign so far (sans self driving cars), let's wait until there's some actual non-sci-fi concerns that emerge and then tackle them as specific things to regulate, rather than wrapping the whole thing into a giant regulatory framework that incorrectly calls it AI before we even learn what the problems are going to be.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  > it's not even remotely a new problem created by this particular technology True. But this technology (again, if the proponents are correct) threatens to do it on a truly unprecedented scale. It was bad enough -- barely tolerable in some cases -- in history. Getting it even worse seems like something nobody would want, let alone cheerlead. I am deeply, deeply concerned that there are people willing to gamble with the lives of innocent others (not to mention society itself) like this. It's something we need to be addressing now, before it happens.

fragsworth 3y ago

I won't name three but the one everyone's really afraid of is the theoretical fast/hard "take-off" runaway problem. It is plausible that a smart enough AI given any instruction, without guardrails, will ultimately destroy the world in its attempt to do that thing. See the wiki on Instrumental Convergence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_convergence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_convergence and in particular, read about the "paperclip maximizer". Paperclips are just an example. It remains to be seen if this is ultimately a real problem. If it turns out that it is, then not regulating the development of these systems in advance may be a huge mistake.

NumberWangMan 3y ago

Existential threat is a really hard thing to grapple with. You can't wait for real-world evidence of danger to deal with it. If there's a possibility of an asteroid coming that will wipe out life on earth, waiting until our telescopes can see it to start taking action may not give us enough time to react. We have to plan for the theoretical possibility. Maybe we'll never be able to create artificial superintelligence. Maybe artificial superintelligence will be much easier to align than we thing. Maybe it'll be hard, but manageable, possibly because we have more time to work on the problem than we think. All of those are possibilities, but the fact that if you ask 100 people about it, you'll get 100 different opinions, means that we have very little idea how things will go. Given that, I don't like the approach of wing it / hope for the best. If we end up stifling AI innovation unnecessarily, that may mean that our techno-utopia is delayed for a few years, but we get there in the end. On the other hand, if we under-react and things turn out really bad, we may not get another try. Scenarios where AGI kills a billion people are really bad, but scenarios where we create it and end up permanently disempowered or dead are worse. I wonder sometimes if people are just really dissatisfied with their lives, that they react with such vitriol to the idea of AI progress being delayed. I know we have a lot of problems, but how many of them are technological vs. having poor human institutions and incentive structures? AI probably won't help much with that.

BeFlatXIII 3y ago
> If there's a possibility of an asteroid coming that will wipe out life on earth, waiting until our telescopes can see it to start taking action may not give us enough time to react. How would we even know what to do until we have a concrete target?
- Vecr 3y ago
  They can test deflection methods on other asteroids, build large spacecraft launchers and have them ready to go, do surveys to make sure the N-body predictions are as accurate as possible, etc. Some of that's being done (NEOWISE, DART) but if you want to deflect a planet killer you need a lot more.
- NumberWangMan 3y ago