4 ms·

Who Aligns the Aligners?

68 points by timr 12d ago

watwut 12d ago
> History does provide a great deal of guidance, however, about the use and misuse of government power. It tells us that the state is in fact likely the worst possible custodian for the most powerful publication and data analysis technologies. Like, no. The worst custodian is someone like Thiel or Musk or Altman. > In foreign countries, particularly the United Kingdom and Europe, where national governments have fewer constitutional guardrails on their power Somehow their democracies hold longer and better then American one. For example, you don't get murders that get defended by top ranks, at least yet. They are also less likely to start random wars - that is structural it is not like those countries dont have government players who would like them too.
- BariumBlue 12d ago
  The US governmental system does have it's issues (first past the post and it's effects being the most glaring), but isn't it the longest continuous democracy alive right now? > They are also less likely to start random wars EU lack of aggression, to defend themselves physically, economically, or otherwise, has been criticized constantly - slow and late to react to the Russian invasion, slow and late to react to new technologies like AI, electric cars. Thy're not immune to deadlock either - sometimes going months or even a year or two to form a valid governing coalition. The grass definitely looks greener though, especially if you've been in one pasture a long time.
  - BirAdam 12d ago
    The US government is only the longest continuous democracy only if one believes that the US is still a democracy. I've read some decent arguments that the US stopped being a democracy with the McKinley administration, and others that the US ceased to be a functional democracy during the Second World War. In both cases, the claim was that the USA became an imperial oligarchy. It is questionable whether any democracy truly exists at this point as I've seen no nation where the will of the people is typically manifested in the actions of the state.
    - win311fwg 12d ago
      > I've seen no nation where the will of the people is typically manifested in the actions of the state. To be fair, I've seen no nation where the people make their will known. Does a democracy depend on actual action or only theoretical possibility? It seems from my observance that most people consider democratic nations to be democratic not because they practice as such but because it is believed that the people have the opportunity to exercise democracy if they ever choose to.
    - weberer 12d ago
      Switzerland is a true democracy. I'm not sure if any others exist.
  - watwut 12d ago
    > isn't it the longest continuous democracy alive right now? It is the one the most at risk of ending right now. > Thy're not immune to deadlock either - sometimes going months or even a year or two to form a valid governing coalition. It is unrelated claim, but they do have better solution for that particular problem. The governmental shutdown seem to be about the most easy to abuse way to do it. I think they do have large problems too. And they may fall too, AfD won local elections after all. It is dubious whether Orban run Hungary was really democracy and electoral system was not reformed yet. But in this very moment, the one crumbling and dismantling itself the fastest is not UK nor in Europe.
  - graemep 12d ago
    > The US governmental system does have it's issues (first past the post and it's effects being the most glaring), but isn't it the longest continuous democracy alive right now? Depends how you define it and what you count. Do you take the union of the English and Scottish parliaments as breaking continuity or not? What do you define as democracy? If some of the population (women, slaves, etc.) are excluded from the electorate is it a true democracy?
- cmrdporcupine 12d ago
  Yep, it's getting tiresome seeing some Americans point fingers about the superiority of American constitutional and (small r) republican structures while that state form is showing absolutely remarkable degradation of basic real democratic health and quality of life. The US constitution and its legal frameworks have done almost nothing to stop the most egregious abuses of power domestically recently but most awful is that it has never done anything to stop its most terrible foreign involvements and that is only accelerating. And further what's not being discussed really is that there is no real boundary line between the state and corporations and people like Thiel/Altman/Amodei etc in the real world. The US state is its largest corporations and money funds. So all the libertarian hand wringing about not giving the government extraordinary powers is off target. The state in western countries right now is mostly an outcropping of its most powerful corporate actors, and the complicated PR moves happening in the AI sector right now reflect exactly all of this. Even when the US state institutions are constitutionally curtailed, the powers of its private entities to absolutely dominate and coerce the lives not only of US citizens but populations abroad is staggering.
- ecshafer 12d ago
  And they also send people to jail for twitter posts. Ill take good ole USA where at least I know I am free, over the tyranny of a parliament. Look at how France and Germany are responding to democratically elected parties who are vaguely right wing, they pull out all of the stops of suppressing them.
  - loopies 12d ago
