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And... How do you do that? Seriously, people have been talking about stoping CO2 emissions for what, 50 years? We've barely made progress there.

• TeMPOraL 3y ago
  With threat of military intervention. People have been talking about curtailing carbon emissions for 50 years, but they haven't been serious about it. Being serious doesn't look like saying "oh shoot, we said we will... try to keep emissions down, but we didn't... even try; sorry...". Being serous looks like "stop now, or we will eminent domain your data centre from under you via an emergency court order, or failing that, bomb it to rubble (because if we don't, some other signatory of the treaty will bomb you for us)".
  • neonihil 3y ago
    The problem with that is that the entity supposed to "bomb it to rubble" and the entity pushing for AI development happens to be the same entity. Maybe the confusion why people can't see this clearly stems from the fact that tech development in the US has mostly been done under the umbrella of a private enterprise. But if one has a look at companies like Palantir, it's going to become quite obvious what is the main driver behind AI development.
  • Dig1t 3y ago
    Are you really suggesting drone striking data centers? What about running AI models on personal hardware? Are we going to require that everyone must have a chip installed in their computer that will report to the government illegal AI software running on the machine? You are proposing an authoritarian nightmare.
    • pixl97 3y ago
      Hence the entire point of this discussion... can we avoid the future nightmares that are coming in one way or another? Make AI = nightmare, stop people from making AI = nightmare. The option that seems to be off the table is people going, hell making AI is a nightmare so I won't voluntarily without the need for a police state.
  • RandomLensman 3y ago
    No-one wants a nuclear war over imaginary risks, so not happening.
    • TeMPOraL 3y ago
      We better find a way to make it happen, because right now, climate change x-risk mitigation is also not happening, for the same reason.
      • RandomLensman 3y ago
        Climate change mitigation is actually happening. Huge investment flows are being redirected and things are being retooled, you might not see it, but don't get caught out by the doomers there.
  • vidarh 3y ago
    > With threat of military intervention. We've seen how hard it is to do that when the fear is nuclear proliferation. Now consider how hard it is to do that when the research can be done on any sufficiently large set of computational devices, and doesn't even need to be geographically concentrated, or even in your own country. If I was a country wanting to continue AI research under threat of military intervention, I'd run it all in cloud providers in the country making the threat, via shell companies in countries I considered rivals.
    • RandomLensman 3y ago
      At least nuclear weapons pose an actual existential risk as opposed to AI - and even then we don't just go to war.
      • ben_w 3y ago
        Nukes being a risk was suggested as a reason why the US was willing to invade Iraq for trying to get one but not North Korea for succeeding. It's almost certainly more complex of course, but the UK called it's arsenal a "deterrent" before I left, and I've heard the same for why China stopped in the hundreds of warheads.
        • RandomLensman 3y ago
          Even if that were true for Iraq, which I doubt, it would have been the odd one out. Btw., China is increasing its arsenal at the moment.
      • TeMPOraL 3y ago
        Nukes don't have a mind of their own. They're operated by people, who fortunately turned out sane enough that they can successfully threaten each other into a stable state (MAD doctrine). Still, adding more groups to the mix increases risk, which is why non-proliferation treaties are a thing, and are taken seriously. Powerful enough AI creates whole new classes of risks, but it also magnifies all the current ones. E.g. nuclear weapons become more of an existential risk once AI is in the picture, as it could intentionally or accidentally provoke or trick us into using them.
  • sgt101 3y ago
    And there it is. The full agenda. Blood and empire.
    • ben_w 3y ago
      Only in exactly the same way that the police have the same agenda as the mafia. International bans need treaties, with agreed standards for intervention in order to not escalate to war. The argument is that if you're not willing to go all the way with enforcement, then you were never serious in the first place. Saying you won't go that far even if necessary to enforce the treaty is analogous to "sure murder is illegal and if you're formally accused we'll send armed cops to arrest you, but they can't shoot you if you resist because shooting you would be assault with a deadly weapon".
