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The AFR piece that underlies this article [1] [2] has more detail on Ng's argument: > [Ng] said that the “bad idea that AI could make us go extinct” was mergin

The AFR piece that underlies this article [1] [2] has more detail on Ng's argument: > [Ng] said that the “bad idea that AI could make us go extinct” was merging with the “bad idea that a good way to make AI safer is to impose burdensome licensing requirements” on the AI industry. > “There’s a standard regulatory capture playbook that has played out in other industries, and I would hate to see that executed successfully in AI.” > “Just to be clear, AI has caused harm. Self-driving cars have killed people. In 2010, an automated trading algorithm crashed the stock market. Regulation has a role. But just because regulation could be helpful doesn’t mean we want bad regulation.” [1]: https://www.afr.com/technology/google-brain-founder-says-big-tech-is-lying-about-ai-human-extinction-danger-20231027-p5efnz https://www.afr.com/technology/google-brain-founder-says-big... [2]: https://web.archive.org/web/20231030062420/https://www.afr.com/technology/google-brain-founder-says-big-tech-is-lying-about-ai-human-extinction-danger-20231027-p5efnz https://web.archive.org/web/20231030062420/https://www.afr.c...

dmix 3y ago
> “There’s a standard regulatory capture playbook that has played out in other industries But imagine all the money bigco can make by crippling small startups from innovating and competing with them! It's for your own safety. Move along citizen.
- Dalewyn 3y ago
  Even better if (read: when) China, who has negative damns for concerns, can take charge of the industry that we willingly and expediently relinquish.
  - b112 3y ago
    China doesn't innovate, it copies, clones, and steals. Without the West to innovate, they won't take charge of anything. A price paid, I think, due a conformant, restrictive culture. And after all, even if you do excel, you may soon disappear.
    - thereisnospork 3y ago
      Maybe they don't today, but tomorrow? Giving them the chance is poor policy.
    - mlmandude 3y ago
      This is what was said about Japan prior to their electronics industry surpassing the rest of the world. Yes, china does copy. However, in many instances those companies move faster and innovate faster than their western counterparts. Look at the lidar industry in china. It's making mass market lidar in the tens of thousands [see hesai]. There is no american or european equivalent at the moment. What about DJI? They massively out innovated western competitors. I wouldn't be so quick to write off that country's capacity for creativity and technological prowess.
      - b112 3y ago
        This may surprise, but Japan is not China. Their culture is not the same. Further their culture was shifted to capitalism at the end of WWII. Citing Japan, is supporting my point about culture. Mass marketing things isn't innovation. It's copying. DJI seems like more copying. "Innovation" isn't marketing. It's raw research and development, along market paths which are useful. This requires a desire for change, a desire to not conform first, but capitalism first, and this is what China's culture does not have.
        deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
        sgu999 3y ago
        China isn't a communist country, it's first and foremost authoritarian. They do have ruthless capitalism, and the ruthless competition in between individuals that comes with it. They inherit from confucianism, and a more collectivist mindset that is prevalent in this area of the planet, but I don't think it should be conflated with the way the economy is organised. The Japanese on the other hand are overall conformist and conservative. With just these counter examples, it doesn't feel like you're looking at the right variables to judge whether innovation is embedded in the culture or not.
  - wokwokwok 3y ago
