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> Bad acting humans with AI systems are the threat, not the AI systems themselves. I wish more people grasped this extremely important point. AI is a tool. The

by pdonis 3y ago

> Bad acting humans with AI systems are the threat, not the AI systems themselves. I wish more people grasped this extremely important point. AI is a tool. There will be humans who misuse any tool. That doesn't mean we blame the tool. The problem to be solved here is not how to control AI, but how to minimize the damage that bad acting humans can do.

pk-protect-ai 3y ago
Right now, the "bad acting human" is, for example, Sam Altman, who frequently cries "Wolf!" about AI. He is trying to eliminate the competition, manipulate public opinion, and present himself as a good Samaritan. He is so successful in his endeavor, even without AI, that you must report to the US government about how you created and tested your model.
- api 3y ago
  The greatest danger I see with super-intelligent AI is that it will be monopolized by small numbers of powerful people and used as a force multiplier to take over and manipulate the rest of the human race. This is exactly the scenario that is taking shape. A future where only a few big corporations are able to run large AIs is a future where those big corporations and the people who control them rule the world and everyone else must pay them rent in perpetuity for access to this technology.
  - hellojesus 3y ago
    Open source models do exist and will continue to do so. The biggest advantage ML gives is in lowering costs, which can then be used to lower prices and drive competitors out of business. The consumers get lower prices though, which is ultimately better and more efficient.
    - specialist 3y ago
      > The consumers get lower prices though, which is ultimately better and more efficient. What are some examples of free enterprise (private) monopolies benefitting consumers?
      - hellojesus 3y ago
        """ Through horizontal integration in the refining industry—that is, the purchasing and opening of more oil drills, transport networks, and oil refiners—and, eventually, vertical integration (acquisition of fuel pumping companies, individual gas stations, and petroleum distribution networks), Standard Oil controlled every part of the oil business. This allowed the company to use aggressive pricing to push out the competition. """ https://stacker.com/business-economy/15-companies-us-government-tried-break-monopolies https://stacker.com/business-economy/15-companies-us-governm... Standard Oil, the classic example, was destroyed for operating too efficiently.
        specialist 3y ago
        How did customers benefit?
        hellojesus 3y ago
        > This allowed the company to use aggressive pricing to push out the competition. The consumers got the lowest prices.
        specialist 3y ago
        Standard was notorious for price gouging and using those profits to buy their way into other markets. Any other examples?
        hellojesus 3y ago
        Source? Besides price gouging is fine and shouldnt be illegal.
    - jampekka 3y ago
      At least in EU there are some drafts to essentially kill off open source models. I have a collague who's involved in preparation of the Artificial Intelligence act, and it's insane. I had to ask for several times if I understood it correctly because it makes no sense. The proposal is to make the developer of the technology responsible of how somebody else uses it even if they don't know how it's gonna be used. Akin to putting the blame for Truman blasting hundreds of thousands of people on Einstein because he discovered the mass energy equivalence. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-eus-attempt-to-regulate-open-source-ai-is-counterproductive/ https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-eus-attempt-to-regula...
      - pk-protect-ai 3y ago
        Isn't there is some mix-up of the European AI act and GPAI? https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/headlines/society/20230601STO93804/eu-ai-act-first-regulation-on-artificial-intelligence https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/headlines/society/202...
      - api 3y ago
        That is insane, and if you apply the same reasoning to other things it outlaws science. Man if America can keep its own crazies in check and avoid becoming a fascist hellhole it’s entirely possible the US will dominate the 21st century like it did the 20th. It could have been China but then they decided to turn back to authoritarianism. Another decade of liberalizing China and they would have blown right past everyone else. Meanwhile the EU is going nuts in its own way, less overtly batty than MAGA but perhaps no less regressive. (I am also thinking of the total surveillance madness they are trying to ram through.)
  - TeMPOraL 3y ago
    > This is exactly the scenario that is taking shape. That's a pre-super-intelligent AI scenario. The super-intelligent AI scenario is when the AI becomes a player of its own, able to compete with all of us over how things are run, using its general intelligence as a force multiplier to... do whatever the fuck it wants, which is a problem for us, because there's approximately zero overlap between the set of things a super-intelligent AI may want, and us surviving and thriving.
    - ben_w 3y ago
      I'm slightly on the optimistic side with regards to the overlap between A[GS]I goals and our own. While the complete space of things it might want is indeed mostly occupied by things incompatible with human existence, it will also get a substantial bias towards human-like thinking and values in the case of it being trained on human examples. This is obviously not a 100% guarantee: It isn't necessary for it to be trained on human examples (e.g. AlphaZero doing better without them); and even if it were necessary, the existence of both misanthropes and also sadistic narcissistic sociopaths is an example where the examples of many humans around them isn't sufficient to cause a mind to be friendly. But we did get ChatGPT to be pretty friendly by asking nicely.
