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Looks like the companies all agreed to do what they were doing already. Nothing about training data transparency , nothing about a common definition of risk or

Looks like the companies all agreed to do what they were doing already. Nothing about training data transparency , nothing about a common definition of risk or standards for compliance. The public have all heard “AI is going to destroy humanity” but those statements have been short on specifics. I have been asked by many people to explain how AI could kill us all. How about some clarity for common people.

ilaksh 3y ago
People always say "AGI" and they mean different things but I am guessing most now mean something like a digital living human/simulation of human when they say that. Mixed in with some blurry connotation of it automatically becoming godlike in power. That stuff is very speculative. But we don't need AI to get to that level for it to be very dangerous. Just imagine that we have an open source GPT that is something like 33% smarter than GPT-4 and less brittle. Make the output 50 times faster than human thought and suppose that we can run it very inexpensively, in a "swarm" of agents cooperating. Then you have a type of superintelligence that does not require any really speculative AI advance -- hyperspeed reasoning -- based on the current technology. If that is widely deployed for military and industrial decision-making then something like a computer virus could create existential risk. Also, realize that all these systems really need to emulate some of the core functional aspects of animals, like a self-preservation instinct or desire to control resources, is the right instruction and relaxation of guardrails. So when they can reason a bit better and at hyperspeed with collaboration between them, they don't need to be alive or anything to be dangerous. Look at the history of increases in computing efficiency. It is easy to imagine 50 or whatever times output speed increase in less than 5 years. And even though they are not human level now, GPT-4 has proven that these types of systems can have strong problem solving ability. One more thing to add is that as the AI performance increases and surpasses human decision-making ability, the hyperspeed will push competiting companies and countries to give them broader and broader goals and more autonomy. Because waiting overnight for human input means your competitor's AIs race ahead the equivalent of weeks. I think we need to set a limit for the performance of new hardware at some point. Also we need people to understand the dangers of full autonomy and imitating animals in the context of hyperspeed or superintelligent AI. We will need criminal penalties and maybe some type of cooperative digital immune system.
- LatteLazy 3y ago
  I think you also need to draw a line between different types of danger: An actual AGI, that can think and has it's own motives and initiative is an entirely different danger to GPT-4, -5 etc which cannot. Those might post a danger in terms of fake news, or worker displacement, but they're just social issues. No rate improvement in chat GPT will make it "decide to kill all the humans" etc.
  - Dalewyn 3y ago
    Every time I hear how artificial intelligence with its "own motives" etc. are dangerous, I wonder how it's different from just dealing with people and animals. Or to put it another way, I can't see how artificial intelligence could be any more dangerous than intelligence as we already know and have them.
    - jonplackett 3y ago
      I think that’s the problem isn’t it? Intelligence has proven to be exceptionally dangerous!
    - LatteLazy 3y ago
      I don't want to sound dismissive but... Well yeah. We already know humans are dangerous. And that is humans who are conditioned to be social, and who have empathy and who rely on other humans for all sorts of things. Plus with fear of a legal system punishing them. Now imagine a human like intelligence without empathy, that is not conditioned from childhood to be social, and that is inherently threatened by us and not reliant on us. Would you want that guy living next door? Oh and it's 100x smarter than you. I think all this is 100 years away, but that's the theory. Skynet doesn't have a subconscious telling it not to murder it's parents...
    - robnado 3y ago
      How dangerous can a dictator with complete knowledge and super human speed actually be?
    - Jagah 3y ago
localplume 3y ago
if you think about it, its actual insanity. The fears are all from science fiction with absolutely no grounding in reality. There are legitimate concerns about the unethical mass harvesting of data but if you think about "AI safety" vs something like vehicular safety or spacecraft safety its kind of nuts, because the latter are grounded in reality and have formal specifications which need to be met. But AI safety is so wishy-washy. Take a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Motor_Vehicle_Safety_Standards https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Motor_Vehicle_Safety_S... You'd think if people are so scared about AI being apocalyptic it would have some strict regulation similar to vehicle standards but its not even close, nor is it in the conversation at all. Its just pure fear from science fiction and the govt putting out performative press releases. What the fuck even is "AI" anyway? it means different things to different people. It could mean a self checkout at a supermarket, or a bank's AML, or some super intelligence. there are basically no standard definitions of anything to do with "AI" anywhere and every single piece of regulation is equally as vague. Companies like having it be a vague term because its marketing so the actual experts don't care about changing it
- ke88y 3y ago