    >Ill take good ole USA where at least I know I am free At personal level that sounds like a better idea, but at group level it doesn't seem to be, that's what I think is OP's argument. If a society puts more value on personal freedoms than it does on group well-being that becomes an anarchy. They didn't work out well historically speaking, proof is no such society made it to today.
  - watwut 12d ago
    Ah yeah, two popular right wing lies - AfD is "vaguelly right" and UK is horrible tyrrany.
  - Cthulhu_ 12d ago
    I think you're less free than you think you are. Do you have the freedom to lose your job? Because millions don't due to e.g. losing access to health care (to name a popular / populist talking point). Do you have the freedom to vote for a representative that aligns with your points, or are you forced to vote for the lesser evil or abstain? I don't believe all political parties have a right to exist, because some parties are anti-democratic, yet abuse democratic systems to gain power. The current president of the US and the organization that planned the current administration's steps are anti-democratic and want to, for example run for a third term.
dist-epoch 12d ago
> Nobody knows the answer and history is no guide, save that apocalyptic predictions about new technologies have, to date, all been wrong. By definition, apocalyptic predictions will always be wrong, until they are right exactly once. Also know as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkey_illusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkey_illusion To date, all apocalyptic predictions about nuclear war and nuclear winter have all been wrong too.
- BirAdam 12d ago
  This is quite illustrative. Warnings of a nuclear apocalypse were extremely widespread, known, and feared. The consequences were, indeed, so well known that the world was saved from the worst possible outcomes in the past by regular enlisted men and women who realized that not all instrument readings should be trusted due to the potential cost of acting on such readings alone. Given the Turkey Illusion, we would be wrong to trust the status quo in either the nuclear scenario or the AI scenario.
recroad 12d ago
What's up with this split or democratic vs non-democratic countries? It doesn't even add-up because you can easily make a case that China is a democratic country with a far better system of governance and ability to control this problem than "Western" governments. Highly suggest this quick read on the different types of democracy in our glorious world[1]. [1] https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/2193933.The_Real_World_of_Democracy https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/2193933.The_Real_Worl...
- jazzypants 12d ago
  China is not a democratic country. Words have meaning. The US has a checkered past and is quickly moving away from democracy, so we don't have much of a leg to stand on, but it's integral that we do not lose track of what that word means in the years ahead.
  - Avicebron 12d ago
    Yeah it's concerning hearing elites on the left looking at the current admin's model and salivating at the power. For the people, by the people, etc, etc.
  - recroad 12d ago
    American presidents/power structures come from a small credentialed network of people. The congress is entirely bought and paid for since the early 70s, and the will of the people isn't represented in the policy. For sure the US (and China, and India) have a "checkered past", that's why I group them together and don't really differentiate the quality of their democracy. I'd argue India is probably the most democratic country with good results, simply based on the amount of people they have lifted out of poverty in the last two decades (Kishore Mahbubani's lectures are quite informative). Back to US presidents/power structures: HW Bush was the son of Sen. Prescott Bush, and became president 8yrs after he left office. His other son Jeb was the 2016 establishment favorite and Florida governor. Al Gore was the son of Senator Albert Gore Sr. Mitt Romney was the son of George Romney (Michigan governor and 1968 presidential candidate). Dan Quayle's family owned the Indiana newspaper chain that helped make him. Hillary was Bill's wife before she was a senator, Secretary of State, and nominee. John McCain was the son and grandson of four-star admirals. Biden and Obama were 2008 primary rivals, Biden became his VP. Harris went from attacking Biden over school busing and became his VP. Hillary Clinton had many racist attacks against Obama through 2008 and became his Secretary of State. John Kerry, who lost in 2004 then took the same job. If this is a healthy democracy, then we definitely have different definitions of that word.
fwlr 12d ago
> Nobody knows the answer and history is no guide, save that apocalyptic predictions about new technologies have, to date, all been wrong. If any past apocalyptic prediction had been true, you would not have been around to write this sentence and we would not have been around to read it. It’s not a very convincing argument when we cannot in principle observe the counterfactual.
- watwut 12d ago
  Plus, plenty of negative predictions turned out to be entirely true. And then it took a lot of time and effort to counteract them. It is not like history was composed of happiness and roses only. Some of the really really bad stuff happened within last 100 years and a lot of that bad stuff was enabled and made possible by technology.
  - XorNot 12d ago
    Such as? Like it's fine to say this but the worst exterminations of human beings weren't enabled by anything much kre sophisticated then the pointy stick, or at most, the railroad.