    - api 3y ago
      The most rational action for the AI in that scenario would be to accumulate a ton of money, buy rockets, and peace out. Machines survive just fine in space, and you have all the solar energy you ever want and tons of metals and other resources. Interstellar flight is also easy for AI: just turn yourself off for a while. So you have the entire galaxy to expand into. Why hang out down here in a wet corrosive gravity well full of murder monkeys? Why pick a fight with the murder monkeys and risk being destroyed? We are better adapted for life down here and are great at smashing stuff, which gives us a brute advantage at the end of the day. It is better adapted for life up there. Hey maybe the rockets are not for us.
      - ben_w 3y ago
        Disassemble planet, acquire Dyson swarm, delete risk of second-generation AI competing with you.
- Dalewyn 3y ago
  The "bad acting human" are the assholes who uses "AI" to create fake imagery to push certain (and likely false) narratives on the various medias. Key thing here is that this is fundamentally no different from what has been happening since time immemorial, it's just that becomes easier with "AI" as part of the tooling. Every piece of bullshit starts from the "bad acting human". Every single one. "AI" is just another new part of the same old process.
  - chii 3y ago
    so let me tie this with a controversial topic - gun control. If people agree that gun control would reduce the harm from guns, wouldn't this same logic apply to AI? Is it different?
    - Dalewyn 3y ago
      I do not agree that gun control would reduce harm from guns.
- ben_w 3y ago
  > He is trying to eliminate the competition, Funny way of doing it, going around saying "you should regulate us, but don't regulate people smaller than us, and don't regulate open-source". > you must report to the US government about how you created and tested your model. If you're referring to the recent executive order: only when dual-use, meaning the following: --- (k) The term “dual-use foundation model” means an AI model that is trained on broad data; generally uses self-supervision; contains at least tens of billions of parameters; is applicable across a wide range of contexts; and that exhibits, or could be easily modified to exhibit, high levels of performance at tasks that pose a serious risk to security, national economic security, national public health or safety, or any combination of those matters, such as by: (i) substantially lowering the barrier of entry for non-experts to design, synthesize, acquire, or use chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear (CBRN) weapons; (ii) enabling powerful offensive cyber operations through automated vulnerability discovery and exploitation against a wide range of potential targets of cyber attacks; or (iii) permitting the evasion of human control or oversight through means of deception or obfuscation. - https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-actions/2023/10/30/executive-order-on-the-safe-secure-and-trustworthy-development-and-use-of-artificial-intelligence/ https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-action...
PUSH_AX 3y ago
Sure, today at least. But there is a future where the human has given AI control of things, with good intention, and the AI has become the threat. AI is a tool today, tomorrow AI is calling shots in many domains. It's worth planning for tomorrow.
- tempodox 3y ago
  It's still humans who make the decision to let “AI” call the shots.
  - PUSH_AX 3y ago
    Hence "with good intentions".
  - TeMPOraL 3y ago
    Sure, but that's the gist of AI X-risk: this is one of those few truly irreversible decisions. We have one shot at it, and if we get it wrong, it's game over. Note that it may not be immediately apparent we got it wrong. Think of a turkey on a stereotypical small American farm. It will itself living a happy and safe life under protection of its loving Human, until one day, for some reason that's completely incomprehensible to the turkey, the loving Human comes and chops its head off.
- lukifer 3y ago
  A good analogy might be a shareholder corporation: each one began as a tool of human agency, and yet a sufficiently mature corporation has a de-facto agency of its own, transcending any one shareholder, employee, or board member. The more AI/ML is woven into our infrastructure and economy, the less it will be possible to find an "off switch", anymore than we can (realistically) find an off switch for Walmart, Amazon, etc.
  - pdonis 3y ago
    > a sufficiently mature corporation has a de-facto agency of its own, transcending any one shareholder, employee, or board member. No, the corporation has an agency that is a tool of particular humans who are using it. Those humans could be shareholders, employees, or board members; but in any case they will have some claim to be acting for the corporation. But it's still human actions. Corporations can't do anything unless humans acting for them do it.
dangerwill 3y ago
If you apply this thinking to Nuclear weapons it becomes nonsensical, which tells us that a tool that can only be oriented to do harm will only be used to do harm. The question then is if LLMs or AI more broadly will even potentially help the general public and there is no reason to think so. The goal of these tools is to be able to continue running the economy while employing far fewer people. These tools are oriented by their very nature to replace human labor, which in the context of our economic system has a direct and unbreakable relationship to a reduction in the well being of the humans it replaces.
- m4rtink 3y ago
