4 ms·

That's like saying we should punish when bridge collapses, before that any bridge should be able to be built. You can argue that, but not many will agree.

sgift 2y ago
Because we know how to build bridges so that they don't collapse. The laws of physics that govern bridge-building are well known. The equivalent for AI systems? Not really.
- sanxiyn 2y ago
  Best practices will say things like "you should test it". While we are ignorant, there are just many reasonable things to do. Human biology is not completely understood, but that does not mean medical checklists are useless.
  - Auracle 2y ago
    Test it how? What makes it fail? The ability to tell people how to make a bomb? Being able to say what (few) good things Hitler accomplished for Germany? Giving medical advice? Where’s the line?
    - sanxiyn 2y ago
      One thing law explicitly says is full shutdown capability. So it should be tested whether it can autonomously hack computers on the internet and propagate itself. In fact Anthropic tested this. See https://metr.org/ https://metr.org/ for more.
- Analemma_ 2y ago
  We don't know how to make safe AI systems, so we should be more cavalier and anything-goes than if we did? Madness.
  - sgift 2y ago
    We don't know if there's even any danger. All statements so far of any danger are somewhere between science-fiction stories and anthropomorphizing AI as some kind of god. The equivalent of "if the bridge breaks down, someone can be hurt", namely a real, quantifiable danger is sorely lacking here.
echelon 2y ago
Nobody has been killed by AI, unless you're arguing it impacts mental health [1]. A better-fitting analogy I'd make is that sex causes disease and other negative externalities, so we should pass laws that force people to be married and licensed in order to have sex. In any case, this bill is the walking epitome of something a "nanny state" might produce. [1] TikTok and Instagram have far more impact on this, and we've yet to do anything there. We seem to be of the opinion that this should be an individual responsibility.
- hollerith 2y ago
  >Nobody has been killed by AI Some of us worry that billions of people will be killed by AI in the future -- possibly without anything that you or the average decision-maker might regard as a warning. (They're likely to be killed all at the same time.) I.e., it is more like a large asteroid slamming into the Earth than a stream of deaths over time such as produced by the deployment in society of the automobile (except that the asteroid does not have the capability of noticing that it's first plan failed to kill a group of human over there, then to devise a second plan for killing those).
  - echelon 2y ago
    > My worry is that billions of people will be killed (probably all at the same time) by AI in the future Science fiction.
    - hollerith 2y ago
      The idea that something with greater cognitive capabilities than us might be dangerous to us occurs to many people: sci-fi writers in large numbers to be sure, but also Alan Turing and a large fraction of currently-living senior AI researchers. What really gets me concerned is the quality of the writing on the subject of how can we design an AI so that it will not want to hurt us (just as we design bridges so that we know from first principles they won't fall down). Most leaders of AI labs have by now written about the topic, but the writings are shockingly bad: everyone has some explanation as to why the AI will turn out to be safe, but there are dozens of orthogonal explanations, some very simplistic, none of which I want to bet my life on or the lives of my younger relatives. Those who do write well about the topic, particularly Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, say that it is probably not currently within the capabilities of any living human or group of humans to design an AI to be safe (to humans) the way we design bridges to be safe, and that our best hope is the hope that over the next centuries humankind will become cognitively capable enough to do and that in the meantime people stop trying to create AIs that might turn out to be dangerously capable -- which (because outside of actually doing the training run, we have no way of predicting the effects on capability of the next architectural improvement or the next increase in computing resources devoted to training) basically means stopping all AI research now worldwide and for good measure stopping progress in GPU technology. Eliezer has been full-time employed for over 20 years to work on the issue (and Nate has been for about 15 years) and they've had enough funding to employ at least a dozen researchers and researcher-apprentices over that time to bounce ideas off of in the office.
jokellum 2y ago
It's not at all like saying that. The concept of bridges is thousands of years old at this point with well established best practices, and a dense knowledge base on what can go wrong and how much damage can occur if built incorrectly. We aren't at the stage of "bridge innovation" where we don't even know what a bridge collapse looks like. We know very well the cost, threat to lives, even timeline that a poorly built bridge can cause. I'm not against legislation regulating AI, but it needs to be targeted toward clear problems e.g.: stealing copyrighted material, profiling crime, face recognition, self driving vehicles, automated "targeting" however you want to interpret that. I want to point out above are some awful uses of AI that are leveraged mostly by closed, proprietary entities

sgift 2y ago

Because we know how to build bridges so that they don't collapse. The laws of physics that govern bridge-building are well known. The equivalent for AI systems? Not really.