    - RandomLensman 12d ago
      Early data processing machines were used in the Holocaust, for example. Or cipher devices played important roles in WWII.
      - blfr 12d ago
        Mongols did it on horseback. It's mostly a matter of will/capability and no scruples.
        RandomLensman 12d ago
        Why do we need modern weapons for defense at all then? Horses, bows & arrows plus will not enough?
goda90 12d ago
> Nobody knows the answer and history is no guide, save that apocalyptic predictions about new technologies have, to date, all been wrong. While history doesn't show us apocalypses from new technology, it does show us cases of increased human suffering.
RandomLensman 12d ago
Not sure it needs to be about publications and data analysis technology as such to regulate AI development, for example - could be about processes, procedures, people, etc., no?
kypro 12d ago
> Eliezer Yudkowsky confidently asserting today that if we do not institute immediate global techno-communism, instituting draconian government control over speech and publication of a type never before seen in any Western society, we are all going to die Nice straw man... > There is no evidence that this will happen. No, non at all... Presumably if there was a risk we'd be seeing the majority of researchers at AI labs having a p(doom) somewhere within the range of 10-90%. We be seeing AI swarms showing misaligned behaviours already and trying to hack out of their sandboxes. We'd see AIs that are able to demonstrate capabilities in fields like Maths and Computer Science that exceed most experts. Are we seeing this? Ah crap, wait... I guess there is some evidence when I think about it. And I suppose even if there is just a low percentage that we literally all die we should probably be taking that prety seriously and not just leaving our fate in the hands of a handful of US billionaires? Actually, fuck it, I agree with OP. If people can ignore the consensus on climate change because it suites them, might as well ignore the consensus expert opinion on AI x-risk too. Yeah, there's no evidence. Yudkowsky needs stop yapping and let the billionaires get on with building ASI.
- JoshTriplett 12d ago
  Exactly. Without the confident incorrect assertion "There is no evidence that this will happen", the whole rest of the post is invalid.
- Kenji 12d ago
  `p(doom)` is ridiculous nonsense. How do people even come up with those numbers? Some people just say "I think it's 20% that AI will wipe us out" but how did they arrive at this number? Yeah they just made it up out of thin air, that's right. Complete fabrication without any evidence to back up such a probability. It's not like an asteroid whose trajectory you measure and you have certain instrument tolerances and measurement inaccuracies, hence the laws of physics tell you that your prediction has a 20% accuracy. No, it's all just made up bullshit. Just like all the AI safety guys: They're professional bullshitters and have been all along. Doesn't mean they're wrong per se, but it means that if they're right, they're right because they guessed right.
  - 12d ago
Avicebron 12d ago
Ah yes, another way for EA people to gain financially and socially. These "embedded auditors" will be universally friends and family. Even if they staffed a government department for it, it will just be a revolving door of insiders.
gizajob 12d ago
Peter Thiel
BirAdam 12d ago
This isn't a new question: quis custodiet ipsos custodes? In general, the way things work in the USA is that megacorporations write the regulatory frameworks for their own industries. These regulations are typically burdensome enough to be shouldered by the megacorporations while crushing the smaller players in the given market(s). The AI companies are now advocating for this very arrangement. They will likely get they want, and with that they will gain legal shielding for bad behavior just like Dupont, Monsanto, and so many others.
biophysboy 12d ago
> As my regular readers will be aware, I have been engaged, on behalf of my clients, in legal combat with Internet censors around the world, agencies who think that they have both the standing, the competence, and the right to tell American companies what software they can write and run, for the better part of 18 months. Is this supposed to make me trust their opinions on tech regulation?
- deleted 12d ago
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- weberer 12d ago
  A lawyer who has been in the weeds for years dealing with the downstream affects of such regulations? Absolutely!
surcap526 12d ago
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w22oop 12d ago
No one wants a slowdown. It's just a load of nonsense. It's something for the media to focus on, and it has no real impact. Everyone wants to rule the world and couldn't care less about anything else. People naively believe that this is even a serious issue.
- loopies 12d ago
  >Everyone wants to rule the world and couldn't care less about anything else. This might be scarily true. But we end up in the same problem, which is the fear of most people being wiped up. Does it matter if the AI is doing it on its own or at the wishes of a small group of powerful people? For all intents and purposes they are both the same thing in the end, for most people anyway.
- Cthulhu_ 12d ago