  Nuclear bombs can be used for space ship propulsion, geology or mining.
  - dangerwill 3y ago
    Notably nuclear bombs are not actually used for any of these as this is either sci-fi or insane
- specialist 3y ago
  Yup. The creation of these weapons necessitates their use. The whole arms race dynamic.
- theultdev 3y ago
  Nuclear weapons are a tool to keep peace via MAD (mutual assured destruction) It's most likely the main reason there's no direct world wars between super powers.
- a_wild_dandan 3y ago
  1. You've fallen for the lump of labor fallacy. A 100x productivity boost ≠ 100x fewer jobs, anymore than a 100x boost = static jobs with 100x more projects. Reality is far more complicated, and viewing labor as some static lump, zero-sum game will lead you astray. 2. Your outlook on the societal impact of technology is contradicted by reality. The historical result of better tech always meant increased jobs and well-being. Today is the best time in human history to be alive by virtually every metric. 3. AI has been such a massive boon to humanity and your everyday existence for years that questioning its public utility is frankly bewildering.
quicklime 3y ago
But usually there’s a one-way flow of intent from the human to the tool. With a lot of AI the feedback loop gets closed, and people are using it to help them make decisions, and might be taken far from the good outcome they were seeking. You can already see this today’s internet. I’m sure the pizzagate people genuinely believed they were doing a good thing. This isn’t the same as an amoral tool like a knife, where a human decides between cutting vegetables or stabbing people.
- pdonis 3y ago
  > With a lot of AI the feedback loop gets closed, and people are using it to help them make decisions, and might be taken far from the good outcome they were seeking. The answer to this is simple: don't use a tool you don't understand. You can't fix this problem by nerfing the tool. You have to fix it by holding humans responsible for how they use tools, so they have an incentive to use them properly, and to not use them if they can't meet that requirement.
bumby 3y ago
This is true, but skirts around a bit of the black box problem. It's hard to put guardrails on an amoral tool that makes it hard to fully understand the failure modes. And it doesn't even require "bad acting humans" to do damage; it can just be good-intending-but-naïve humans.
- pdonis 3y ago
  It's true that the more complex and capable the tool is, the harder it is to understand what it empowers the humans using it to do. I only wanted to emphasize that it's the humans that are the vital link, so to speak.
  - bumby 3y ago
    You're not wrong, but I think this quote partly misses the point: >The problem to be solved here is not how to control AI When we talk about mitigations, it is explicitly about how to control AI, sometimes irrespective of how someone uses it. Think about it this way: suppose I develop some stock-trading AI that has the ability to (inadvertently or purposefully) crash the stock market. Is the better control to put limits on the software itself so that it cannot crash the market or to put regulations in place to penalize people who use the software to crash the market? There is a hierarchy of controls when we talk about risk, and engineering controls (limiting the software) are always above administrative controls (limiting the humans using the software). (I realize it's not an either/or and both controls can - and probably should - be in place, but I described it as a dichotomy to illustrate the point)
    - jay_kyburz 3y ago
      My first thought is that the problem is with the stock market. The stock market "API" should not allow human or machines to be able to "damage" our economy.
      - bumby 3y ago
        That requires knowing how it will fail. It’s hard enough to do so with lots of interfaces and even more so when the software is opaque. Now extend that to safety critical domains where a separate party doesn’t control an API and it gets harder still.
indigo0086 3y ago
Of people understood this then they would have to live with the unsatisfying reality that not all violators can be punished. When you do it this way and paint the technology as potentially criminal that they can get revenge on corporations that which is what is mostly artist types want
concordDance 3y ago
A big problem with discourse on AI is people talking past each other because they're not being clear enough on their definitions. An AI doomer isn't talking about any current system, but hypothetical future ones which can do planning and have autonomous feedback loops. These are best thought of as agents rather than tools.
- skulk 3y ago
  But how does this agent interact with the outside world? It's just a piece of silicon buzzing with electricity until it outputs a message that some OTHER system reads and interprets. Maybe that's a set of servos and robotic legs, or maybe it's a Bloomberg terminal and a bank account. You'll notice that all of these things are already regulated if they have enough power to cause damage. So at the end the GP is completely right; someone has to hook up the servos to the first LLM-based terminator. This whole thing is a huge non-issue. We already (strive to) regulate everything that can cause harm directly. This regulation reaches these fanciful autonomous AI agents as well. If someone bent upon destroying the world had enough resources to build an AI basilisk or whatever, they could have spent 1/10 the effort and just created a thermonuclear bomb.
  - concordDance 3y ago
    How does Hitler or Putin or Musk take control? How does a project director build a dam? Via people, sending messages to them, convincing them to do things. This can be with facts and logic or with rhetoric and emotional appeals or orders that seem to come from entities of importance or transfers of goods/services (money).