    …and the problem with that is what, exactly? The only meaningful thing in this discussion is about people who want to make money easy, but can’t, because of the rules they don’t like. Well, suck it up. You don’t get to make a cheap shity factory that pours its waste into the local river either. Rules exist for a reason. You want the life style but also all the good things and also no rules. You can’t have all the cake and eat it too. /shrug If China builds amazing AI tech (and they will) then the rest of the world will just use it. Some of it will be open source. It won’t be a big deal. This “we must out compete China by being as shit and horrible as they are” meme is stupid. If you want to live in China, go live in China. I assure you you will not find it to be the law less free hold of “anything goes” that you somehow imagine.
    - Dalewyn 3y ago
      >…and the problem with that is what, exactly? The problem is what the Powers-That-Be say and what they do are not in alignment. We are now, after much long-time pressure from everyone not in power saying that being friendly with China doesn't work, waging a cold war against China and presumably we want to win that cold war. On the other hand, we just keep giving silver platter after silver platter to China. So do we want the coming of Pax Sino or do we still want Pax Americana? If we defer to history, we are about due for another changing of the guard as empires generally do not last more than a few hundred years if that, and the west seems poised to make that prophecy self-fulfilling.
      - TeMPOraL 3y ago
        Wish people stopped with that Cold War narrative. You're not waging anything just yet. Here's the thing: the US didn't win the OG Cold War by being, as 'AnthonyMouse puts it upthread, "the country that has an elected government and constitutional protections for human rights" and "having a stronger economy". It won it by having a stronger economy, which it used to fuck half of the world up, in a low-touch dance with the Soviets that had both sides toppling democratic governments, funding warlords and dictatorships, and generally doing the opposite of protecting human rights. And at least through a part of that period, if an American citizen disagreed, or urged restraint and civility and democracy, they were branded a commie mutant spy traitor. My point here isn't to pass judgement on the USA (and to be clear, I doubt things would've been better if the US let Soviets take the lead). Rather, it's that when we're painting the current situation as the next Cold War, then I think people have a kind of cognitive dissonance here. The US won the OG Cold War by becoming a monster, and not pulling any punches. It didn't have long discussions about how to safely develop new technologies - it just went full steam ahead, showered R&D groups with money, while sending more specialists to fuck up another country to keep the enemy distracted. This wasn't an era known for reasoned approach to progress - this was the era known for designing nuclear ramjets with zero shielding, meant to zip around the enemy land, irradiating villages and rivers and cities as they fly by, because fuck the enemy that's why. I mean, if it is to happen, it'll happen. But let's not pretend you can keep Pax Americana by keeping your hands clean and being a nice democratic state. Or that whether being more or less serious about AI safety is relevant here. If it becomes a Cold War, both sides will just pull all the stops and rush full-steam to develop and weaponize AGI. -- EDIT - an aside: If the history of both sides' space programs is any indication, I wouldn't be surprised to see the US building a world-threatening AGI out of GPT-4 and some duct tape. Take for example US spy satellites - say, the 1960s CORONA program. Less than a decade after Sputnik, no computers, with engineering fields like control theory being still under development - but they successfully pulled off a program that involved putting analog cameras in space on weird orbits, which would make ridiculously high-detail photos of enemy land, and then deorbit the film canisters, so they could be captured mid-air by a jet plane carrying a long stick. If I didn't know better, I'd say we don't have the technology today to make this work. The US did it in the 1960s, because it turns out you can do surprisingly much with surprisingly little, if you give creative people infinite budget, motivate them with basic "it's us vs. them" story, and order them to win you the war. As impressive as such feats were (and there were plenty more), I don't think we want to have the same level of focus and dedication applied to AI - if that's a possibility, then I fear we've crossed the X-risk threshold already with the "safe" models we have now.
