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Whether or not the existential risk around AI is real, governments, corporations, NGO's and others will twist this to their own purpose to build censorship, ent

Whether or not the existential risk around AI is real, governments, corporations, NGO's and others will twist this to their own purpose to build censorship, entry barriers, and other unpleasantries. We should be mindful of that.

wil421 3y ago
What I said is 100% incorrect.
- wskinner 3y ago
  Are you confusing dang with Sam Altman?
- ru552 3y ago
  Pretty sure it was Sam that went to Congress to get a moat built.
- mdp2021 3y ago
  That - that somebody would be at the same time an HN admin and an OpenAI founder - is a statement (a remarkably extraordinary statement) that requires some links to show it.
  - jimwhite42 3y ago
    It's either a simple mistake, or a deliberate troll. Sam Altman used to do a role on Hacker News very similar to what dang does today.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
jimwhite42 3y ago
Is it too cynical to claim the the noise about existential risks is a convenient distraction from these unquestionably real issues we will face, maybe even a deliberate part of helping it happen? Here's a random bit of fun prescience: From Dune, by Frank Herbert: > JIHAD, BUTLERIAN: (see also Great Revolt) — the crusade against computers, thinking machines, and conscious robots begun in 201 B.G. and concluded in 108 B.G. Its chief commandment remains in the O.C. Bible as “Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.” The usual interpretation is something along the lines that AIs took over the thinking for the leaders, making the leaders lazy, impotent, and society fragile and chaotic. This fits with a lot of Herbert's themes. But, from Children of Dune: > Three — Planetary feudalism remained in constant danger from a large technical class, but the effects of the Butlerian Jihad continued as a damper on technological excesses. Ixians, Tleilaxu, and a few scattered outer planets were the only possible threat in this regard, and they were planet-vulnerable to the combined wrath of the rest of the Imperium. The Butlerian Jihad would not be undone. Mechanized warfare required a large technical class. The Atreides Imperium had channeled this force into other pursuits. No large technical class existed unwatched. And the Empire remained safely feudalist, naturally, since that was the best social form for spreading over widely dispersed wild frontiers — new planets. Arguable paints a different picture - that the AI in the hands of the masses would be too threatening to the status quo.
- waihtis 3y ago
  >Arguable paints a different picture - that the AI in the hands of the masses would be too threatening to the status quo. That is 100% what the whole AI panic is about.
  - jimwhite42 3y ago
    The things you do name are unquestionably going to be massive issues, and yet these don't get nearly the airtime of the incredibly speculative 'AI will kill all humans if we don't do something drastic'.
- noirscape 3y ago
  > a convenient distraction from these unquestionably real issues we will face, maybe even a deliberate part of helping it happen? Oh certainly. Not for any higher purpose, but remember that OpenAI lost its shit and threatened to leave the moment the EU wanted to look into actually regulating the risks of their product. The driver is money, and little else. AI people like Sam Altman want a very specific kind of "AI regulation" - a mostly toothless one meant to address the hypothetical of a Skynet (which is honestly still pretty far out there) rather than the more realistic problems that come from their product. Things like IP law (these LLMs rely on scraping lots of copyrighted data), profiling people (in an age where privacy is important to a lot of people), medical malpractice (I remember someone saying they fed a patient dossier into ChatGPT on this site... Dear Lord I hope that person got shafted by HIPAA) are all genuine problems/risks with LLMs that don't come from the models themselves but from the people using them. Thats the real danger and OpenAI wants absolutely no regulation in that area because it could hurt their bottom line. Hence why they also almost all tend to follow the beliefs of Elezier Yudkowsky, whose entire life is basically to claim Rokos Basilisk is totally happening and the only option is to give him (and his friends) lots of money to ensure it so you won't be tortured by the AI for not bringing it about. Crowing about evil AIs is a useful distraction because it plays well populistically (Skynet, Matrix, HAL 9000 are all good examples of "AI out of control" in the public consciousness) and it gives them easy backing from people who don't understand how these things work. The EU wasn't impressed and the AI act they passed addresses some actually meaningful concerns. It remains to see if US Congress/Senate will address it at all or if their business interests reign supreme.
pmarreck 3y ago
I am currently (as of about a week ago) permanently banned on ALL my accounts on Reddit (despite many of them using different email addresses for anonymity purposes, etc.) because of a single admin making (quite arguably) a single error in permanently banning 1 of my logins from 1 subreddit (which was already overly punitive). Apologetic messages to mods went unheard and unheeded. Months later, I accidentally posted to that subreddit from a different account (and it was a supportive message!!) and somehow (without me intending to be a bad actor) this got escalated to identifying me across ALL my accounts (via machine learning on their end, possibly via Google cookies and similar source IP I'm guessing?) and this eventually cascaded into a total and permanent ban across EVERYTHING. Meanwhile, I'm possibly one of the most Googleable people around (not due to fame, but due to nearly global name uniqueness) and it should be pretty plain to see that I'm a good actor (and kind of a big nerd) and that this might have all been a misunderstanding. I'm kind of over it, but it is still hugely annoying. And it's terrifying to consider that no matter how anonymous you are on Reddit (and you might have very good reasons to be using an anonymous login), they in theory know exactly who you are. What I'm saying is that AI could magnify a single human error in the past into an arguably massively unethical action; it could retroactively tie your anonymous actions in the past to your non-anonymous identity in the present. Where there is no escaping your past mistakes and you will always be punished for them, forever, by massive machines without any human intervention, or by systems in power that are arguably unethical and dystopian.
- waihtis 3y ago
  Sounds like you just got burned by using the same IP twice, but your point does stand. There's some interesting fingerprinting software out there, and I've personally seen compute on things like typing cadence and other more clandestine metrics too. These can of course be amplified greatly in effectiveness by AI.
  - unphased 3y ago
    Security is one area in which you can't really afford not to go down the tin foil hat rabbit hole. It's been like this for some time, where it's not really possible to know just how much capability is possessed by nation state actors, but with AI and other tools those capabilities will expand and become the baseline probably way sooner than we predict. No longer will experts be needed to do careful tracing to deanonymize, one of the true superpowers of AI will be its ability to extract the full power out of the big data we've been collecting. So the cost then of figuring something out that now might cost millions will soon cost a couple bucks.
theknocker 3y ago
[dead]
reducesuffering 3y ago
Whether or not the existential risk around [climate change or nuclear weapons] is real, governments, corporations, NGO's and others will twist this to their own purpose to build censorship, entry barriers, and other unpleasantries. We should be mindful of that.
- neysofu 3y ago
  Your point being?
- waihtis 3y ago
  Nuclear weapons have a very tangible negative outcome which everyone can imagine. Existential AI risk has no meaning right now outside of a blurry vision of something like Skynet. The issues are not alike.
  - nicolapede 3y ago
    The day AI can be used in war, through robots for example, loosing a war might mean total annihilation. That is beyond nuclear weapons risk.
    - c_crank 3y ago
      The day in which Arnold Schwarzenegger robots travel back in time to kill Sarah Connor... very risky!

