5 ms·
> Closest thing we have to a Manhattan Project in the modern era? Minus the urgency, scientific process, well-defined goals, target dates, public ownership, ac
by paxys 2y ago
> Closest thing we have to a Manhattan Project in the modern era?
Minus the urgency, scientific process, well-defined goals, target dates, public ownership, accountability...
- HPMOR 2y agoThe Manhattan Project had none of these things publicly declared. And Ilya is a top flight scientist.
- pclmulqdq 2y agoThe word "publicly" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. There is no indication that SSI has any of these at all.
- Quinner 2y agoIf public ownership means we give one guy a button to end the world, I'm not sure how's that's a meaningful difference.
- nativeit 2y agoWe all get to vote for that person.
- louthy 2y ago> all Some of you do. The rest of us are left with the consequences.
- latexr 2y agoWell, not exactly “we all”, just the citizens of the country in possession of the kill switch. And in some countries, the person in question was either not elected or elections are a farce to keep appearances.
- nwiswell 2y agoOh, that's super. I've been really impressed recently with the wisdom of our collective selections.
- vasco 2y agoNo one single person can cause a nuclear detonation alone.
- Quinner 2y agoThe President of the United States has sole nuclear launch authority. To stop him would either take the cabinet and VP invoking the 25th amendment and removing him from office, or a military officer to disobey direct orders.
- vasco 2y agoAre you under the impression the president can actually do it? It's not true, someone else at least needs to at least push another button. I'm 100% sure of what I said in regards to the USA, just not hidden nuke programs I wouldn't know about. No person in the USA can single handedly trigger a nuclear weapon launch. What he has authority to do is ask someone else to launch a nuke, and that person will then need to decide to do it. Even the president needs someone else to push a button (and in those rooms there's also more than one person). There's literally no human that can do it alone without convincing at least 1 or 2 other people, depending on who it is.
- wil421 2y agoPretty sure the military made it clear they aren’t launching any nukes, despite what the last President said publicly. They also made it clear they weren’t invading China. https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2017/11/18/politics/air-force-general-john-hyten-nuclear-strike-donald-trump https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2017/11/18/politics/air-force-genera... https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-58581296.amp https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-58581296.amp
- paxys 2y agoThe fact that the world hasn't ended and no nuke has been launched since the 1940s shows that the system is working. Give the button to a random billionaire and half of us will be dead by next week to improve profit margins.
- vunderba 2y agoBikini atoll and the islanders that no longer live there due to nuclear contamination would like a word with you. Split hairs however you like with the definition of "launch" but those tests went on well through the 1950s.
- __loam 2y agoA nuclear weapon hasn't been detonated in anger since 1945.
- whimsicalism 2y agonone of these things are true of public knowledge about the manhattan project… but oookay
- digging 2y agoInteresting attributes to mention... The urgency was faked and less true of the Manhattan Project than it is of AGI safety. There was no nuclear weapons race; once it became clear that Germany had no chance of building atomic bombs, several scientists left the MP in protest, saying it was unnecessary and dangerous. However, the race to develop AGI is very real, and we also have no way of knowing how close anyone is to reaching it. Likewise, the target dates were pretty meaningless. There was no race, and the atomic bombs weren't necessary to end the war with Japan either. (It can't be said with certainty one way or the other, but there's pretty strong evidence that their existence was not the decisive factor in surrender.) Public ownership and accountability are also pretty odd things to say! Congress didn't even know about the Manhattan Project. Even Truman didn't know for a long time. Sure, it was run by employees of the government and funded by the government, but it was a secret project with far less public input than any US-based private AI companies today.
- subsubzero 2y agoI agree and also disagree. > There was no nuclear weapons race; once it became clear that Germany had no chance of building atomic bombs, several scientists left the MP in protest You are forgetting Japan in WWII and given casualty numbers from island hopping it was going to be a absolutely huge casualty count with US troops, probably something on the order of Englands losses during WW1. Which for them sent them on a downward trajectory due to essentially an entire generation dying or being extremely traumatized. If the US did not have Nagasaki and Hiroshima we would probably not have the space program and US technical prowess post WWII, so a totally different reality than where we are today.
