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The inventions were partly understood mechanistically- just like ML. What we didn't understand was the consequences of deployment (such as massive radiation le
by dekhn 3y ago
The inventions were partly understood mechanistically- just like ML. What we didn't understand was the consequences of deployment (such as massive radiation leaks due to testing, unpredictable yields, the risks of global thermonuclear war, and the ongoing cost of maintaining a fleet of nuclear weapons).
Similar issues with molecular biology- we knew how to clone a gene from one organism to another, but that doesn't mean we really knew all the things going on (side effects) or what the large-scale implications are (hence the Asilomar agreement).
Even cars- while engines were understood mechanistically, it took quite some time for people to appreciate why automobile safety glass was necessary.
See the experiences learned during testing nuclear weapons- we tested them because we didn't understand them mechanistcally, at least not fully enough to predict many effects.
- comp_throw7 3y ago> The inventions were partly understood mechanistically- just like ML We have effectively no mechanistic understanding of frontier ML systems, in the sense that we have no idea how they do what they do and could not e.g. write human-readable code to perform comparable tasks, nor can we predict ahead of time what capabilities such systems will have when they're trained (being able to predict e.g. log-loss is _not_ the same as being able to predict specific capabilities).