wil421 3y ago

What I said is 100% incorrect.

wskinner 3y ago
Are you confusing dang with Sam Altman?
ru552 3y ago
Pretty sure it was Sam that went to Congress to get a moat built.
mdp2021 3y ago
That - that somebody would be at the same time an HN admin and an OpenAI founder - is a statement (a remarkably extraordinary statement) that requires some links to show it.
- jimwhite42 3y ago
  It's either a simple mistake, or a deliberate troll. Sam Altman used to do a role on Hacker News very similar to what dang does today.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

jimwhite42 3y ago

Is it too cynical to claim the the noise about existential risks is a convenient distraction from these unquestionably real issues we will face, maybe even a deliberate part of helping it happen? Here's a random bit of fun prescience: From Dune, by Frank Herbert: > JIHAD, BUTLERIAN: (see also Great Revolt) — the crusade against computers, thinking machines, and conscious robots begun in 201 B.G. and concluded in 108 B.G. Its chief commandment remains in the O.C. Bible as “Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.” The usual interpretation is something along the lines that AIs took over the thinking for the leaders, making the leaders lazy, impotent, and society fragile and chaotic. This fits with a lot of Herbert's themes. But, from Children of Dune: > Three — Planetary feudalism remained in constant danger from a large technical class, but the effects of the Butlerian Jihad continued as a damper on technological excesses. Ixians, Tleilaxu, and a few scattered outer planets were the only possible threat in this regard, and they were planet-vulnerable to the combined wrath of the rest of the Imperium. The Butlerian Jihad would not be undone. Mechanized warfare required a large technical class. The Atreides Imperium had channeled this force into other pursuits. No large technical class existed unwatched. And the Empire remained safely feudalist, naturally, since that was the best social form for spreading over widely dispersed wild frontiers — new planets. Arguable paints a different picture - that the AI in the hands of the masses would be too threatening to the status quo.