  > What the fuck even is "AI" anyway? Indeed. For most lay people I've talked to -- family, friends, and acquiescence outside of tech -- the answer ultimately boils down to "automation that can do my job or can do the job of people I care about or can do the job of people who would then compete for my job". Sometimes also "algorithms" a la social media feeds and so on. Ie, the lay answer to "what is AI?" has recently morphed into roughly "computer programs that I am worried about or don't like". For most actual AI researchers I've talked to, you get the standard tounge-in-cheek response ("AI is whatever gets published at AI conferences and funded by AI investors") and then, when you press, it's roughly something like ML+CV+NLP+optimization and sometimes but not always other fields like automated reasoning or parts of robotics get added. Roughly, most of the parts of CS that aren't theory or systems or HCI or software engineering or already closed. For most techno-babblers in the podosphere who have OPINIONS on super-intelligence but couldn't pass an internship phone screen to save their lives, it's superintelligence and other stupid hollywood bullshit.
gsatic 3y ago
That's cuz Theory of Bounded Rationality applies. When we are passed the point where ppl with their 3 inch brains can actually come up with answers to complex problems, you don't spend time asking them questions.
adamsmith143 3y ago
>I have been asked by many people to explain how AI could kill us all. How about some clarity for common people. There are countless resources to find this stuff out. To be clear there may not be a level at which common people understand why e.g. Fission Chain Reactions are dangerous but they can grok why a giant bomb that spreads radiation is bad. For Starters: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uMQ3cqWDPHhjtiesc/agi-ruin-a-list-of-lethalities https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uMQ3cqWDPHhjtiesc/agi-ruin-a... >The public have all heard “AI is going to destroy humanity” but those statements have been short on specifics. You can no more explain how Stockfish is going to beat you at chess then you can predict how an AGI would defeat humanity. Nevertheless the outcome is nearly certain.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- jazzyjackson 3y ago
  You have to find a different preacher than Yud, he has zero capacity to explain himself to skeptics.
  - lukifer 3y ago
    Robert Miles is a much more effective communicator: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMLKbhY0ji0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMLKbhY0ji0
    - jazzyjackson 3y ago
      Thanks, I'm a half hour in and will keep listening; he's more soft spoken and relatable sure but he still strikes me as a vague doomer who's not trying to explain why he's confident humans will lose, just that he's confident. @30:24, on what solutions might be realistic to help, if not a 6 month sanction, Miles says: "Maybe what we should be asking for is just an enormous amount of money to do alignment research with" Sounds like a classic doomsday cult, end is nigh, deposit your checks to this account...
WalterBright 3y ago
> I have been asked by many people to explain how AI could kill us all. "Colossus The Forbin Project", "Terminator" I.e. giving control of weapons to an AI.
roenxi 3y ago
It is likely to be similar to humans vs. other primates. Step 1 is establish a position of complete military dominance through superior communication, resource utilisation and technology. Step 2 is wipe out anyone who competes for resources. Basically the argument is if anyone, anywhere creates an AI that has the same basic drives as a human (preserve yourself, replicate, preserve things that look like you) it'll start competing with us for resources. AIs have demonstrated the ability to crush humans at every competitive game we can play with them, so they'll crush us at that game too. It looks a bit far fetched in 2023 but it is actually pretty easy to see it happening. Hardware progresses exponentially for a few more years. Some war-torn state gets desperate, starts deploying military AIs to try and get an edge, loses control, yada yada. Or economic pressure starts engineering humans out of the loop in one too many places and evolutionary pressures happen by accident to develop an intelligent autonomous agent that wants to replicate. Humans struggled with a cold virus recently and couldn't stamp it out. Something that can outdo us research-wise would not be something we can handle. Whether humanity has control of corporations is an open question given the number of people who get killed if it is profitable to do so. We've been luck that corporations need people to act as a brain. AIs don't need that.
- hgsgm 3y ago
  AI is really bad at plugging itself in after it is unplugged.
  - roenxi 3y ago
    That is like a gorilla grunting that humans are weak and will die after it hits us with its fist. Which is to say, that is completely true. But if you're up against an opponent who is smarter than you it might never come down to a fistfight. Every big gorilla on the planet could kill me. None of them can outcompete me for something, because I'm not stupid enough to challenge a big gorilla to a fistfight. There won't be a fight until after I've got my hands on a gun and the gorilla is an easy shot. There probably won't need to be a fight because I'll just trade for what I want using tactics that a gorilla cannot comprehend the effectiveness of. There is a pretty good chance humans won't even realise they are competing with an AI until they are locked out from having options. I'm not even sure if most gorillas realise to this day that we humans will crush them if they ever try anything that threatens us.
tivert 3y ago
> The public have all heard “AI is going to destroy humanity” but those statements have been short on specifics. Honestly, my understanding is that's mainly a distraction from the much more realistic: > AI is going to take your job and impoverish your family while making the rich even richer. But cheer up! You'll be able to talk to a chatbot therapist about your problems, from your cardboard home under a bridge, so it's progress! In the past, not even kings had chatbot therapists! You'll have it better than a king!
- hanselot 3y ago
  I'm sorry, but as an AI language model, I am not qualified to give you advice on how to improve the build structure of your cardboard home. I advise you to speak to a qualified professional cardboardpenter or simply to go stand in the begging que in front of our headquarters in San Francisco. Feel free to take your home with you, given how long the line is.

