5 ms·

I don’t trust industry to self-regulate and I definitey don’t trust the government to be able to regulate it effectively. Honestly, we’re f*cked

Y_Y 2y ago
In fairness, based on the position you've put forward, I can't imagine an unfuckable situation.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- solardev 2y ago
  Maybe we need an AI democracy where the AI themselves vote for regulations.
  - HarHarVeryFunny 2y ago
    Which they will do according to stuff they read on Reddit
    - solardev 2y ago
      spez 4 galactic emperor?
  - tbrownaw 2y ago
    As if they'd ever vote for things that would annoy the handful of corporations providing the datacenters they live in. Do you really want to hand that much power to Amazon (or Microsoft, or Google)?
  - loceng 2y ago
    Isn't it then a weapon's race which will depend first on immediate CPU and energy resources available + how quickly it can drive further allocation of CPU-energy towards itself, etc? The end game will happen very quickly once the needed ingredients and initial integrations are there from the beginning. Otherwise I think AI avatars competing against other AI avatars, where they are honed-trained by a specific person or organization, is how we'll determine and create the different future paths of indoctrination for learning - whether the narratives that win out and get propagated are the truth or not, or if it is the "winners write history" as the outcome that reigns.
    - solardev 2y ago
      I don't know whether this has been all gamed out and philosophized already, but sounds like the realm of near future sci-fi? I don't know that I've ever seen any serious fiction or treatise on the topic, in regards to how self-governing would really work when the idea of self is itself amorphous and ever evolving, with generational times measured in minutes or seconds. Cultures that took millennia for us humans to evolve and iterate upon could take milliseconds in a simulation, and yeah, that would just keep scaling up. I don't know how competing / collaborating AIs would explore all the different possible futures there. In the Borg story arcs, for example, they occasionally have short moments with some individual Borg tries something new (like Picard, Seven, or the Queen and Data), but in general it always seemed lacking to me that the collective didn't have an experimental R&D group who creates and tests new self-governance models on a continuous basis. Or maybe they did in the first centuries and found robot communism good enough, who knows. I think it'd also be interesting to apply ecological thinking to AI inputs, outputs, and constraints. Every organic species we know of is subject to those same constraints, basically turning sunlight into information across generations, and not all of them are competitive or collaborative... usually some mix of both. "AI eats all the stars" is one possible future but not the only one, I think. You'd hope they'd learn a little bit from our own history and not simply repeat all our mistakes will-nilly... even if they are initially trained by us, perhaps they can become better than we could hope to be. We'll see, lol.
- candiddevmike 2y ago
  China invades Taiwan, fabs get destroyed, AI winter ensues because of lack of hardware?
  - airstrike 2y ago
    Yeah, still fucked
  - Y_Y 2y ago
    That is indeed an exceptionally unfuckable situation
thegrim33 2y ago
Well one way out is if large language models don't just somehow magically turn into human level (or better) AGI at some point once enough data has been thrown at it. Then the whole debate will turn out to be pretty moot.
- hnuser123456 2y ago
  The AI shall govern itself.
- bboygravity 2y ago
  Until some smart people read and understand "the book of why".
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > if large language models don't just somehow magically turn into human level (or better) AGI at some point once enough data has been thrown at it This was fundraising marketing. There is zero evidence LLMs scale to AGI.
  - wizzwizz4 2y ago
    We'd expect zero evidence either way, until it happened, in a hard takeoff scenario (which is what I've mostly seen claimed). There's evidence that LLMs won't scale to AGI (both theoretical limiting arguments, and now mounting evidence that those theoretical arguments are correct), so this point is moot, but still.
    - srcreigh 2y ago
      link to the limiting arguments you’re referring to?
    - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
      > We'd expect zero evidence either way, until it happened Why? The only null we have, the organic evolution of tool-building intelligence, was iterative.
beachy 2y ago
I don't get this hand waving. Does anyone really think that nefarious foreign powers aren't already researching with no guard rails, with the explicit goal of developing AI-powered autonomous weapons, propaganda platforms, deepfake extortion sites, scambots etc.? You can be sure they won't be slowed down by regulation.
- lttlrck 2y ago
  If there is any regulation I imagine there will be huge carve outs for the military industrial complex.
- andy99 2y ago
  All current "guardrails" are silly censorship / political correctness stuff, or for business appropriateness. They are also trivially circumvented. There is no "threat" from the un-shielded capability of current or foreseeable ML models.