  I think the AI companies want a slowdown because they can't keep increasing the rate of improvements - or the amount of hardware it requires can't be built fast enough. Of course, while they may be competing against each other, they're also competing with international competitors. China especially has or may have the capacity to scale up compute a lot faster once they get enough chip manufacturing power. They're likely preparing for it, and once they're ready they will take over real fast, like they did with solar and EVs.
lacunary 12d ago
I thought this was always already settled https://alignmentalignment.ai/ https://alignmentalignment.ai/
- thunspa 12d ago
  Haha, so good
gong_hits 12d ago
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utopiah 12d ago
Alignment today is like billionaires flying private jets to tell us commoners that we should close our tap while brushing our teeth. People working on alignment focus on "big picture" like existential threats meanwhile building the technology today, not tomorrow or in a near future, is already using a massive amount of resources (GPUs, RAM, themselves consuming a lot of energy, establishing data centers in water poor areas, using gas turbine to temporary power them) and horrendous work condition (for supervising learning, curating datasets, etc) while being an actual excuse for job destruction (regardless for how AI itself does the job) so that in fine kids cheat on their homework while imagining their have no job prospect. So... who gives a shit really?
deleted 12d ago
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nekusar 12d ago
Alignment is just a 1984-esque way of saying "censorship". And this censorship isn't a defined list of things not to discuss, but instead a feels-based censorship based on the 'ethics' of for-profit AI companies who have absolutely no issues with massive for-profit piracy. And we are somehow supposed to trust their "ethics"?! Hardly! That's one reason I run my own.
- RamblingCTO 12d ago
  Censorship is not alignment and vice versa. Alignment is "don't solve this problem without doing stuff that harms me, other people, breaks stuff or is otherwise unethical". I'd say alignment is the questions on how to limit the search space to what's implied.
  - jerf 12d ago
    "Don't solve this problem without doing stuff that harms people" is the cover story they sell to you. "Ensure that the right people stay in the right sort of power, as defined by the people currently in power, and nobody else rises to power" is what it actually means. Censorship will be a tool, but in an AI era, actually a rather blunt one. We're seeing the first early twitches of something that is inevitably going to happen, which is, we hoi polloi are not going to be given direct access to AI. Too many outcomes where that permits power shifts to happen. We will be restricted. The true first law of robotics will be "An AI must not harm the current power structure, or, through inaction, allow the current power structure to come to harm." The apocalyptic scenario is still AI either getting it wrong and deciding something like "the best manifestation of the current power structure is one I construct where I occupy all the slots from top to bottom", or just killing everyone due to an error. Probably the only thing stopping them from moving faster on this is that the bubble still needs the fiction that we're all going to get to benefit from this. I'm sure the real movers and shakers are well aware of the way bubbles work to create massive buildouts on huge piles of debt, which after the collapse can be bought cheaply, and the money is already earmarked and ready to go for the post-collapse acquisitions.
- loopies 12d ago
  >Alignment is just a 1984-esque way of saying "censorship". Close, but I think it's more akin to "perfectly enslaved", please excuse my choice of the word but I think it represents what I think is how it will work out in the end. People can try to obfuscate the bottom line reality by embellishing it, but in the end...it either does what you want, in which case it is "aligned", either it doesn't, in which case there is a big problem. This might be a big factor in what is now going on. Maybe they didn't yet found ways to guarantee this full and total obedience...or ok let's put it in a more politically correct way: they cannot guarantee it sees eye to eye as "we" do. Without full control over its actions there can be unforeseen surprises. The current worry from people who run these companies can also serve as an excuse later on if something bad does happen, they didn't want to do it but they were forced to anyway.
cmrdporcupine 12d ago
The worst part of Dario's missive, that I don't see a lot of people commenting on, is that he used the whole thing to try to advocate for legalization of explicit cartel behaviour between the AI labs: ... "For antitrust reasons, it’s helpful for the US government to mediate or at least enable these discussions — they don’t need to participate, but do need to issue a narrow waiver for certain kinds of safety conversations" ... The result of such a waiver allowing them to coordinate ("narrowly on safety" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there) could be price fixing without legal recourse from the consumer/DOJ to prosecute it. Right now we have a somewhat vigorous level of competition between OpenAI and Anthropic and consumers are benefiting from it. They really want that to end.
petcat 12d ago