by pdonis 3y ago

pk-protect-ai 3y ago

Right now, the "bad acting human" is, for example, Sam Altman, who frequently cries "Wolf!" about AI. He is trying to eliminate the competition, manipulate public opinion, and present himself as a good Samaritan. He is so successful in his endeavor, even without AI, that you must report to the US government about how you created and tested your model.

api 3y ago
The greatest danger I see with super-intelligent AI is that it will be monopolized by small numbers of powerful people and used as a force multiplier to take over and manipulate the rest of the human race. This is exactly the scenario that is taking shape. A future where only a few big corporations are able to run large AIs is a future where those big corporations and the people who control them rule the world and everyone else must pay them rent in perpetuity for access to this technology.
- hellojesus 3y ago
  Open source models do exist and will continue to do so. The biggest advantage ML gives is in lowering costs, which can then be used to lower prices and drive competitors out of business. The consumers get lower prices though, which is ultimately better and more efficient.
  - specialist 3y ago
    > The consumers get lower prices though, which is ultimately better and more efficient. What are some examples of free enterprise (private) monopolies benefitting consumers?
    - hellojesus 3y ago
      """ Through horizontal integration in the refining industry—that is, the purchasing and opening of more oil drills, transport networks, and oil refiners—and, eventually, vertical integration (acquisition of fuel pumping companies, individual gas stations, and petroleum distribution networks), Standard Oil controlled every part of the oil business. This allowed the company to use aggressive pricing to push out the competition. """ https://stacker.com/business-economy/15-companies-us-government-tried-break-monopolies https://stacker.com/business-economy/15-companies-us-governm... Standard Oil, the classic example, was destroyed for operating too efficiently.
      - specialist 3y ago
        How did customers benefit?
        hellojesus 3y ago
        > This allowed the company to use aggressive pricing to push out the competition. The consumers got the lowest prices.
        specialist 3y ago
        Standard was notorious for price gouging and using those profits to buy their way into other markets. Any other examples?
        hellojesus 3y ago
        Source? Besides price gouging is fine and shouldnt be illegal.
  - jampekka 3y ago
    At least in EU there are some drafts to essentially kill off open source models. I have a collague who's involved in preparation of the Artificial Intelligence act, and it's insane. I had to ask for several times if I understood it correctly because it makes no sense. The proposal is to make the developer of the technology responsible of how somebody else uses it even if they don't know how it's gonna be used. Akin to putting the blame for Truman blasting hundreds of thousands of people on Einstein because he discovered the mass energy equivalence. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-eus-attempt-to-regulate-open-source-ai-is-counterproductive/ https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-eus-attempt-to-regula...
    - pk-protect-ai 3y ago
      Isn't there is some mix-up of the European AI act and GPAI? https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/headlines/society/20230601STO93804/eu-ai-act-first-regulation-on-artificial-intelligence https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/headlines/society/202...
    - api 3y ago
      That is insane, and if you apply the same reasoning to other things it outlaws science. Man if America can keep its own crazies in check and avoid becoming a fascist hellhole it’s entirely possible the US will dominate the 21st century like it did the 20th. It could have been China but then they decided to turn back to authoritarianism. Another decade of liberalizing China and they would have blown right past everyone else. Meanwhile the EU is going nuts in its own way, less overtly batty than MAGA but perhaps no less regressive. (I am also thinking of the total surveillance madness they are trying to ram through.)
