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If or when AI is capable of doing all the great things people proclaim it to be able to do, then it will also be capable of doing immense harm, and we should be
by llamaimperative 3y ago
If or when AI is capable of doing all the great things people proclaim it to be able to do, then it will also be capable of doing immense harm, and we should be putting more work into mitigating that.
Like it really is that simple. AI generally, LLMs specifically, and certainly this crop of LLMs in particular might end up being inert pieces of technology. But to the precise extent that they are not inert, they carry risk.
That's a perfectly sensible position. The optimist position isn't even internally consistent. See Andreessen on Sam Harris's podcast: AI will produce consumer utopia and drive prices down. Also, there are no downside risks because AI will be legally neutered from doing much of anything.
Is it legally neutered or is it transformative? The skeptical case doesn't rely on answering this question: to the extent it's effective, powerful, and able to do good things in the world, it will also be effective, powerful, and able to do bad things in the world. The AI skeptics don't need to know which outcome the future holds.
- jrflowers 3y ago> The AI skeptics don't need to know which outcome the future holds. But they need to interpret a benign point about the undisputed fact that an LLM has never convinced anybody to fly a plane into a building as some sort of dangerous ignorance of risk that needs correcting.
- ethanbond 3y agoPerson observing Trinity test: "Wow this is really dangerous and could wipe out a city" Very astute response: "An atomic weapon has never wiped out a city"
- jrflowers 3y agoWatching the first dot matrix printer output a page of text: “This might print out text that summons Cthulhu”
- ethanbond 3y agoIs all that money flowing into AI development and deployment in order to produce pieces of paper with text on them? Nope, it's to produce society-scale transformation. So even the optimists wouldn't buy your analogy.
- jrflowers 3y ago>produce pieces of paper with text on them? This is a good point — No. LLMs are meant to produce text on a screen, not paper, so I guess it’s more like Seeing the “it is now safe to shut off your PC” text on a screen for the first time: “I am become Death, destroyer of worlds”
- ethanbond 3y agoBrilliant proof of exactly my point. When it comes to discussing any possible outcome other than utopia, suddenly the power of these tools drops to zero! Remarkable :)
- jrflowers 3y agoYou responded to my previous comment that called utopians as cultish as the fanfic folks. When it comes up discussing any possible outcome that isn’t the opinion of [cult x], the only reason that the other person disagrees is because they are in [cult y] Remarkable :)
- ethanbond 3y agoWhat? I never proposed that dichotomy and don't believe in it. You did and you're tripping over it a bit. You can just discard that model and engage with the substance of the topic, you know!
- jrflowers 3y agoThe substance of this discussion is that a language model has never convinced anyone to crash a plane into a building and your position is that pointing out that fact is to ignore the material reality of the possibility of some theoretically advanced technology (which could maybe be adjacent to language models) at some point convincing a hypothetical person to crash a plane into a building. That is to say, the substance here is an emotional doomsday reaction to a benign statement of undisputed fact — a language model has never convinced a person to crash a plane into a building. Watching a cell divide into two cells: “Why isn’t anyone talking about the possibility that this is Hitler??”