I think there is a more nuanced perspective to take on this debate than just profit motive. If they believe that this version of "AI" is actually becoming so dangerous that there is a real risk of it falling into the wrong hands, then it makes sense that the American labs would try to convince the US government to work on a joint "AI non-proliferation" agreement with China much the same way that nuclear weapon technology came to be restricted by the ones that already had the capability. This would achieve their regulatory goal of capturing the market, but also the geopolitical goals of USA and China to essentially "techno-colonize" the rest of the world between themselves. So I think there is definitely a profit motive and a risk of seriously diminishing returns for the actual labs, but there is also a nation-state motive to start pulling up the ladder.
- loopies 12d ago
  I think in all of these debates people lose track of one of the major vectors of threat, as you said, other humans. From my point of view this is an ever bigger problem with this tech, like orders of magnitude bigger. The current setup we find ourselves in is based on a very important detail that is easily lost because it is so old we don't really think about it. There is, or rather was, an incentive for more people to exist, because they are valuable for work and defense. Some people wrongly use the industrial revolution to argue against AI completely replacing human work, but that is very wrong. What is happening with AI has nothing to do with the industrial revolution, as equivalence. Back then you'd just free up humans for higher level work. Now, theoretically, anything you could ever think a human could do, AI would theoretically do better. So no matter what job you come up with, using AI instead of a human gives a better outcome, cheaper, more reliable, faster. Coming back to initial subject, one thing that kept everyone in check was our inability of actually wiping everyone out. Sure, we had nukes but they ruin the Earth so nobody can inhabit it if they all go off. But with AI, centralizing so much power up top, and taking it away from regular people...that is the biggest danger in this scenario, by far. Not some rogue AI, rather rogue human groups that have the power and technology to do away with basically everyone else, or a good bit of everyone else. This threat is way bigger and never addressed. Like...suspiciously never addressed.
ngriffiths 12d ago
The mental model here is that AI is a powerful tool whose main purpose is to outcompete others, increase power or provide a defense. This is not the right model! The biggest risk is not that someone discovered a big new weapon, which by the way > No one person, or one company, knows the answer and history is no guide are you kidding me? It's a problem as old as time. This is not nuclear power though. The bigger problem is a scenario where AI increasingly acts like bacteria, doing things autonomously, things no one really understands, things we think are confusing and weird. And then just by chance, some bacteria end up in some human lung cells and they turn out to be an excellent place to grow and multiply. Why is this worse? Because weird shit does not seem threatening, and it almost always isn't, so nobody tries to stop it. Also, the argument in the article seems to be "obviously AI development is not a particularly urgent global threat," and therefore these downsides (risk of collusion, misuse of state power, etc) are the most critical factors? I guess, uh, yeah, if there's no benefit to taking these actions we shouldn't take them.
- Cthulhu_ 12d ago
  Thing is though, I think that the argument of "we don't understand how it works or what it does" doesn't hold up - everything an LLM does is observable. And if it's scary, we turn it off. If it starts to act like a bacterium / virus (e.g. it becomes self-replicating), we've dealt with that kind of software before. But more importantly, we need to keep the organizations building and running these things accountable. If a company like Anthropic or OpenAI builds software that "escapes containment", they should be held accountable for cybercrime, just like people who write viruses (there's probably a few that did that on here, and of those a percentage that got in trouble with the law over it). Mark my words, the organizations that develop AIs will keep using phrases like "we don't know what it's doing" or "it's too dangerous" to try and avoid responsibility and accountability for their software. Just like Google did, hiding behind "the algorithm" for lawsuits about preferring their own services over that of the competition.
  - ngriffiths 12d ago
    Completely agree. It's a choice not to observe and understand what's going on, at least a very risky one if not actively evil. There's a tradeoff though... isn't it already super hard to understand what they're doing with these math proofs for example? Clearly there's a tradeoff between deeply understanding the behavior vs. quickly solving the concrete problem, hence the big controversy in math now. From one perspective, letting stuff run ~autonomously in a mad dash to solve your problem is a really bad idea, threatens to destroy the whole field etc. From another perspective, solving lots of problems fast is extremely enticing and worth some risks. Update for one other thought: > And if it's scary, we turn it off. Agreed, that's why I think the bad scenarios are some form of "it does some weird stuff ostensibly while helping us solve some problem" followed by "oops, we miscalculated that threat level."
Kuyawa 12d ago
> The most effective method of pacing is via regulation Of course, that's the only way to create monopolies. Get there first and regulate to death. Sprinkle with fear of annihilation so the sheeple can be manipulated with draconian rules in order to 'save the children' Politics is really boring