      • sgt101 3y ago
        I don't agree. The police enforce civil order by consent expressed through democracy. There is no analogy in international affairs. Who is it that is going to get bombed? I am thinking it will not be the NSA data centre's in Utah, or any data centres owned by nuclear armed states.
        • TeMPOraL 3y ago
          > The police enforce civil order by consent expressed through democracy. There is no analogy in international affairs. Which is the point exactly. All agreements in international affairs are ultimately backed by threats of violence. Most negotiations don't go as far as explicitly mentioning it, because no one really wants to go there, but the threat is always there in the background, implied.
        • ben_w 3y ago
          All policing is to a certain degree by consent, even in dictatorships which only use democratic as a fig-leaf. International law likewise. Just as the criminal justice system is a deterrent against crime despite imperfections, so are treaties, international courts, sanctions, and warfare. > I am thinking it will not be the NSA data centre's in Utah, or any data centres owned by nuclear armed states. For now, this would indeed seem unlikely. But so did the fall of the British Empire and later the Soviet Union before they happened.
  • andruby 3y ago
    But that's just not going to work in the real world is it? If a country uses military force in another country, that's a declaration of war. We'll never convince every single country from banning AI research. And even if we do, you don't need much resources to do AI research. A few people and a few computers is enough. This is not something like uranium refining.
  • 3rd3 3y ago
    Since when are military spooks and political opportunists better at deciding on our technological future than startups and corporations? The degree of global policing and surveillance necessary to fully prevent secret labs from working on AI would be mind-boggling. How would you ensure all government actors are sticking to the same safety standards rather than seizing power by implementing AI hastily? This problem has long been known as quis custodiet ipsos custodes - "who guards the guards themselves?".
    • concordDance 3y ago
      > The degree of global policing and surveillance necessary to fully prevent secret labs from working on AI would be mind-boggling. It's not that bad given the compute requirements for training even the basic LLMs we have today. But yes, it's a long shot.
      • visarga 3y ago
        Training a SOTA model is expensive, but you only need to do it once, and fine-tune a thousand times for various purposes. And it's not even that expensive when compared to the cost of building other large scale projects. How much is a dam, or a subway station? There are also corporations who would profit from making models widely available, such as chip makers, they would commoditise the complement. Once you have your very capable, open sourced model, that runs on phones and laptops locally, then fine-tuning is almost free. This is not make belief. A few recent fine-tunes of Mistral-7B for example are excellent quality, and run surprisingly fast on a 5 year old GPU - 40T/s. I foresee a new era of grassroots empowerment and privacy. In a few years we will have more powerful phones and laptops, with specialised LLM chips, better pre-trained models and better fine-tuning datasets distilled from SOTA models of the day. We might have good enough AI on our terms.
        • concordDance 3y ago
          > Once you have your very capable, open sourced model, that runs on phones and laptops locally, then fine-tuning is almost free. Hence the idea to ban development of more capable models. (We're really pretty lucky that LLM based AGI might be the first type of AGI made, it seems much lower risk and lower power than some of the other possibilties)
  • sebastianz 3y ago
    > With threat of military intervention. I assume you are american, right? Cause that sounds pretty american. Although I suppose you might also be chinese or russian, they also like that solution a lot. Whichever of those you are, I'm sure your side is definitely the one with all the right answers, and will be a valiant and correct ruler of the world, blessing us all with your great values.
    • TeMPOraL 3y ago
      I'm Polish. My country is the one whose highest distinction on the international level was being marked by the US for preemptive glassing, to make it more difficult for the Soviets to drive their tanks west. Which is completely irrelevant to the topic at hand anyway.
      • sebastianz 3y ago
        > Which is completely irrelevant to the topic at hand anyway. It's not irrelevant. I was implying that you did not specify who is doing this military intervention that you see as a solution. What are their values, who decides the rules that the rest of the world will have to follow, with what authority, and who (and how) will the policing be done.