jimmySixDOF 3y ago
And I strongly agree with pointing out a low hanging fruit for "good" regulation is strict and clear attribution laws to label any AI generated content with its source. That's a sooner the better easy win no brainer.
- a_wild_dandan 3y ago
  Why would we do this? And how would this conceivably even be enforced? I can't see this being useful or even well-defined past cartoonishly simple special cases of generation like "artist signatures for modalities where pixels are created." Requiring attribution categorically across the vast domain of generative AI...can you please elaborate?
  - chii 3y ago
    > Why would we do this? i think it's a reasonable ask to enforce attribution of AI generated content. We enforce food labels, why not content? I would go further and argue that AI generated content do not get granted the same copyright as human generated content, but with that, AI generated content using existing copyrighted training data does not violate copyright.
    - Aerroon 3y ago
      If you use an AI spell checker then will your resulting text all be without copyright? If you use an AI coding assistant then will the written code be without copyright? Or will the code require a disclaimer that says some parts of it are AI generated? You're also going to have to be very precise on defining what AI means. For most people a compiler is as magical as AI. They might even consider it AI, especially if it does some kind of automatic performance optimizations - after all, that's not the behavior the user wrote.
    - munksbeer 3y ago
      > We enforce food labels, why not content? Regulation isn't always, but often is a drag on productivity. Food labels make total sense because the negative consequences of not doing it outweight the drag of doing it. I'm not at all convinced that enforcing AI labeling and the resulting impossible task of policing and enforcing this will outweigh any negatives of not doing it. I'm thinking about the cookie policy in Europe. I hate it and almost always just click through because so many websites work around it by making it a real pain to "reject cookies".
dang 3y ago
Ok, we've changed the URL to that from https://www.businessinsider.com/andrew-ng-google-brain-big-tech-ai-risks-2023-10 https://www.businessinsider.com/andrew-ng-google-brain-big-t.... Thanks! Submitters: "Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y ago
Here's what makes it worse imo. Imagine someone invents a machine that can give infinite energy. Do you a) sell that energy, or b) give the technology to build the machine to everyone. Clearly b is better for society, a is locking up profits.
- nicbou 3y ago
  In this case the machine also has negative and yet unknown side effects. We don't give nuclear power to everyone.
- dogcomplex 3y ago
  The answer is c) sell that energy and use your resulting funds to deeply root yourself in all other systems and prevent or destroy alternative forms of energy production, thus achieving total market dominance This non-hypothetical got us global warming already
- jacquesm 3y ago
  I read that book. No, you deny your gift to the world and become a recluse while the world slowly spins apart. Technically: a solar panel is just such a machine. You'll have to wait a long, long time but the degradation is slow enough that you can probably use a panel for more than several human life times at ever decreasing output. You will probably find it more economical to replace the panel at some point because of the amount of space it occupies and the fact that newer generations of solar panels will do that much better in that same space. But there isn't any hard technical reason why you should discard one after 10, 30 or 100 years. Of course 'infinite' would require the panel to be 'infinitely durable' and likely at some point it will suffer mechanical damage. But that's not a feature of the panel itself.
- fulafel 3y ago
  This analogy of course is close to nuclear energy. I think most people would say that regulation is still broadly aligned with the public interest there, even though the forces of regulatory capture are in play.
somsak2 3y ago
human-driven cars kill people all the time too. and the stock thing from 2010 isn't AI, just algorithmic trading. not the most convincing of arguments