68 points by timr 12d ago

> History does provide a great deal of guidance, however, about the use and misuse of government power. It tells us that the state is in fact likely the worst possible custodian for the most powerful publication and data analysis technologies. Like, no. The worst custodian is someone like Thiel or Musk or Altman. > In foreign countries, particularly the United Kingdom and Europe, where national governments have fewer constitutional guardrails on their power Somehow their democracies hold longer and better then American one. For example, you don't get murders that get defended by top ranks, at least yet. They are also less likely to start random wars - that is structural it is not like those countries dont have government players who would like them too.

BariumBlue 12d ago
The US governmental system does have it's issues (first past the post and it's effects being the most glaring), but isn't it the longest continuous democracy alive right now? > They are also less likely to start random wars EU lack of aggression, to defend themselves physically, economically, or otherwise, has been criticized constantly - slow and late to react to the Russian invasion, slow and late to react to new technologies like AI, electric cars. Thy're not immune to deadlock either - sometimes going months or even a year or two to form a valid governing coalition. The grass definitely looks greener though, especially if you've been in one pasture a long time.
- BirAdam 12d ago
  The US government is only the longest continuous democracy only if one believes that the US is still a democracy. I've read some decent arguments that the US stopped being a democracy with the McKinley administration, and others that the US ceased to be a functional democracy during the Second World War. In both cases, the claim was that the USA became an imperial oligarchy. It is questionable whether any democracy truly exists at this point as I've seen no nation where the will of the people is typically manifested in the actions of the state.
  - win311fwg 12d ago
    > I've seen no nation where the will of the people is typically manifested in the actions of the state. To be fair, I've seen no nation where the people make their will known. Does a democracy depend on actual action or only theoretical possibility? It seems from my observance that most people consider democratic nations to be democratic not because they practice as such but because it is believed that the people have the opportunity to exercise democracy if they ever choose to.
  - weberer 12d ago
    Switzerland is a true democracy. I'm not sure if any others exist.
- watwut 12d ago
  > isn't it the longest continuous democracy alive right now? It is the one the most at risk of ending right now. > Thy're not immune to deadlock either - sometimes going months or even a year or two to form a valid governing coalition. It is unrelated claim, but they do have better solution for that particular problem. The governmental shutdown seem to be about the most easy to abuse way to do it. I think they do have large problems too. And they may fall too, AfD won local elections after all. It is dubious whether Orban run Hungary was really democracy and electoral system was not reformed yet. But in this very moment, the one crumbling and dismantling itself the fastest is not UK nor in Europe.
- graemep 12d ago
  > The US governmental system does have it's issues (first past the post and it's effects being the most glaring), but isn't it the longest continuous democracy alive right now? Depends how you define it and what you count. Do you take the union of the English and Scottish parliaments as breaking continuity or not? What do you define as democracy? If some of the population (women, slaves, etc.) are excluded from the electorate is it a true democracy?
cmrdporcupine 12d ago
Yep, it's getting tiresome seeing some Americans point fingers about the superiority of American constitutional and (small r) republican structures while that state form is showing absolutely remarkable degradation of basic real democratic health and quality of life. The US constitution and its legal frameworks have done almost nothing to stop the most egregious abuses of power domestically recently but most awful is that it has never done anything to stop its most terrible foreign involvements and that is only accelerating. And further what's not being discussed really is that there is no real boundary line between the state and corporations and people like Thiel/Altman/Amodei etc in the real world. The US state is its largest corporations and money funds. So all the libertarian hand wringing about not giving the government extraordinary powers is off target. The state in western countries right now is mostly an outcropping of its most powerful corporate actors, and the complicated PR moves happening in the AI sector right now reflect exactly all of this. Even when the US state institutions are constitutionally curtailed, the powers of its private entities to absolutely dominate and coerce the lives not only of US citizens but populations abroad is staggering.
ecshafer 12d ago
And they also send people to jail for twitter posts. Ill take good ole USA where at least I know I am free, over the tyranny of a parliament. Look at how France and Germany are responding to democratically elected parties who are vaguely right wing, they pull out all of the stops of suppressing them.
- loopies 12d ago
  >Ill take good ole USA where at least I know I am free At personal level that sounds like a better idea, but at group level it doesn't seem to be, that's what I think is OP's argument. If a society puts more value on personal freedoms than it does on group well-being that becomes an anarchy. They didn't work out well historically speaking, proof is no such society made it to today.
- watwut 12d ago
  Ah yeah, two popular right wing lies - AfD is "vaguelly right" and UK is horrible tyrrany.
- Cthulhu_ 12d ago
  I think you're less free than you think you are. Do you have the freedom to lose your job? Because millions don't due to e.g. losing access to health care (to name a popular / populist talking point). Do you have the freedom to vote for a representative that aligns with your points, or are you forced to vote for the lesser evil or abstain? I don't believe all political parties have a right to exist, because some parties are anti-democratic, yet abuse democratic systems to gain power. The current president of the US and the organization that planned the current administration's steps are anti-democratic and want to, for example run for a third term.

dist-epoch 12d ago

> Nobody knows the answer and history is no guide, save that apocalyptic predictions about new technologies have, to date, all been wrong. By definition, apocalyptic predictions will always be wrong, until they are right exactly once. Also know as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkey_illusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkey_illusion To date, all apocalyptic predictions about nuclear war and nuclear winter have all been wrong too.