        • TeMPOraL 3y ago
          > I was implying that you did not specify who is doing this military intervention that you see as a solution. What are their values, who decides the rules that the rest of the world will have to follow, with what authority, and who (and how) will the policing be done. Like nuclear non-proliferation treaties or various international bans on bioweapons, but more so. The idea is that humanity is racing full steam ahead into an AI x-risk event, so it needs to slow down, and the only way it can slow down is through an international moratorium that's signed by most nations and treated seriously, where "seriously" includes the option of signatories[0] authorizing a military strike against a facility engaged in banned AI R&D work. In short: think of UN that works. -- [0] - Via some international council or whatever authority would be formed as part of the treaty.
  • deleted 3y ago
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  • rolisz 3y ago
    So you're proposing replacing a hypothetical risk (Geoffrey Hinton puts the probability at 1%) with guaranteed pain and destruction, which might escalate to nuclear war? Thank you, but no thank you.
    • TeMPOraL 3y ago
      No, I'm proposing replacing a high risk scenario (I disagree with Hinton here) with a low risk scenario, which has low chance to escalate to any serious fighting. It seems people have missed what the proposed alternative is, so let me spell it out: it's about getting governments to SIGN AN INTERNATIONAL TREATY. It is NOT about having US (or anyone else) policing the rest of the world. It's not fundamentally more dangerous than the few existing treaties of similar kind, such as those about nuclear non-proliferation. And obviously, all nuclear powers need to be on-board with it, because being implicitly backed by nukes is the only way any agreement can truly stick on the international level. This level of coordination may seem near-impossible to achieve now, but then it's much more possible than surviving an accidental creation of an AGI.
      • ImPostingOnHN 3y ago
        > No, I'm proposing replacing a high risk scenario (I disagree with Hinton here) I disagree with you here, I think the risk is low, not high. > it's about getting governments to SIGN AN INTERNATIONAL TREATY. It is NOT about having US (or anyone else) policing the rest of the world We haven't been able to do that for climate change. When we do, then I'll be convinced enough that it would be feasible for AI. Until then, show me this coordination for the damage that's already happening (climate change). > This level of coordination may seem near-impossible to achieve now, but then it's much more possible than surviving an accidental creation of an AGI. I think the coordination required is much less possible than a scenario where we need to "survive" some sort of danger from the creation of an AGI. But we can find out for sure with climate change as an example. Let's see the global coordination. Have we solved that actual problem, yet? Remember, everyone has to first agree to this "bomb AI" to avoid war. Otherwise, bombing/war starts. The equivalent for climate change would be bombing carbon producers. I don't see either agreement happening globally.
  • belter 3y ago
    So the next War will be the Good AI against the Bad AI and humans as collateral damage?
    • TeMPOraL 3y ago
      No, that's the best outcome of the bad scenario that the above is meant to avoid. How do people jump from "we need an actual international ban on this" to "oh so this is arguing for an arms race"? It's like the polar opposite of what's being said.
• olalonde 3y ago
  This underscores the crux of the issue. Our collective response to curbing emissions has been lackluster, largely due to the fact that the argument for it being beneficial hasn't sufficiently swayed a significant number of people. The case asserting that AI R&D poses an existential risk will be even harder to make. It's hard to enforce a ban when a large part of the population, and perhaps entire countries, do not believe the ban is justified. This contrasts with the near-universal agreement surrounding the prohibition of chemical and biological weapons, or the prevention of nuclear weapons proliferation, where the consensus is considerably stronger.
• ac29 3y ago
  I think you are really underestimating how much progress has been made with renewable energy. Taking a quick look a CAISO, the California grid is currently 65% powered by renewables (mostly solar). This is a bit higher than average, but it certainly wouldnt have been nearly as high even 5 years ago, much less 25 years ago.