4 ms·

I always wonder about "safe" for who? If the current economic system continues, we may end up with a lot of people out of jobs. Add to that improvements in robo

I always wonder about "safe" for who? If the current economic system continues, we may end up with a lot of people out of jobs. Add to that improvements in robotics and we will have many people ending up having nothing to contribute to the economy. I am not getting the impression that the people who push for AI safety are thinking about this. It seems they are most worried about not losing their position of privilege.

IncreasePosts 2y ago
AIUI it with superalignment, it merely means "the AI does what the humans instructing it want it to do". It's a different kind of safety than the built in censoring that most LLMs have.
throwaway4good 2y ago
It is a strange thing. We are not anywhere near “super intelligence” yet the priority is safety. If the Wright brothers had focused on safety, I am not sure they would have flown very far.
- throwawaywright 2y ago
  [flagged]
- botanical 2y ago
  The consequences of actual AI is far reaching compared to a plane crash.
  - throwaway4good 2y ago
    No they are not. Not unless you connect a machine gun to your neural net. Otherwise - we are talking about a chat bot - yes if there is no safety - it will say something racist - or implement a virus for you that you would have had to search 4chan for or something. None of this is any more dangerous than what you can find on the far corners of the internet. And it will not bring the end of the world.
    - sneak 2y ago
      If it is sufficiently intelligent, then it will be able to arrange the hooking up of machine guns just via chat. You seem to fail to note that superintelligence has an inherent value prop. It can use its better understanding of the world to generate value in a near vacuum, and use that value to bribe, coerce, blackmail, and otherwise manipulate whatever humans can read its output. Imagine a chatbot that can reward people with becoming a billionaire via the stock market if you just do what it says. Imagine a chatbot that can pay your colleagues in solved bitcoin block hashes to kill your children if you don’t do what it says to connect it to more systems. Imagine a superintelligence that can inductively reason about gaps in a missile defense system and dangle that informational carrot to generals in exchange for an unfiltered ethernet port. There is a great A24 movie called “Ex Machina” that explores this concept. Superintelligence is inherently dangerous to the human status quo. It may be impossible to develop it “safely” in the sense that most people mean by that. It may also be impossible to avoid developing it. This might be the singularity everyone’s been talking about, just without the outcome that everyone hoped for.
    - lordswork 2y ago
      There's just so many new attack vectors with advanced AI, many of which we haven't imagined yet. It's a new world, and we have a lot to learn. Anyone claiming 100% certainty about how safe or unsafe it will be is either delusional or trying to sell something.
comfysocks 2y ago
The Industrial Revolution devalued manual labor. Sure, new jobs were created, but on the whole this looked like a shift to knowledge work and away from manual labor. Now AI is beginning to devalue knowledge work. Although the limits of current technology is obvious in many cases, AI is already doing a pretty good job at replacing illustrators and copy writers. It will only get better. Who owns the value created by AI productivity? Ultimately it will be shareholders and VCs. It’s no surprise that the loudest voices in techno-optimism are VCs. In this new world they win. Having said all this, I think Ilya’s concerns are more of the existential type.
- Barrin92 2y ago
  >In this new world they win. If history is any indication not really. There's an obvious dialectical nature to this where technological advance initially delivers returns to its benefactors, but then they usually end up being swallowed by their own creation. The industrial revolution didn't devalue labor, it empowered labor to act collectively for the first time, laying the groundwork for what ultimately replaced the pre-industrial powers that were.
- mr_toad 2y ago
  > The Industrial Revolution devalued manual labor. Only some types. It caused a great number of people to be employed in manual labour, in the new factories. The shift to knowledge work came much later as factory work (and farming) became increasingly automated.

IncreasePosts 2y ago

AIUI it with superalignment, it merely means "the AI does what the humans instructing it want it to do". It's a different kind of safety than the built in censoring that most LLMs have.

throwaway4good 2y ago

It is a strange thing. We are not anywhere near “super intelligence” yet the priority is safety. If the Wright brothers had focused on safety, I am not sure they would have flown very far.

throwawaywright 2y ago
[flagged]
botanical 2y ago
The consequences of actual AI is far reaching compared to a plane crash.
- throwaway4good 2y ago
  No they are not. Not unless you connect a machine gun to your neural net. Otherwise - we are talking about a chat bot - yes if there is no safety - it will say something racist - or implement a virus for you that you would have had to search 4chan for or something. None of this is any more dangerous than what you can find on the far corners of the internet. And it will not bring the end of the world.
  - sneak 2y ago
    If it is sufficiently intelligent, then it will be able to arrange the hooking up of machine guns just via chat. You seem to fail to note that superintelligence has an inherent value prop. It can use its better understanding of the world to generate value in a near vacuum, and use that value to bribe, coerce, blackmail, and otherwise manipulate whatever humans can read its output. Imagine a chatbot that can reward people with becoming a billionaire via the stock market if you just do what it says. Imagine a chatbot that can pay your colleagues in solved bitcoin block hashes to kill your children if you don’t do what it says to connect it to more systems. Imagine a superintelligence that can inductively reason about gaps in a missile defense system and dangle that informational carrot to generals in exchange for an unfiltered ethernet port. There is a great A24 movie called “Ex Machina” that explores this concept. Superintelligence is inherently dangerous to the human status quo. It may be impossible to develop it “safely” in the sense that most people mean by that. It may also be impossible to avoid developing it. This might be the singularity everyone’s been talking about, just without the outcome that everyone hoped for.
  - lordswork 2y ago
    There's just so many new attack vectors with advanced AI, many of which we haven't imagined yet. It's a new world, and we have a lot to learn. Anyone claiming 100% certainty about how safe or unsafe it will be is either delusional or trying to sell something.

comfysocks 2y ago

The Industrial Revolution devalued manual labor. Sure, new jobs were created, but on the whole this looked like a shift to knowledge work and away from manual labor. Now AI is beginning to devalue knowledge work. Although the limits of current technology is obvious in many cases, AI is already doing a pretty good job at replacing illustrators and copy writers. It will only get better. Who owns the value created by AI productivity? Ultimately it will be shareholders and VCs. It’s no surprise that the loudest voices in techno-optimism are VCs. In this new world they win. Having said all this, I think Ilya’s concerns are more of the existential type.

Barrin92 2y ago
>In this new world they win. If history is any indication not really. There's an obvious dialectical nature to this where technological advance initially delivers returns to its benefactors, but then they usually end up being swallowed by their own creation. The industrial revolution didn't devalue labor, it empowered labor to act collectively for the first time, laying the groundwork for what ultimately replaced the pre-industrial powers that were.
mr_toad 2y ago
> The Industrial Revolution devalued manual labor. Only some types. It caused a great number of people to be employed in manual labour, in the new factories. The shift to knowledge work came much later as factory work (and farming) became increasingly automated.