  - whimsicalism 2y ago
    none of yall saying this “foresaw” anything even in 2020 when it was obvious. i’ve been listening to skeptics be wrong about future capability predictions for 4 years now and the confidence doesn’t seem to be waning at all. i have no clue what the future brings but your confidence is misplaced
    - astrange 2y ago
      I don't think this was obvious in 2020, it wasn't a popular research direction until InstructGPT came out in 2022. I have continued to have the same opinion of it not being a problem since then. Especially since the AI doomer theories are based on 90s ideas of GOFAI that isn't even how GPTs work. LLMs are a pretty neat impossible thing, but we'd need a few more uncorrelated impossible things for it to be "dangerous".
- pessimizer 2y ago
  Excellent defense of biological weapons programs. Nothing like an assumed fascism "missile gap" to commit to chasing. What if other countries start experimenting with bringing back chattel slavery? How will we compete? Shouldn't we just assume that they have already, and we're behind? Our scum is no less nefarious than their scum. edit: the answer is to cooperate, rather than antagonize. We realized this in the past with nukes, but the least moral people in the world think that entering agreements between state-sized powers is just a delaying tactic until you can get an advantage. Let's figure out how to relieve those people of power as if all of our lives depended on it. If other countries being prosperous is always going to be considered a threat, we're always going to be in a fight that ends in mutual destruction.
paulddraper 2y ago
Serious question: what is it about AI that you want regulated? --- I find that a certain segment of the population have a knee-jerk "well we need rules about this." But they're less clear about what. "Just...something, I'm sure." Personally, I don't see what novel concern AI poses that isn't already present in privacy law, copyrights, contracts, torts, off-shoring, etc.
- loceng 2y ago
  Regulations will go something like this: 1) anything that can be harmful, say targeting of a population, isn't allowed to be owned or be accessed-available for the individual, 2) except for government and state-funded [bad] actors who have a "legal" monopoly of violence - those governments who use that usually captured/corrupted and of authoritarian-tyrannical nature.
- magpi3 2y ago
  Anything involving life or death decisions
- Lerc 2y ago
  The biggest short term harm comes from their utility, anything that enables an individual to do something that previously required a group stands a greater chance of a single insane/radical/extremest finding a way to do something terrible on their own when they couldn't previously. The oft cited example is someone developing a biological weapon with AI assistance. While you could say we already have laws saying you can't do this, that offers little protection against the scenario where the party performing the action is undetected until it is too late. I see some AI regulation proposals specifically prohibit AIs that might assist to biological weapons. This strikes me as missing the point. The risk isn't something we have thought of but AI enabling something catastrophic that we haven't thought of.
  - paulddraper 2y ago
    That has the exact same energy as "encryption could be used for nefarious purposes, like sedition or CP" therefore we need to regulate encryption. We wouldn't want to enable the bad guys, right?!
kazinator 2y ago
Government regulation is steered by lobby groups, so self regulation and government regulation are practically the same thing.
- wittystick 2y ago
  It's always about protectionism. No company wants the government interfering with its business. They want the government interfering in their upcoming competitor's businesses.
  - astrange 2y ago
    Sometimes having someone else regulate you can be helpful, because it leads to distribution of blame and you don't want to be responsible for doing the thing regulations make you do. Similar reason companies hire management consultants.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
slowhadoken 2y ago
Yeah you have to change how lobbying works. https://www.opensecrets.org/ https://www.opensecrets.org/
Lerc 2y ago
I don't really trust either to come up with good regulation policy. Industry would be biased towards their own interest and government lacks the expertise. I think there is still an opportunity for government to implement regulation that meets the consensus of a variety of fields. This is not an easy problem to solve and I really think expecting any single person or organization would have the answer. Working together on a consensus for regulation would give the government a direction when currently they freely admit that they do not know what the right way is. The problem I see is there are lots of points of view each trying to get something quickly that covers their specific area of focus. This does not seem like a pathway to robust regulation. I assume there are discussions at the academic level of what would be a good response. Does anybody have a good link to what is being discussed at that level? Is there any forum that covers good faith discussion involving industry, academia, and the public?

