4 ms·

Just a reminder that AI safety is all of the following, and many other things: - Rogue AI scenario, which increasingly looks like a figment of collective imagi

Just a reminder that AI safety is all of the following, and many other things: - Rogue AI scenario, which increasingly looks like a figment of collective imagination of certain extremely smart people who discovered religions in their tech tree - Instructions on how to make nuclear weapons (are they scraping classified materials now?..) - Geopolitical games (don't let the adversary have what we have, "for the benefit of all humanity" is a red herring). - Spam/manipulation/botting/astroturfing (legit one, not nearly enough attention paid compared to others). - Erotic roleplay (prudish/thought policing), disturbing erotic roleplay (arguably a nothingburger, division is understandable). Turns out if you shove all that into one huge category of AI safety, the term becomes overloaded and meaningless.

gs17 2y ago
> Instructions on how to make nuclear weapons (are they scraping classified materials now?..) Presumably, a "smart enough" AI could work it the physics out the same way humans did to write those classified materials. It's still not a realistic threat unless we're banning physics textbooks as well, AFAIK the barrier more is the materials and equipment required than the principles.
- deleted 2y ago
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- ThrowawayTestr 2y ago
  If an LLM can figure out nukes from first principles I think we have bigger problems.
  - jchw 2y ago
    The idea that an LLM will spontaneously use its super-intelligence to somehow develop perfect plans for building weapons of mass destruction seem greatly misplaced. Think of all of the things that are not about intelligence that go into building something like that. It is of course feasible for someone to pull it off, which we know because we already did, but all we needed for that is ordinary human intelligence, the right knowledge, oh, and also (presumably) access to kilograms of weapons-grade plutonium, among many other things. Nobody ever really explains why normal nuclear non-proliferation efforts are insufficient to address the concerns. I get that the fear isn't always rational but it is rather mind-bending that these types of arguments are actually used in the real world in favor of some crazy regulation. I don't even really care that much about LLMs and I find it pretty perplexing.

gs17 2y ago

> Instructions on how to make nuclear weapons (are they scraping classified materials now?..) Presumably, a "smart enough" AI could work it the physics out the same way humans did to write those classified materials. It's still not a realistic threat unless we're banning physics textbooks as well, AFAIK the barrier more is the materials and equipment required than the principles.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
ThrowawayTestr 2y ago
If an LLM can figure out nukes from first principles I think we have bigger problems.
- jchw 2y ago
  The idea that an LLM will spontaneously use its super-intelligence to somehow develop perfect plans for building weapons of mass destruction seem greatly misplaced. Think of all of the things that are not about intelligence that go into building something like that. It is of course feasible for someone to pull it off, which we know because we already did, but all we needed for that is ordinary human intelligence, the right knowledge, oh, and also (presumably) access to kilograms of weapons-grade plutonium, among many other things. Nobody ever really explains why normal nuclear non-proliferation efforts are insufficient to address the concerns. I get that the fear isn't always rational but it is rather mind-bending that these types of arguments are actually used in the real world in favor of some crazy regulation. I don't even really care that much about LLMs and I find it pretty perplexing.