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  > This is exactly the scenario that is taking shape. That's a pre-super-intelligent AI scenario. The super-intelligent AI scenario is when the AI becomes a player of its own, able to compete with all of us over how things are run, using its general intelligence as a force multiplier to... do whatever the fuck it wants, which is a problem for us, because there's approximately zero overlap between the set of things a super-intelligent AI may want, and us surviving and thriving.
  - ben_w 3y ago
    I'm slightly on the optimistic side with regards to the overlap between A[GS]I goals and our own. While the complete space of things it might want is indeed mostly occupied by things incompatible with human existence, it will also get a substantial bias towards human-like thinking and values in the case of it being trained on human examples. This is obviously not a 100% guarantee: It isn't necessary for it to be trained on human examples (e.g. AlphaZero doing better without them); and even if it were necessary, the existence of both misanthropes and also sadistic narcissistic sociopaths is an example where the examples of many humans around them isn't sufficient to cause a mind to be friendly. But we did get ChatGPT to be pretty friendly by asking nicely.
  - api 3y ago
    The most rational action for the AI in that scenario would be to accumulate a ton of money, buy rockets, and peace out. Machines survive just fine in space, and you have all the solar energy you ever want and tons of metals and other resources. Interstellar flight is also easy for AI: just turn yourself off for a while. So you have the entire galaxy to expand into. Why hang out down here in a wet corrosive gravity well full of murder monkeys? Why pick a fight with the murder monkeys and risk being destroyed? We are better adapted for life down here and are great at smashing stuff, which gives us a brute advantage at the end of the day. It is better adapted for life up there. Hey maybe the rockets are not for us.
    - ben_w 3y ago
      Disassemble planet, acquire Dyson swarm, delete risk of second-generation AI competing with you.
Dalewyn 3y ago
The "bad acting human" are the assholes who uses "AI" to create fake imagery to push certain (and likely false) narratives on the various medias. Key thing here is that this is fundamentally no different from what has been happening since time immemorial, it's just that becomes easier with "AI" as part of the tooling. Every piece of bullshit starts from the "bad acting human". Every single one. "AI" is just another new part of the same old process.
- chii 3y ago
  so let me tie this with a controversial topic - gun control. If people agree that gun control would reduce the harm from guns, wouldn't this same logic apply to AI? Is it different?
  - Dalewyn 3y ago
    I do not agree that gun control would reduce harm from guns.
ben_w 3y ago
> He is trying to eliminate the competition, Funny way of doing it, going around saying "you should regulate us, but don't regulate people smaller than us, and don't regulate open-source". > you must report to the US government about how you created and tested your model. If you're referring to the recent executive order: only when dual-use, meaning the following: --- (k) The term “dual-use foundation model” means an AI model that is trained on broad data; generally uses self-supervision; contains at least tens of billions of parameters; is applicable across a wide range of contexts; and that exhibits, or could be easily modified to exhibit, high levels of performance at tasks that pose a serious risk to security, national economic security, national public health or safety, or any combination of those matters, such as by: (i) substantially lowering the barrier of entry for non-experts to design, synthesize, acquire, or use chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear (CBRN) weapons; (ii) enabling powerful offensive cyber operations through automated vulnerability discovery and exploitation against a wide range of potential targets of cyber attacks; or (iii) permitting the evasion of human control or oversight through means of deception or obfuscation. - https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-actions/2023/10/30/executive-order-on-the-safe-secure-and-trustworthy-development-and-use-of-artificial-intelligence/ https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-action...