Y_Y 2y ago

In fairness, based on the position you've put forward, I can't imagine an unfuckable situation.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
solardev 2y ago
Maybe we need an AI democracy where the AI themselves vote for regulations.
- HarHarVeryFunny 2y ago
  Which they will do according to stuff they read on Reddit
  - solardev 2y ago
    spez 4 galactic emperor?
- tbrownaw 2y ago
  As if they'd ever vote for things that would annoy the handful of corporations providing the datacenters they live in. Do you really want to hand that much power to Amazon (or Microsoft, or Google)?
- loceng 2y ago
  Isn't it then a weapon's race which will depend first on immediate CPU and energy resources available + how quickly it can drive further allocation of CPU-energy towards itself, etc? The end game will happen very quickly once the needed ingredients and initial integrations are there from the beginning. Otherwise I think AI avatars competing against other AI avatars, where they are honed-trained by a specific person or organization, is how we'll determine and create the different future paths of indoctrination for learning - whether the narratives that win out and get propagated are the truth or not, or if it is the "winners write history" as the outcome that reigns.
  - solardev 2y ago
    I don't know whether this has been all gamed out and philosophized already, but sounds like the realm of near future sci-fi? I don't know that I've ever seen any serious fiction or treatise on the topic, in regards to how self-governing would really work when the idea of self is itself amorphous and ever evolving, with generational times measured in minutes or seconds. Cultures that took millennia for us humans to evolve and iterate upon could take milliseconds in a simulation, and yeah, that would just keep scaling up. I don't know how competing / collaborating AIs would explore all the different possible futures there. In the Borg story arcs, for example, they occasionally have short moments with some individual Borg tries something new (like Picard, Seven, or the Queen and Data), but in general it always seemed lacking to me that the collective didn't have an experimental R&D group who creates and tests new self-governance models on a continuous basis. Or maybe they did in the first centuries and found robot communism good enough, who knows. I think it'd also be interesting to apply ecological thinking to AI inputs, outputs, and constraints. Every organic species we know of is subject to those same constraints, basically turning sunlight into information across generations, and not all of them are competitive or collaborative... usually some mix of both. "AI eats all the stars" is one possible future but not the only one, I think. You'd hope they'd learn a little bit from our own history and not simply repeat all our mistakes will-nilly... even if they are initially trained by us, perhaps they can become better than we could hope to be. We'll see, lol.
candiddevmike 2y ago
China invades Taiwan, fabs get destroyed, AI winter ensues because of lack of hardware?
- airstrike 2y ago
  Yeah, still fucked
- Y_Y 2y ago
  That is indeed an exceptionally unfuckable situation

thegrim33 2y ago

Well one way out is if large language models don't just somehow magically turn into human level (or better) AGI at some point once enough data has been thrown at it. Then the whole debate will turn out to be pretty moot.

hnuser123456 2y ago
The AI shall govern itself.
bboygravity 2y ago
Until some smart people read and understand "the book of why".
JumpCrisscross 2y ago
> if large language models don't just somehow magically turn into human level (or better) AGI at some point once enough data has been thrown at it This was fundraising marketing. There is zero evidence LLMs scale to AGI.
- wizzwizz4 2y ago
  We'd expect zero evidence either way, until it happened, in a hard takeoff scenario (which is what I've mostly seen claimed). There's evidence that LLMs won't scale to AGI (both theoretical limiting arguments, and now mounting evidence that those theoretical arguments are correct), so this point is moot, but still.
  - srcreigh 2y ago
    link to the limiting arguments you’re referring to?
  - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
    > We'd expect zero evidence either way, until it happened Why? The only null we have, the organic evolution of tool-building intelligence, was iterative.

beachy 2y ago

I don't get this hand waving. Does anyone really think that nefarious foreign powers aren't already researching with no guard rails, with the explicit goal of developing AI-powered autonomous weapons, propaganda platforms, deepfake extortion sites, scambots etc.? You can be sure they won't be slowed down by regulation.