waihtis 3y ago
>Arguable paints a different picture - that the AI in the hands of the masses would be too threatening to the status quo. That is 100% what the whole AI panic is about.
- jimwhite42 3y ago
  The things you do name are unquestionably going to be massive issues, and yet these don't get nearly the airtime of the incredibly speculative 'AI will kill all humans if we don't do something drastic'.
noirscape 3y ago
> a convenient distraction from these unquestionably real issues we will face, maybe even a deliberate part of helping it happen? Oh certainly. Not for any higher purpose, but remember that OpenAI lost its shit and threatened to leave the moment the EU wanted to look into actually regulating the risks of their product. The driver is money, and little else. AI people like Sam Altman want a very specific kind of "AI regulation" - a mostly toothless one meant to address the hypothetical of a Skynet (which is honestly still pretty far out there) rather than the more realistic problems that come from their product. Things like IP law (these LLMs rely on scraping lots of copyrighted data), profiling people (in an age where privacy is important to a lot of people), medical malpractice (I remember someone saying they fed a patient dossier into ChatGPT on this site... Dear Lord I hope that person got shafted by HIPAA) are all genuine problems/risks with LLMs that don't come from the models themselves but from the people using them. Thats the real danger and OpenAI wants absolutely no regulation in that area because it could hurt their bottom line. Hence why they also almost all tend to follow the beliefs of Elezier Yudkowsky, whose entire life is basically to claim Rokos Basilisk is totally happening and the only option is to give him (and his friends) lots of money to ensure it so you won't be tortured by the AI for not bringing it about. Crowing about evil AIs is a useful distraction because it plays well populistically (Skynet, Matrix, HAL 9000 are all good examples of "AI out of control" in the public consciousness) and it gives them easy backing from people who don't understand how these things work. The EU wasn't impressed and the AI act they passed addresses some actually meaningful concerns. It remains to see if US Congress/Senate will address it at all or if their business interests reign supreme.

pmarreck 3y ago

I am currently (as of about a week ago) permanently banned on ALL my accounts on Reddit (despite many of them using different email addresses for anonymity purposes, etc.) because of a single admin making (quite arguably) a single error in permanently banning 1 of my logins from 1 subreddit (which was already overly punitive). Apologetic messages to mods went unheard and unheeded. Months later, I accidentally posted to that subreddit from a different account (and it was a supportive message!!) and somehow (without me intending to be a bad actor) this got escalated to identifying me across ALL my accounts (via machine learning on their end, possibly via Google cookies and similar source IP I'm guessing?) and this eventually cascaded into a total and permanent ban across EVERYTHING. Meanwhile, I'm possibly one of the most Googleable people around (not due to fame, but due to nearly global name uniqueness) and it should be pretty plain to see that I'm a good actor (and kind of a big nerd) and that this might have all been a misunderstanding. I'm kind of over it, but it is still hugely annoying. And it's terrifying to consider that no matter how anonymous you are on Reddit (and you might have very good reasons to be using an anonymous login), they in theory know exactly who you are. What I'm saying is that AI could magnify a single human error in the past into an arguably massively unethical action; it could retroactively tie your anonymous actions in the past to your non-anonymous identity in the present. Where there is no escaping your past mistakes and you will always be punished for them, forever, by massive machines without any human intervention, or by systems in power that are arguably unethical and dystopian.

waihtis 3y ago
Sounds like you just got burned by using the same IP twice, but your point does stand. There's some interesting fingerprinting software out there, and I've personally seen compute on things like typing cadence and other more clandestine metrics too. These can of course be amplified greatly in effectiveness by AI.
- unphased 3y ago
  Security is one area in which you can't really afford not to go down the tin foil hat rabbit hole. It's been like this for some time, where it's not really possible to know just how much capability is possessed by nation state actors, but with AI and other tools those capabilities will expand and become the baseline probably way sooner than we predict. No longer will experts be needed to do careful tracing to deanonymize, one of the true superpowers of AI will be its ability to extract the full power out of the big data we've been collecting. So the cost then of figuring something out that now might cost millions will soon cost a couple bucks.

theknocker 3y ago

[dead]

reducesuffering 3y ago

Whether or not the existential risk around [climate change or nuclear weapons] is real, governments, corporations, NGO's and others will twist this to their own purpose to build censorship, entry barriers, and other unpleasantries. We should be mindful of that.

neysofu 3y ago
Your point being?
waihtis 3y ago
Nuclear weapons have a very tangible negative outcome which everyone can imagine. Existential AI risk has no meaning right now outside of a blurry vision of something like Skynet. The issues are not alike.
- nicolapede 3y ago
  The day AI can be used in war, through robots for example, loosing a war might mean total annihilation. That is beyond nuclear weapons risk.
  - c_crank 3y ago
    The day in which Arnold Schwarzenegger robots travel back in time to kill Sarah Connor... very risky!