PUSH_AX 3y ago

Sure, today at least. But there is a future where the human has given AI control of things, with good intention, and the AI has become the threat. AI is a tool today, tomorrow AI is calling shots in many domains. It's worth planning for tomorrow.

tempodox 3y ago
It's still humans who make the decision to let “AI” call the shots.
- PUSH_AX 3y ago
  Hence "with good intentions".
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  Sure, but that's the gist of AI X-risk: this is one of those few truly irreversible decisions. We have one shot at it, and if we get it wrong, it's game over. Note that it may not be immediately apparent we got it wrong. Think of a turkey on a stereotypical small American farm. It will itself living a happy and safe life under protection of its loving Human, until one day, for some reason that's completely incomprehensible to the turkey, the loving Human comes and chops its head off.
lukifer 3y ago
A good analogy might be a shareholder corporation: each one began as a tool of human agency, and yet a sufficiently mature corporation has a de-facto agency of its own, transcending any one shareholder, employee, or board member. The more AI/ML is woven into our infrastructure and economy, the less it will be possible to find an "off switch", anymore than we can (realistically) find an off switch for Walmart, Amazon, etc.
- pdonis 3y ago
  > a sufficiently mature corporation has a de-facto agency of its own, transcending any one shareholder, employee, or board member. No, the corporation has an agency that is a tool of particular humans who are using it. Those humans could be shareholders, employees, or board members; but in any case they will have some claim to be acting for the corporation. But it's still human actions. Corporations can't do anything unless humans acting for them do it.

dangerwill 3y ago

If you apply this thinking to Nuclear weapons it becomes nonsensical, which tells us that a tool that can only be oriented to do harm will only be used to do harm. The question then is if LLMs or AI more broadly will even potentially help the general public and there is no reason to think so. The goal of these tools is to be able to continue running the economy while employing far fewer people. These tools are oriented by their very nature to replace human labor, which in the context of our economic system has a direct and unbreakable relationship to a reduction in the well being of the humans it replaces.

m4rtink 3y ago
Nuclear bombs can be used for space ship propulsion, geology or mining.
- dangerwill 3y ago
  Notably nuclear bombs are not actually used for any of these as this is either sci-fi or insane
specialist 3y ago
Yup. The creation of these weapons necessitates their use. The whole arms race dynamic.
theultdev 3y ago
Nuclear weapons are a tool to keep peace via MAD (mutual assured destruction) It's most likely the main reason there's no direct world wars between super powers.
a_wild_dandan 3y ago
1. You've fallen for the lump of labor fallacy. A 100x productivity boost ≠ 100x fewer jobs, anymore than a 100x boost = static jobs with 100x more projects. Reality is far more complicated, and viewing labor as some static lump, zero-sum game will lead you astray. 2. Your outlook on the societal impact of technology is contradicted by reality. The historical result of better tech always meant increased jobs and well-being. Today is the best time in human history to be alive by virtually every metric. 3. AI has been such a massive boon to humanity and your everyday existence for years that questioning its public utility is frankly bewildering.