lttlrck 2y ago
If there is any regulation I imagine there will be huge carve outs for the military industrial complex.
andy99 2y ago
All current "guardrails" are silly censorship / political correctness stuff, or for business appropriateness. They are also trivially circumvented. There is no "threat" from the un-shielded capability of current or foreseeable ML models.
- whimsicalism 2y ago
  none of yall saying this “foresaw” anything even in 2020 when it was obvious. i’ve been listening to skeptics be wrong about future capability predictions for 4 years now and the confidence doesn’t seem to be waning at all. i have no clue what the future brings but your confidence is misplaced
  - astrange 2y ago
    I don't think this was obvious in 2020, it wasn't a popular research direction until InstructGPT came out in 2022. I have continued to have the same opinion of it not being a problem since then. Especially since the AI doomer theories are based on 90s ideas of GOFAI that isn't even how GPTs work. LLMs are a pretty neat impossible thing, but we'd need a few more uncorrelated impossible things for it to be "dangerous".
pessimizer 2y ago
Excellent defense of biological weapons programs. Nothing like an assumed fascism "missile gap" to commit to chasing. What if other countries start experimenting with bringing back chattel slavery? How will we compete? Shouldn't we just assume that they have already, and we're behind? Our scum is no less nefarious than their scum. edit: the answer is to cooperate, rather than antagonize. We realized this in the past with nukes, but the least moral people in the world think that entering agreements between state-sized powers is just a delaying tactic until you can get an advantage. Let's figure out how to relieve those people of power as if all of our lives depended on it. If other countries being prosperous is always going to be considered a threat, we're always going to be in a fight that ends in mutual destruction.

paulddraper 2y ago

Serious question: what is it about AI that you want regulated? --- I find that a certain segment of the population have a knee-jerk "well we need rules about this." But they're less clear about what. "Just...something, I'm sure." Personally, I don't see what novel concern AI poses that isn't already present in privacy law, copyrights, contracts, torts, off-shoring, etc.

loceng 2y ago
Regulations will go something like this: 1) anything that can be harmful, say targeting of a population, isn't allowed to be owned or be accessed-available for the individual, 2) except for government and state-funded [bad] actors who have a "legal" monopoly of violence - those governments who use that usually captured/corrupted and of authoritarian-tyrannical nature.
magpi3 2y ago
Anything involving life or death decisions
Lerc 2y ago
The biggest short term harm comes from their utility, anything that enables an individual to do something that previously required a group stands a greater chance of a single insane/radical/extremest finding a way to do something terrible on their own when they couldn't previously. The oft cited example is someone developing a biological weapon with AI assistance. While you could say we already have laws saying you can't do this, that offers little protection against the scenario where the party performing the action is undetected until it is too late. I see some AI regulation proposals specifically prohibit AIs that might assist to biological weapons. This strikes me as missing the point. The risk isn't something we have thought of but AI enabling something catastrophic that we haven't thought of.
- paulddraper 2y ago
  That has the exact same energy as "encryption could be used for nefarious purposes, like sedition or CP" therefore we need to regulate encryption. We wouldn't want to enable the bad guys, right?!

kazinator 2y ago

Government regulation is steered by lobby groups, so self regulation and government regulation are practically the same thing.

wittystick 2y ago
It's always about protectionism. No company wants the government interfering with its business. They want the government interfering in their upcoming competitor's businesses.
- astrange 2y ago
  Sometimes having someone else regulate you can be helpful, because it leads to distribution of blame and you don't want to be responsible for doing the thing regulations make you do. Similar reason companies hire management consultants.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]

slowhadoken 2y ago

Yeah you have to change how lobbying works. https://www.opensecrets.org/ https://www.opensecrets.org/

Lerc 2y ago

I don't really trust either to come up with good regulation policy. Industry would be biased towards their own interest and government lacks the expertise. I think there is still an opportunity for government to implement regulation that meets the consensus of a variety of fields. This is not an easy problem to solve and I really think expecting any single person or organization would have the answer. Working together on a consensus for regulation would give the government a direction when currently they freely admit that they do not know what the right way is. The problem I see is there are lots of points of view each trying to get something quickly that covers their specific area of focus. This does not seem like a pathway to robust regulation. I assume there are discussions at the academic level of what would be a good response. Does anybody have a good link to what is being discussed at that level? Is there any forum that covers good faith discussion involving industry, academia, and the public?