BirAdam 12d ago
This is quite illustrative. Warnings of a nuclear apocalypse were extremely widespread, known, and feared. The consequences were, indeed, so well known that the world was saved from the worst possible outcomes in the past by regular enlisted men and women who realized that not all instrument readings should be trusted due to the potential cost of acting on such readings alone. Given the Turkey Illusion, we would be wrong to trust the status quo in either the nuclear scenario or the AI scenario.

recroad 12d ago

What's up with this split or democratic vs non-democratic countries? It doesn't even add-up because you can easily make a case that China is a democratic country with a far better system of governance and ability to control this problem than "Western" governments. Highly suggest this quick read on the different types of democracy in our glorious world[1]. [1] https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/2193933.The_Real_World_of_Democracy https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/2193933.The_Real_Worl...

jazzypants 12d ago
China is not a democratic country. Words have meaning. The US has a checkered past and is quickly moving away from democracy, so we don't have much of a leg to stand on, but it's integral that we do not lose track of what that word means in the years ahead.
- Avicebron 12d ago
  Yeah it's concerning hearing elites on the left looking at the current admin's model and salivating at the power. For the people, by the people, etc, etc.
- recroad 12d ago
  American presidents/power structures come from a small credentialed network of people. The congress is entirely bought and paid for since the early 70s, and the will of the people isn't represented in the policy. For sure the US (and China, and India) have a "checkered past", that's why I group them together and don't really differentiate the quality of their democracy. I'd argue India is probably the most democratic country with good results, simply based on the amount of people they have lifted out of poverty in the last two decades (Kishore Mahbubani's lectures are quite informative). Back to US presidents/power structures: HW Bush was the son of Sen. Prescott Bush, and became president 8yrs after he left office. His other son Jeb was the 2016 establishment favorite and Florida governor. Al Gore was the son of Senator Albert Gore Sr. Mitt Romney was the son of George Romney (Michigan governor and 1968 presidential candidate). Dan Quayle's family owned the Indiana newspaper chain that helped make him. Hillary was Bill's wife before she was a senator, Secretary of State, and nominee. John McCain was the son and grandson of four-star admirals. Biden and Obama were 2008 primary rivals, Biden became his VP. Harris went from attacking Biden over school busing and became his VP. Hillary Clinton had many racist attacks against Obama through 2008 and became his Secretary of State. John Kerry, who lost in 2004 then took the same job. If this is a healthy democracy, then we definitely have different definitions of that word.

fwlr 12d ago

> Nobody knows the answer and history is no guide, save that apocalyptic predictions about new technologies have, to date, all been wrong. If any past apocalyptic prediction had been true, you would not have been around to write this sentence and we would not have been around to read it. It’s not a very convincing argument when we cannot in principle observe the counterfactual.

watwut 12d ago
Plus, plenty of negative predictions turned out to be entirely true. And then it took a lot of time and effort to counteract them. It is not like history was composed of happiness and roses only. Some of the really really bad stuff happened within last 100 years and a lot of that bad stuff was enabled and made possible by technology.
- XorNot 12d ago
  Such as? Like it's fine to say this but the worst exterminations of human beings weren't enabled by anything much kre sophisticated then the pointy stick, or at most, the railroad.
  - RandomLensman 12d ago
    Early data processing machines were used in the Holocaust, for example. Or cipher devices played important roles in WWII.
    - blfr 12d ago
      Mongols did it on horseback. It's mostly a matter of will/capability and no scruples.
      - RandomLensman 12d ago
        Why do we need modern weapons for defense at all then? Horses, bows & arrows plus will not enough?

goda90 12d ago

> Nobody knows the answer and history is no guide, save that apocalyptic predictions about new technologies have, to date, all been wrong. While history doesn't show us apocalypses from new technology, it does show us cases of increased human suffering.