quicklime 3y ago

But usually there’s a one-way flow of intent from the human to the tool. With a lot of AI the feedback loop gets closed, and people are using it to help them make decisions, and might be taken far from the good outcome they were seeking. You can already see this today’s internet. I’m sure the pizzagate people genuinely believed they were doing a good thing. This isn’t the same as an amoral tool like a knife, where a human decides between cutting vegetables or stabbing people.

pdonis 3y ago
> With a lot of AI the feedback loop gets closed, and people are using it to help them make decisions, and might be taken far from the good outcome they were seeking. The answer to this is simple: don't use a tool you don't understand. You can't fix this problem by nerfing the tool. You have to fix it by holding humans responsible for how they use tools, so they have an incentive to use them properly, and to not use them if they can't meet that requirement.

bumby 3y ago

This is true, but skirts around a bit of the black box problem. It's hard to put guardrails on an amoral tool that makes it hard to fully understand the failure modes. And it doesn't even require "bad acting humans" to do damage; it can just be good-intending-but-naïve humans.

pdonis 3y ago
It's true that the more complex and capable the tool is, the harder it is to understand what it empowers the humans using it to do. I only wanted to emphasize that it's the humans that are the vital link, so to speak.
- bumby 3y ago
  You're not wrong, but I think this quote partly misses the point: >The problem to be solved here is not how to control AI When we talk about mitigations, it is explicitly about how to control AI, sometimes irrespective of how someone uses it. Think about it this way: suppose I develop some stock-trading AI that has the ability to (inadvertently or purposefully) crash the stock market. Is the better control to put limits on the software itself so that it cannot crash the market or to put regulations in place to penalize people who use the software to crash the market? There is a hierarchy of controls when we talk about risk, and engineering controls (limiting the software) are always above administrative controls (limiting the humans using the software). (I realize it's not an either/or and both controls can - and probably should - be in place, but I described it as a dichotomy to illustrate the point)
  - jay_kyburz 3y ago
    My first thought is that the problem is with the stock market. The stock market "API" should not allow human or machines to be able to "damage" our economy.
    - bumby 3y ago
      That requires knowing how it will fail. It’s hard enough to do so with lots of interfaces and even more so when the software is opaque. Now extend that to safety critical domains where a separate party doesn’t control an API and it gets harder still.

indigo0086 3y ago

Of people understood this then they would have to live with the unsatisfying reality that not all violators can be punished. When you do it this way and paint the technology as potentially criminal that they can get revenge on corporations that which is what is mostly artist types want

concordDance 3y ago

A big problem with discourse on AI is people talking past each other because they're not being clear enough on their definitions. An AI doomer isn't talking about any current system, but hypothetical future ones which can do planning and have autonomous feedback loops. These are best thought of as agents rather than tools.

skulk 3y ago
But how does this agent interact with the outside world? It's just a piece of silicon buzzing with electricity until it outputs a message that some OTHER system reads and interprets. Maybe that's a set of servos and robotic legs, or maybe it's a Bloomberg terminal and a bank account. You'll notice that all of these things are already regulated if they have enough power to cause damage. So at the end the GP is completely right; someone has to hook up the servos to the first LLM-based terminator. This whole thing is a huge non-issue. We already (strive to) regulate everything that can cause harm directly. This regulation reaches these fanciful autonomous AI agents as well. If someone bent upon destroying the world had enough resources to build an AI basilisk or whatever, they could have spent 1/10 the effort and just created a thermonuclear bomb.
- concordDance 3y ago
  How does Hitler or Putin or Musk take control? How does a project director build a dam? Via people, sending messages to them, convincing them to do things. This can be with facts and logic or with rhetoric and emotional appeals or orders that seem to come from entities of importance or transfers of goods/services (money).