dmix 3y ago

> “There’s a standard regulatory capture playbook that has played out in other industries But imagine all the money bigco can make by crippling small startups from innovating and competing with them! It's for your own safety. Move along citizen.

Dalewyn 3y ago
Even better if (read: when) China, who has negative damns for concerns, can take charge of the industry that we willingly and expediently relinquish.
- b112 3y ago
  China doesn't innovate, it copies, clones, and steals. Without the West to innovate, they won't take charge of anything. A price paid, I think, due a conformant, restrictive culture. And after all, even if you do excel, you may soon disappear.
  - thereisnospork 3y ago
    Maybe they don't today, but tomorrow? Giving them the chance is poor policy.
  - mlmandude 3y ago
    This is what was said about Japan prior to their electronics industry surpassing the rest of the world. Yes, china does copy. However, in many instances those companies move faster and innovate faster than their western counterparts. Look at the lidar industry in china. It's making mass market lidar in the tens of thousands [see hesai]. There is no american or european equivalent at the moment. What about DJI? They massively out innovated western competitors. I wouldn't be so quick to write off that country's capacity for creativity and technological prowess.
    - b112 3y ago
      This may surprise, but Japan is not China. Their culture is not the same. Further their culture was shifted to capitalism at the end of WWII. Citing Japan, is supporting my point about culture. Mass marketing things isn't innovation. It's copying. DJI seems like more copying. "Innovation" isn't marketing. It's raw research and development, along market paths which are useful. This requires a desire for change, a desire to not conform first, but capitalism first, and this is what China's culture does not have.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      - sgu999 3y ago
        China isn't a communist country, it's first and foremost authoritarian. They do have ruthless capitalism, and the ruthless competition in between individuals that comes with it. They inherit from confucianism, and a more collectivist mindset that is prevalent in this area of the planet, but I don't think it should be conflated with the way the economy is organised. The Japanese on the other hand are overall conformist and conservative. With just these counter examples, it doesn't feel like you're looking at the right variables to judge whether innovation is embedded in the culture or not.
- wokwokwok 3y ago
  …and the problem with that is what, exactly? The only meaningful thing in this discussion is about people who want to make money easy, but can’t, because of the rules they don’t like. Well, suck it up. You don’t get to make a cheap shity factory that pours its waste into the local river either. Rules exist for a reason. You want the life style but also all the good things and also no rules. You can’t have all the cake and eat it too. /shrug If China builds amazing AI tech (and they will) then the rest of the world will just use it. Some of it will be open source. It won’t be a big deal. This “we must out compete China by being as shit and horrible as they are” meme is stupid. If you want to live in China, go live in China. I assure you you will not find it to be the law less free hold of “anything goes” that you somehow imagine.
  - Dalewyn 3y ago
    >…and the problem with that is what, exactly? The problem is what the Powers-That-Be say and what they do are not in alignment. We are now, after much long-time pressure from everyone not in power saying that being friendly with China doesn't work, waging a cold war against China and presumably we want to win that cold war. On the other hand, we just keep giving silver platter after silver platter to China. So do we want the coming of Pax Sino or do we still want Pax Americana? If we defer to history, we are about due for another changing of the guard as empires generally do not last more than a few hundred years if that, and the west seems poised to make that prophecy self-fulfilling.
    - TeMPOraL 3y ago
      Wish people stopped with that Cold War narrative. You're not waging anything just yet. Here's the thing: the US didn't win the OG Cold War by being, as 'AnthonyMouse puts it upthread, "the country that has an elected government and constitutional protections for human rights" and "having a stronger economy". It won it by having a stronger economy, which it used to fuck half of the world up, in a low-touch dance with the Soviets that had both sides toppling democratic governments, funding warlords and dictatorships, and generally doing the opposite of protecting human rights. And at least through a part of that period, if an American citizen disagreed, or urged restraint and civility and democracy, they were branded a commie mutant spy traitor. My point here isn't to pass judgement on the USA (and to be clear, I doubt things would've been better if the US let Soviets take the lead). Rather, it's that when we're painting the current situation as the next Cold War, then I think people have a kind of cognitive dissonance here. The US won the OG Cold War by becoming a monster, and not pulling any punches. It didn't have long discussions about how to safely develop new technologies - it just went full steam ahead, showered R&D groups with money, while sending more specialists to fuck up another country to keep the enemy distracted. This wasn't an era known for reasoned approach to progress - this was the era known for designing nuclear ramjets with zero shielding, meant to zip around the enemy land, irradiating villages and rivers and cities as they fly by, because fuck the enemy that's why. I mean, if it is to happen, it'll happen. But let's not pretend you can keep Pax Americana by keeping your hands clean and being a nice democratic state. Or that whether being more or less serious about AI safety is relevant here. If it becomes a Cold War, both sides will just pull all the stops and rush full-steam to develop and weaponize AGI. -- EDIT - an aside: If the history of both sides' space programs is any indication, I wouldn't be surprised to see the US building a world-threatening AGI out of GPT-4 and some duct tape. Take for example US spy satellites - say, the 1960s CORONA program. Less than a decade after Sputnik, no computers, with engineering fields like control theory being still under development - but they successfully pulled off a program that involved putting analog cameras in space on weird orbits, which would make ridiculously high-detail photos of enemy land, and then deorbit the film canisters, so they could be captured mid-air by a jet plane carrying a long stick. If I didn't know better, I'd say we don't have the technology today to make this work. The US did it in the 1960s, because it turns out you can do surprisingly much with surprisingly little, if you give creative people infinite budget, motivate them with basic "it's us vs. them" story, and order them to win you the war. As impressive as such feats were (and there were plenty more), I don't think we want to have the same level of focus and dedication applied to AI - if that's a possibility, then I fear we've crossed the X-risk threshold already with the "safe" models we have now.

