5 ms·
When I read about the dangers of AI I'm reminded of the feeling I had after reading Jeff Hawkin's "On Intelligence". He talked about simulating the neocortex to
by ralphc 3y ago
When I read about the dangers of AI I'm reminded of the feeling I had after reading Jeff Hawkin's "On Intelligence". He talked about simulating the neocortex to do many of the things that deep learning and LLM's are doing now.
His research may or may not be a dead end but his work, and this work, to me seems like we're building the neocortex layer without building the underlying "lizard brain" that higher animals' brains are built upon. The part of the brain that gives us emotions and motivations. The leftover from the reptiles that drive animals to survive, to find pleasure in a full belly, to strive to breed.
We use our neocortex and planning facilities but in a lot of ways it's just to satisfy the primitive urges.
My point being, these new AIs are just a higher level "newcortexes" with nothing to motivate them. They can do everything but don't want to do anything. We tell them what to do. The AIs by themselves don't need to be feared, we need to fear what people with lizard brains use them for.
- tmsh 3y ago+1 I tend to agree with that in terms of how to think about AI. It's all just neocortex. The alignment issue could be unpacked as more of a "lizard brain <-> mammalian brain <-> pre-frontal cortex <-> LLM-enhanced cortex" alignment issue. But when real self-replication starts happening -- that is maybe the really exciting/terrifying area. It's more that humans with generative AI are almost strong enough to create artificial life. And when that pops off -- when you have things trying to survive -- that's where we need to be careful. I guess I would regulate that area -- mostly around self-replication.
- dist-epoch 3y ago> We tell them what to do. The AIs by themselves don't need to be feared, we need to fear what people with lizard brains use them for. Even if so, there will always be that one person which wants to see the world burn. If suddenly every person in SF had a nuclear bomb, how long do you think it would take until someone presses the button? I bet less than 5 minutes.
- arisAlexis 3y agoThat doesn't change the risk profile one bit though.
- tyre 3y agoThis is a great way to put it. The counter to "current generation AI is terrifying" seems to fall along the lines of it not being nearly as close to AGI as the layperson believes. But I don't think that matters. I don't believe that LLMs or image/voice/video generative models need to do much beyond what they can do today in order to wreck civilization level disaster. They don't need to become Skynet, learn to operate drone armies, hack critical infrastructure, or engineer pandemics. LLMs allow dynamic, adaptive, scalable, and targeted propaganda. Already we have seen the effects of social media's reach combined with brute forced content generation. LLMs allow this to happen faster and at a higher fidelity. That could be enough to tip the balance and trigger a world war. I don't think it takes a huge amount of faked primary material (generated phone calls, fuzzy video, etc.) that's massively amplified until it becomes "true enough" to drive a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, a Russian tactical nuclear strike in Ukraine, an armed insurrection in the United States. We're close to there already.
- YetAnotherNick 3y agoGPT4 really "doesn't want" be racist against blacks. Like try talking to it, there is(was) no hard filter but I really can't grasp how the bias can go this deep just by finetuning. GPT-4 definitely know all the stereotypes of blacks, but good luck getting it to engage on any. Suppose we finetune it exactly like that but say opposing democracy or freedom or peace or any other thing we value. And let it create the propoganda or convince people for the same by free posting on the net. "As an AI language model" line could easily be removed.
- sitkack 3y agoEverything is its own mirror. Found the cure to cancer? Maybe also made a cancer gun at the same time.
- JimtheCoder 3y agoDoesn't this only work if everyone is stupid and believes everything they see/read/hear on the internet? You have to have a little more faith in humanity than that...
- muskmusk 3y agoBingo!
- jimbokun 3y agoOr until someone decides to give AI a "lizard brain" and sets it loose.
- ChatGTP 3y agoPresumably this will be easy, once you have a Neocortex with an IQ of 500, creating a lizrd brain is only moments away.