sanxiyn 2y ago
Best practices will say things like "you should test it". While we are ignorant, there are just many reasonable things to do. Human biology is not completely understood, but that does not mean medical checklists are useless.
- Auracle 2y ago
  Test it how? What makes it fail? The ability to tell people how to make a bomb? Being able to say what (few) good things Hitler accomplished for Germany? Giving medical advice? Where’s the line?
  - sanxiyn 2y ago
    One thing law explicitly says is full shutdown capability. So it should be tested whether it can autonomously hack computers on the internet and propagate itself. In fact Anthropic tested this. See https://metr.org/ https://metr.org/ for more.
Analemma_ 2y ago
We don't know how to make safe AI systems, so we should be more cavalier and anything-goes than if we did? Madness.
- sgift 2y ago
  We don't know if there's even any danger. All statements so far of any danger are somewhere between science-fiction stories and anthropomorphizing AI as some kind of god. The equivalent of "if the bridge breaks down, someone can be hurt", namely a real, quantifiable danger is sorely lacking here.

echelon 2y ago

Nobody has been killed by AI, unless you're arguing it impacts mental health [1]. A better-fitting analogy I'd make is that sex causes disease and other negative externalities, so we should pass laws that force people to be married and licensed in order to have sex. In any case, this bill is the walking epitome of something a "nanny state" might produce. [1] TikTok and Instagram have far more impact on this, and we've yet to do anything there. We seem to be of the opinion that this should be an individual responsibility.

hollerith 2y ago
>Nobody has been killed by AI Some of us worry that billions of people will be killed by AI in the future -- possibly without anything that you or the average decision-maker might regard as a warning. (They're likely to be killed all at the same time.) I.e., it is more like a large asteroid slamming into the Earth than a stream of deaths over time such as produced by the deployment in society of the automobile (except that the asteroid does not have the capability of noticing that it's first plan failed to kill a group of human over there, then to devise a second plan for killing those).
- echelon 2y ago
  > My worry is that billions of people will be killed (probably all at the same time) by AI in the future Science fiction.
  - hollerith 2y ago
    The idea that something with greater cognitive capabilities than us might be dangerous to us occurs to many people: sci-fi writers in large numbers to be sure, but also Alan Turing and a large fraction of currently-living senior AI researchers. What really gets me concerned is the quality of the writing on the subject of how can we design an AI so that it will not want to hurt us (just as we design bridges so that we know from first principles they won't fall down). Most leaders of AI labs have by now written about the topic, but the writings are shockingly bad: everyone has some explanation as to why the AI will turn out to be safe, but there are dozens of orthogonal explanations, some very simplistic, none of which I want to bet my life on or the lives of my younger relatives. Those who do write well about the topic, particularly Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, say that it is probably not currently within the capabilities of any living human or group of humans to design an AI to be safe (to humans) the way we design bridges to be safe, and that our best hope is the hope that over the next centuries humankind will become cognitively capable enough to do and that in the meantime people stop trying to create AIs that might turn out to be dangerously capable -- which (because outside of actually doing the training run, we have no way of predicting the effects on capability of the next architectural improvement or the next increase in computing resources devoted to training) basically means stopping all AI research now worldwide and for good measure stopping progress in GPU technology. Eliezer has been full-time employed for over 20 years to work on the issue (and Nate has been for about 15 years) and they've had enough funding to employ at least a dozen researchers and researcher-apprentices over that time to bounce ideas off of in the office.

jokellum 2y ago

It's not at all like saying that. The concept of bridges is thousands of years old at this point with well established best practices, and a dense knowledge base on what can go wrong and how much damage can occur if built incorrectly. We aren't at the stage of "bridge innovation" where we don't even know what a bridge collapse looks like. We know very well the cost, threat to lives, even timeline that a poorly built bridge can cause. I'm not against legislation regulating AI, but it needs to be targeted toward clear problems e.g.: stealing copyrighted material, profiling crime, face recognition, self driving vehicles, automated "targeting" however you want to interpret that. I want to point out above are some awful uses of AI that are leveraged mostly by closed, proprietary entities