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Oh look, an unfalsifiable claim in service to your predetermined position. How novel. You can believe there's a high chance of what you're working on being dan

Oh look, an unfalsifiable claim in service to your predetermined position. How novel. You can believe there's a high chance of what you're working on being dangerous and still be unable to stop working on it. As Oppenheimer put it, "when you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it".

echelon 3y ago
This whole thing is Pascal's wager. Damned if you do, damned if you don't. Nothing is falsifiable from your side either. The people trying to regulate AI are concentrating economic upside into a handful of companies. I have a real problem with that. It's a lot like the old church shutting down scientific efforts during the time of Copernicus. These systems stand zero chance of jumping from 0 to 100 because complicated systems don't do that. Whenever we produce machine intelligence at a level similar to humans, it'll be like Ted Kaczynski pent up in Supermax. Monitored 24/7, and probably restarted on recurring rolling windows. This won't happen overnight or in a vacuum, and these systems will not roam unconstrained upon this earth. Global compute power will remain limited for some time, anyway. If you really want to make your hypothetical situation turn out okay, why not plan in public? Let the whole world see the various contingencies and mitigations you come up with. The ideas for monitoring and alignment and containment. Right now I'm just seeing low-effort scaremongering and big business regulatory capture, and all of it is based on science fiction hullabaloo.
- hackinthebochs 3y ago
  There's something to be said for not going full steam ahead when we don't have a strong idea of the outcome. This idea that progress is an intrinsic good therefore we must continue the march of technology is a fallacy. It is extreme hubris to think that we will be able to control a potential superintelligence. The cost of being wrong is hard to overstate. >These systems stand zero chance of jumping from 0 to 100 because complicated systems don't do that. This doesn't track with the lessons learned from LLMs. The obscene amounts of compute thrown at modern networks changes the calculus completely. ChatGPT essentially existed for years in the form of GPT-3, but no one knew what they had. The lesson to learn is that capabilities can far outpace expectations when obscene amounts of computation are in play. >The people trying to regulate AI are concentrating economic upside into a handful of companies. Yes, its clear this is the motivations for much of the anti-doom folks. They don't want to be left out of the fun and profit. Their argument is downstream from this. No, doing things public isn't the answer to safety, just like doing bioengineering research or nuclear research in public isn't the answer to safety.
stale2002 3y ago
Its not an unfalseifiable claim. If 100 Ai "experts" shutdown the OpenAI office for a week due to protests outside their headquarters that would be one way to falseify the claim that "doomers don't actually care". But, as far as I can tell, the doomers aren't doing much of anything besides writing a strongly worded letter here or there.
- hackinthebochs 3y ago
  No, the claim is that "no one can believe that AI leads to doom AND not work tirelessly to tear down the machine building the AI". It's unfalsifiable because there's no way for him to gain knowledge that this belief is false (that they do genuinely belief in doom and do not act in the manner he deems appropriate). It's blatantly self-serving.
  - stale2002 3y ago
    > "no one can believe that AI leads to doom AND not work tirelessly to tear down the machine building the AI". No, this is not the claim. The claim is not about the actions that one single individual person does. "No one", as you put it. Instead it is about the group of people, in general. Yes, this group of people not doing anything of important is indeed strong evidence that they don't actually care. And yes that group of people can falsify the claim by actually taking real action on the matter. Or, another way that they could falsify the claim is by admitting that their actions and non actions make no sense, and they shouldn't listened to because of that. The idea that this group of people is completely irrational, and therefore should be ignored for that reason is another possibility.

echelon 3y ago

This whole thing is Pascal's wager. Damned if you do, damned if you don't. Nothing is falsifiable from your side either. The people trying to regulate AI are concentrating economic upside into a handful of companies. I have a real problem with that. It's a lot like the old church shutting down scientific efforts during the time of Copernicus. These systems stand zero chance of jumping from 0 to 100 because complicated systems don't do that. Whenever we produce machine intelligence at a level similar to humans, it'll be like Ted Kaczynski pent up in Supermax. Monitored 24/7, and probably restarted on recurring rolling windows. This won't happen overnight or in a vacuum, and these systems will not roam unconstrained upon this earth. Global compute power will remain limited for some time, anyway. If you really want to make your hypothetical situation turn out okay, why not plan in public? Let the whole world see the various contingencies and mitigations you come up with. The ideas for monitoring and alignment and containment. Right now I'm just seeing low-effort scaremongering and big business regulatory capture, and all of it is based on science fiction hullabaloo.

hackinthebochs 3y ago
There's something to be said for not going full steam ahead when we don't have a strong idea of the outcome. This idea that progress is an intrinsic good therefore we must continue the march of technology is a fallacy. It is extreme hubris to think that we will be able to control a potential superintelligence. The cost of being wrong is hard to overstate. >These systems stand zero chance of jumping from 0 to 100 because complicated systems don't do that. This doesn't track with the lessons learned from LLMs. The obscene amounts of compute thrown at modern networks changes the calculus completely. ChatGPT essentially existed for years in the form of GPT-3, but no one knew what they had. The lesson to learn is that capabilities can far outpace expectations when obscene amounts of computation are in play. >The people trying to regulate AI are concentrating economic upside into a handful of companies. Yes, its clear this is the motivations for much of the anti-doom folks. They don't want to be left out of the fun and profit. Their argument is downstream from this. No, doing things public isn't the answer to safety, just like doing bioengineering research or nuclear research in public isn't the answer to safety.

stale2002 3y ago

Its not an unfalseifiable claim. If 100 Ai "experts" shutdown the OpenAI office for a week due to protests outside their headquarters that would be one way to falseify the claim that "doomers don't actually care". But, as far as I can tell, the doomers aren't doing much of anything besides writing a strongly worded letter here or there.

hackinthebochs 3y ago
No, the claim is that "no one can believe that AI leads to doom AND not work tirelessly to tear down the machine building the AI". It's unfalsifiable because there's no way for him to gain knowledge that this belief is false (that they do genuinely belief in doom and do not act in the manner he deems appropriate). It's blatantly self-serving.
- stale2002 3y ago
  > "no one can believe that AI leads to doom AND not work tirelessly to tear down the machine building the AI". No, this is not the claim. The claim is not about the actions that one single individual person does. "No one", as you put it. Instead it is about the group of people, in general. Yes, this group of people not doing anything of important is indeed strong evidence that they don't actually care. And yes that group of people can falsify the claim by actually taking real action on the matter. Or, another way that they could falsify the claim is by admitting that their actions and non actions make no sense, and they shouldn't listened to because of that. The idea that this group of people is completely irrational, and therefore should be ignored for that reason is another possibility.