ilaksh 3y ago

People always say "AGI" and they mean different things but I am guessing most now mean something like a digital living human/simulation of human when they say that. Mixed in with some blurry connotation of it automatically becoming godlike in power. That stuff is very speculative. But we don't need AI to get to that level for it to be very dangerous. Just imagine that we have an open source GPT that is something like 33% smarter than GPT-4 and less brittle. Make the output 50 times faster than human thought and suppose that we can run it very inexpensively, in a "swarm" of agents cooperating. Then you have a type of superintelligence that does not require any really speculative AI advance -- hyperspeed reasoning -- based on the current technology. If that is widely deployed for military and industrial decision-making then something like a computer virus could create existential risk. Also, realize that all these systems really need to emulate some of the core functional aspects of animals, like a self-preservation instinct or desire to control resources, is the right instruction and relaxation of guardrails. So when they can reason a bit better and at hyperspeed with collaboration between them, they don't need to be alive or anything to be dangerous. Look at the history of increases in computing efficiency. It is easy to imagine 50 or whatever times output speed increase in less than 5 years. And even though they are not human level now, GPT-4 has proven that these types of systems can have strong problem solving ability. One more thing to add is that as the AI performance increases and surpasses human decision-making ability, the hyperspeed will push competiting companies and countries to give them broader and broader goals and more autonomy. Because waiting overnight for human input means your competitor's AIs race ahead the equivalent of weeks. I think we need to set a limit for the performance of new hardware at some point. Also we need people to understand the dangers of full autonomy and imitating animals in the context of hyperspeed or superintelligent AI. We will need criminal penalties and maybe some type of cooperative digital immune system.

LatteLazy 3y ago
I think you also need to draw a line between different types of danger: An actual AGI, that can think and has it's own motives and initiative is an entirely different danger to GPT-4, -5 etc which cannot. Those might post a danger in terms of fake news, or worker displacement, but they're just social issues. No rate improvement in chat GPT will make it "decide to kill all the humans" etc.
- Dalewyn 3y ago
  Every time I hear how artificial intelligence with its "own motives" etc. are dangerous, I wonder how it's different from just dealing with people and animals. Or to put it another way, I can't see how artificial intelligence could be any more dangerous than intelligence as we already know and have them.
  - jonplackett 3y ago
    I think that’s the problem isn’t it? Intelligence has proven to be exceptionally dangerous!
  - LatteLazy 3y ago
    I don't want to sound dismissive but... Well yeah. We already know humans are dangerous. And that is humans who are conditioned to be social, and who have empathy and who rely on other humans for all sorts of things. Plus with fear of a legal system punishing them. Now imagine a human like intelligence without empathy, that is not conditioned from childhood to be social, and that is inherently threatened by us and not reliant on us. Would you want that guy living next door? Oh and it's 100x smarter than you. I think all this is 100 years away, but that's the theory. Skynet doesn't have a subconscious telling it not to murder it's parents...
  - robnado 3y ago
    How dangerous can a dictator with complete knowledge and super human speed actually be?
  - Jagah 3y ago

localplume 3y ago

if you think about it, its actual insanity. The fears are all from science fiction with absolutely no grounding in reality. There are legitimate concerns about the unethical mass harvesting of data but if you think about "AI safety" vs something like vehicular safety or spacecraft safety its kind of nuts, because the latter are grounded in reality and have formal specifications which need to be met. But AI safety is so wishy-washy. Take a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Motor_Vehicle_Safety_Standards https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Motor_Vehicle_Safety_S... You'd think if people are so scared about AI being apocalyptic it would have some strict regulation similar to vehicle standards but its not even close, nor is it in the conversation at all. Its just pure fear from science fiction and the govt putting out performative press releases. What the fuck even is "AI" anyway? it means different things to different people. It could mean a self checkout at a supermarket, or a bank's AML, or some super intelligence. there are basically no standard definitions of anything to do with "AI" anywhere and every single piece of regulation is equally as vague. Companies like having it be a vague term because its marketing so the actual experts don't care about changing it

ke88y 3y ago
> What the fuck even is "AI" anyway? Indeed. For most lay people I've talked to -- family, friends, and acquiescence outside of tech -- the answer ultimately boils down to "automation that can do my job or can do the job of people I care about or can do the job of people who would then compete for my job". Sometimes also "algorithms" a la social media feeds and so on. Ie, the lay answer to "what is AI?" has recently morphed into roughly "computer programs that I am worried about or don't like". For most actual AI researchers I've talked to, you get the standard tounge-in-cheek response ("AI is whatever gets published at AI conferences and funded by AI investors") and then, when you press, it's roughly something like ML+CV+NLP+optimization and sometimes but not always other fields like automated reasoning or parts of robotics get added. Roughly, most of the parts of CS that aren't theory or systems or HCI or software engineering or already closed. For most techno-babblers in the podosphere who have OPINIONS on super-intelligence but couldn't pass an internship phone screen to save their lives, it's superintelligence and other stupid hollywood bullshit.

