Hacker News Search

tony69 2y ago
You might be right that the AI is more difficult, but I disagree on the androids being dangerous. There are physical limitations to androids that imo make it very difficult that they could be seriously dangerous, let alone invincible, no matter how intelligent: - power (boston dynamics battery lasts how long?), an android has to plug in at some point no matter what - dexterity, or in general agency in real world, seems we’re still a long way from this in the context of a general purpose android General purpose superhuman robot seems really really difficult.
- CRConrad 2y ago
  Like, there aren't computer-controlled industrial robots that are many many times stronger than humans?!? Wow, and here I thought there were.
- ben_w 2y ago
  > let alone invincible !! I don't want anyone to think I meant that. > an android has to plug in at some point no matter what Sure, and we have to eat; despite this, human actions have killed a lot of people > - dexterity, or in general agency in real world, seems we’re still a long way from this in the context of a general purpose android Yes? The 5-10 years thing is about the gap between some AI that doesn't exist yet (level 5 self-driving) moving from car-sized hardware to android-sized hardware; I don't make any particular claim about when the AI will be good enough for cars (delay before the first step), and I don't know how long it will take to go from being good at just cars to good in general (delay after the second step).
roughly 2y ago
> the hardware is already stronger and faster than our bones and muscles. For 30 minutes until the batteries run down, or for 5 years until the parts wear out.
- ben_w 2y ago
  The ATP in your cells will last about 2 seconds without replacement. Electricity is also much cheaper than food, even bulk calories like vegetable oil.[0] And if the android is controlled by a human-level intelligence, one thing it can very obviously do is all the stuff the humans did to make the android in the first place. [0] £8.25 for 333 servings of 518 kJ - https://www.tesco.com/groceries/en-GB/products/272515844 https://www.tesco.com/groceries/en-GB/products/272515844 Equivalent to £0.17/kWh - https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=£8.25+%2F+%28333+*+518kJ%29+in+£%2FkWh https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=£8.25+%2F+%28333+*+518k... UK average consumer price for electricity, £0.27/kWh - https://www.greenmatch.co.uk/average-electricity-cost-uk https://www.greenmatch.co.uk/average-electricity-cost-uk

theptip 2y ago

Trouble is, in practice what you would need to do might be “turn off all of Google’s datacenters”. Or perhaps the thing manages to secure compute in multiple clouds (which is what I’d do if I woke up as an entity running on a single DC with a big red power button on it). The blast radius of such decisions are large enough that this option is not trivial as you suggest.

zombiwoof 2y ago
Open the data center doors I’m sorry I can’t do that
jen729w 2y ago
Right, but when we’ve literally invented a superintelligence that we’re worried will eliminate the race, a) we’ve done that, which is cool. Now let’s figure out how to control it. b) you can’t get your gmail for a bit while we reboot the DC. That’s probably okay.
- theptip 2y ago
  a) after you create the superintelligence is likely too late. You seem to think that inventing superintelligence means that we somehow understand what we created, but note that we have no idea how a simple LLM works, let alone an ASI that is presumably 5-10 OOM more complex. You are unlikely to be able to control a thing that is way smarter than you, the safest option is to steer the nature of that thing before it comes into being (or, don’t build it at all). Note that we currently don’t know how to do this, it’s what Ilya is working on. The approach from OpenAI is roughly to create ASI and then hope it’s friendly. b) except that is not how these things go in the real world. What actually happens is that initially it’s just a risk of the agent going rogue, the CEO weighs the multi-billion dollar cost vs. some small-seeming probability of disaster and decides to keep the company running until the threat is extremely clear, which in many scenarios is too late. (For a recent example, consider the point in the spread of Covid where a lockdown could have prevented the disease from spreading; likely somewhere around tens to hundreds of cases, well before the true risk was quantified, and therefore drastic action was not justified to those that could have pressed the metaphorical red button).