jimmySixDOF 3y ago

And I strongly agree with pointing out a low hanging fruit for "good" regulation is strict and clear attribution laws to label any AI generated content with its source. That's a sooner the better easy win no brainer.

a_wild_dandan 3y ago
Why would we do this? And how would this conceivably even be enforced? I can't see this being useful or even well-defined past cartoonishly simple special cases of generation like "artist signatures for modalities where pixels are created." Requiring attribution categorically across the vast domain of generative AI...can you please elaborate?
- chii 3y ago
  > Why would we do this? i think it's a reasonable ask to enforce attribution of AI generated content. We enforce food labels, why not content? I would go further and argue that AI generated content do not get granted the same copyright as human generated content, but with that, AI generated content using existing copyrighted training data does not violate copyright.
  - Aerroon 3y ago
    If you use an AI spell checker then will your resulting text all be without copyright? If you use an AI coding assistant then will the written code be without copyright? Or will the code require a disclaimer that says some parts of it are AI generated? You're also going to have to be very precise on defining what AI means. For most people a compiler is as magical as AI. They might even consider it AI, especially if it does some kind of automatic performance optimizations - after all, that's not the behavior the user wrote.
  - munksbeer 3y ago
    > We enforce food labels, why not content? Regulation isn't always, but often is a drag on productivity. Food labels make total sense because the negative consequences of not doing it outweight the drag of doing it. I'm not at all convinced that enforcing AI labeling and the resulting impossible task of policing and enforcing this will outweigh any negatives of not doing it. I'm thinking about the cookie policy in Europe. I hate it and almost always just click through because so many websites work around it by making it a real pain to "reject cookies".

dang 3y ago

Ok, we've changed the URL to that from https://www.businessinsider.com/andrew-ng-google-brain-big-tech-ai-risks-2023-10 https://www.businessinsider.com/andrew-ng-google-brain-big-t.... Thanks! Submitters: "Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y ago

Here's what makes it worse imo. Imagine someone invents a machine that can give infinite energy. Do you a) sell that energy, or b) give the technology to build the machine to everyone. Clearly b is better for society, a is locking up profits.

nicbou 3y ago
In this case the machine also has negative and yet unknown side effects. We don't give nuclear power to everyone.
dogcomplex 3y ago
The answer is c) sell that energy and use your resulting funds to deeply root yourself in all other systems and prevent or destroy alternative forms of energy production, thus achieving total market dominance This non-hypothetical got us global warming already
jacquesm 3y ago
I read that book. No, you deny your gift to the world and become a recluse while the world slowly spins apart. Technically: a solar panel is just such a machine. You'll have to wait a long, long time but the degradation is slow enough that you can probably use a panel for more than several human life times at ever decreasing output. You will probably find it more economical to replace the panel at some point because of the amount of space it occupies and the fact that newer generations of solar panels will do that much better in that same space. But there isn't any hard technical reason why you should discard one after 10, 30 or 100 years. Of course 'infinite' would require the panel to be 'infinitely durable' and likely at some point it will suffer mechanical damage. But that's not a feature of the panel itself.
fulafel 3y ago
This analogy of course is close to nuclear energy. I think most people would say that regulation is still broadly aligned with the public interest there, even though the forces of regulatory capture are in play.

somsak2 3y ago

human-driven cars kill people all the time too. and the stock thing from 2010 isn't AI, just algorithmic trading. not the most convincing of arguments