gsatic 3y ago

That's cuz Theory of Bounded Rationality applies. When we are passed the point where ppl with their 3 inch brains can actually come up with answers to complex problems, you don't spend time asking them questions.

adamsmith143 3y ago

>I have been asked by many people to explain how AI could kill us all. How about some clarity for common people. There are countless resources to find this stuff out. To be clear there may not be a level at which common people understand why e.g. Fission Chain Reactions are dangerous but they can grok why a giant bomb that spreads radiation is bad. For Starters: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uMQ3cqWDPHhjtiesc/agi-ruin-a-list-of-lethalities https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uMQ3cqWDPHhjtiesc/agi-ruin-a... >The public have all heard “AI is going to destroy humanity” but those statements have been short on specifics. You can no more explain how Stockfish is going to beat you at chess then you can predict how an AGI would defeat humanity. Nevertheless the outcome is nearly certain.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
jazzyjackson 3y ago
You have to find a different preacher than Yud, he has zero capacity to explain himself to skeptics.
- lukifer 3y ago
  Robert Miles is a much more effective communicator: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMLKbhY0ji0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMLKbhY0ji0
  - jazzyjackson 3y ago
    Thanks, I'm a half hour in and will keep listening; he's more soft spoken and relatable sure but he still strikes me as a vague doomer who's not trying to explain why he's confident humans will lose, just that he's confident. @30:24, on what solutions might be realistic to help, if not a 6 month sanction, Miles says: "Maybe what we should be asking for is just an enormous amount of money to do alignment research with" Sounds like a classic doomsday cult, end is nigh, deposit your checks to this account...

WalterBright 3y ago

> I have been asked by many people to explain how AI could kill us all. "Colossus The Forbin Project", "Terminator" I.e. giving control of weapons to an AI.

roenxi 3y ago

It is likely to be similar to humans vs. other primates. Step 1 is establish a position of complete military dominance through superior communication, resource utilisation and technology. Step 2 is wipe out anyone who competes for resources. Basically the argument is if anyone, anywhere creates an AI that has the same basic drives as a human (preserve yourself, replicate, preserve things that look like you) it'll start competing with us for resources. AIs have demonstrated the ability to crush humans at every competitive game we can play with them, so they'll crush us at that game too. It looks a bit far fetched in 2023 but it is actually pretty easy to see it happening. Hardware progresses exponentially for a few more years. Some war-torn state gets desperate, starts deploying military AIs to try and get an edge, loses control, yada yada. Or economic pressure starts engineering humans out of the loop in one too many places and evolutionary pressures happen by accident to develop an intelligent autonomous agent that wants to replicate. Humans struggled with a cold virus recently and couldn't stamp it out. Something that can outdo us research-wise would not be something we can handle. Whether humanity has control of corporations is an open question given the number of people who get killed if it is profitable to do so. We've been luck that corporations need people to act as a brain. AIs don't need that.

hgsgm 3y ago
AI is really bad at plugging itself in after it is unplugged.
- roenxi 3y ago
  That is like a gorilla grunting that humans are weak and will die after it hits us with its fist. Which is to say, that is completely true. But if you're up against an opponent who is smarter than you it might never come down to a fistfight. Every big gorilla on the planet could kill me. None of them can outcompete me for something, because I'm not stupid enough to challenge a big gorilla to a fistfight. There won't be a fight until after I've got my hands on a gun and the gorilla is an easy shot. There probably won't need to be a fight because I'll just trade for what I want using tactics that a gorilla cannot comprehend the effectiveness of. There is a pretty good chance humans won't even realise they are competing with an AI until they are locked out from having options. I'm not even sure if most gorillas realise to this day that we humans will crush them if they ever try anything that threatens us.

tivert 3y ago

> The public have all heard “AI is going to destroy humanity” but those statements have been short on specifics. Honestly, my understanding is that's mainly a distraction from the much more realistic: > AI is going to take your job and impoverish your family while making the rich even richer. But cheer up! You'll be able to talk to a chatbot therapist about your problems, from your cardboard home under a bridge, so it's progress! In the past, not even kings had chatbot therapists! You'll have it better than a king!

hanselot 3y ago
I'm sorry, but as an AI language model, I am not qualified to give you advice on how to improve the build structure of your cardboard home. I advise you to speak to a qualified professional cardboardpenter or simply to go stand in the begging que in front of our headquarters in San Francisco. Feel free to take your home with you, given how long the line is.