- chakintosh 2y ago... Hiroshima
- zombiwoof 2y agoAnd Nagasaki , not once but twice. Why? Just because
- lazide 2y agoOnce could be a fluke, twice sends an entirely different message.
- chakintosh 2y agoEven once is a -fluke- war crime.
- lazide 2y agoOppsie daisy. Still, you’d have to be quite an idiot to wait for the third time to listen eh? Besides, the winners get to decide what’s a war crime or not. And when the US started mass firebombing civilian Tokyo, it’s not like they were going to be able to just ‘meh, we’re good’ on that front. Compared to that hell, being nuked was humane. And I don’t say that lightly.
- chakintosh 2y agoBy that point, Japan was already on its way out and resorted to flying manned bombs and airplanes into american warships. Nuking Japan wasn't for Japan, it was a show of force for the soviets who were developing their own nukes.
- lazide 2y agoNeutralizing Japan the rest of the way would have cost millions of additional American lives, at a minimum. Japan was never going to surrender unless they saw the axe swinging for their neck, and knew they couldn’t dodge. They didn’t care about their own civilians. As made quite apparent by, as you note, kamikaze tactics and more. The Bomb was a cleaner, sharper, and faster Axe than invading the main island. That it also sent a message to the rest of the world was a bonus. But do you think they would have not used it, if for example the USSR wasn’t waiting? Of course not, they’d still have nuked the hell out of the Japanese.
- alexilliamson 2y agoWell-defined goal is the big one. We wanted a big bomb. What does AGI do? AGI is up against a philosophical barrier, not a technical one. We'll continue improving AI's ability to automate and assist human decisions, but how does it become something more? Something more "general"?
- lucubratory 2y ago"General" is every activity a human can do or learn to do. It was coined along with "narrow" to contrast with the then decidedly non-general AI systems. This was generally conceived of as a strict binary - every AI we've made is narrow, whereas humans are general, able to do a wide variety of tasks and do things like transfer learning, and the thinking was that we were missing some grand learning algorithm that would create a protointelligence which would be "general at birth" like a human baby, able to learn anything & everything in theory. An example of an AI system that is considered narrow is a calculator, or a chess engine - these are already superhuman in intelligence, in that they can perform their tasks better than any human ever possibly could, but a calculator or a chess engine is so narrow that it seems absurd to think of asking a calculator for an example of a healthy meal plan, or asking a chess engine to make sense of an expense report, or asking anything to write a memoir. Even in more modern times, with AlexNet we had a very impressive image recognition AI system, but it couldn't calculate large numbers or win a game of chess or write poetry - it was impressive, but still narrow. With transformers, demonstrated first by LLMs, I think we've shown that the narrow-general divide as a strict binary is the wrong way to think about AI. Instead, LLMs are obviously more general than any previous AI system, in that they can do math or play chess or write a poem, all using the same system. They aren't as good as our existing superhuman computer systems at these tasks (aside from language processing, which they are SOTA at), not even as good at humans, but they're obviously much better than chance. With training to use tools (like calculators and chess engines) you can easily make an AI system with an LLM component that's superhuman in those fields, but there are still things that LLMs cannot do as well as humans, even when using tools, so they are not fully general. One example is making tools for themselves to use - they can do a lot of parts of that work, but I haven't seen an example yet of an LLM actually making a tool for itself that it can then use to solve a problem it otherwise couldn't. This is a subproblem of the larger "LLMs don't have long term memory and long term planning abilities" problem - you can ask an LLM to use python to make a little tool for itself to do one specific task, but it's not yet capable of adding that tool to its general toolset to enhance its general capabilities going forward. It can't write a memoir, or a book that people want to read, because they suck at planning or refining from drafts, and they have limited creativity because they're typically a blank slate in terms of explicit memory before they're asked to write - they have a gargantuan of implicitly remembered things from training, which is where what creativity they do have comes from, but they don't yet have a way to accrue and benefit from experience. A thought exercise I think is helpful for understanding what the "AGI" benchmark should mean is: can this AI system be a drop-in substitute for a remote worker? As in, any labour that can be accomplished by a remote worker can be performed by it, including learning on the job to do different or new tasks, and including "designing and building AI systems". Such a system would be extremely economically valuable, and I think it should meet the bar of "AGI".
- berz01 2y agonailed it bro, someone give this man a podium