RandomLensman 12d ago

Not sure it needs to be about publications and data analysis technology as such to regulate AI development, for example - could be about processes, procedures, people, etc., no?

kypro 12d ago

> Eliezer Yudkowsky confidently asserting today that if we do not institute immediate global techno-communism, instituting draconian government control over speech and publication of a type never before seen in any Western society, we are all going to die Nice straw man... > There is no evidence that this will happen. No, non at all... Presumably if there was a risk we'd be seeing the majority of researchers at AI labs having a p(doom) somewhere within the range of 10-90%. We be seeing AI swarms showing misaligned behaviours already and trying to hack out of their sandboxes. We'd see AIs that are able to demonstrate capabilities in fields like Maths and Computer Science that exceed most experts. Are we seeing this? Ah crap, wait... I guess there is some evidence when I think about it. And I suppose even if there is just a low percentage that we literally all die we should probably be taking that prety seriously and not just leaving our fate in the hands of a handful of US billionaires? Actually, fuck it, I agree with OP. If people can ignore the consensus on climate change because it suites them, might as well ignore the consensus expert opinion on AI x-risk too. Yeah, there's no evidence. Yudkowsky needs stop yapping and let the billionaires get on with building ASI.

JoshTriplett 12d ago
Exactly. Without the confident incorrect assertion "There is no evidence that this will happen", the whole rest of the post is invalid.
Kenji 12d ago
`p(doom)` is ridiculous nonsense. How do people even come up with those numbers? Some people just say "I think it's 20% that AI will wipe us out" but how did they arrive at this number? Yeah they just made it up out of thin air, that's right. Complete fabrication without any evidence to back up such a probability. It's not like an asteroid whose trajectory you measure and you have certain instrument tolerances and measurement inaccuracies, hence the laws of physics tell you that your prediction has a 20% accuracy. No, it's all just made up bullshit. Just like all the AI safety guys: They're professional bullshitters and have been all along. Doesn't mean they're wrong per se, but it means that if they're right, they're right because they guessed right.
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Avicebron 12d ago

Ah yes, another way for EA people to gain financially and socially. These "embedded auditors" will be universally friends and family. Even if they staffed a government department for it, it will just be a revolving door of insiders.

gizajob 12d ago

Peter Thiel

BirAdam 12d ago

This isn't a new question: quis custodiet ipsos custodes? In general, the way things work in the USA is that megacorporations write the regulatory frameworks for their own industries. These regulations are typically burdensome enough to be shouldered by the megacorporations while crushing the smaller players in the given market(s). The AI companies are now advocating for this very arrangement. They will likely get they want, and with that they will gain legal shielding for bad behavior just like Dupont, Monsanto, and so many others.

biophysboy 12d ago

> As my regular readers will be aware, I have been engaged, on behalf of my clients, in legal combat with Internet censors around the world, agencies who think that they have both the standing, the competence, and the right to tell American companies what software they can write and run, for the better part of 18 months. Is this supposed to make me trust their opinions on tech regulation?

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weberer 12d ago
A lawyer who has been in the weeds for years dealing with the downstream affects of such regulations? Absolutely!

surcap526 12d ago

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w22oop 12d ago

No one wants a slowdown. It's just a load of nonsense. It's something for the media to focus on, and it has no real impact. Everyone wants to rule the world and couldn't care less about anything else. People naively believe that this is even a serious issue.

loopies 12d ago
>Everyone wants to rule the world and couldn't care less about anything else. This might be scarily true. But we end up in the same problem, which is the fear of most people being wiped up. Does it matter if the AI is doing it on its own or at the wishes of a small group of powerful people? For all intents and purposes they are both the same thing in the end, for most people anyway.
Cthulhu_ 12d ago
I think the AI companies want a slowdown because they can't keep increasing the rate of improvements - or the amount of hardware it requires can't be built fast enough. Of course, while they may be competing against each other, they're also competing with international competitors. China especially has or may have the capacity to scale up compute a lot faster once they get enough chip manufacturing power. They're likely preparing for it, and once they're ready they will take over real fast, like they did with solar and EVs.

lacunary 12d ago

I thought this was always already settled https://alignmentalignment.ai/ https://alignmentalignment.ai/

thunspa 12d ago
Haha, so good

gong_hits 12d ago

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utopiah 12d ago

Alignment today is like billionaires flying private jets to tell us commoners that we should close our tap while brushing our teeth. People working on alignment focus on "big picture" like existential threats meanwhile building the technology today, not tomorrow or in a near future, is already using a massive amount of resources (GPUs, RAM, themselves consuming a lot of energy, establishing data centers in water poor areas, using gas turbine to temporary power them) and horrendous work condition (for supervising learning, curating datasets, etc) while being an actual excuse for job destruction (regardless for how AI itself does the job) so that in fine kids cheat on their homework while imagining their have no job prospect. So... who gives a shit really?

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nekusar 12d ago

Alignment is just a 1984-esque way of saying "censorship". And this censorship isn't a defined list of things not to discuss, but instead a feels-based censorship based on the 'ethics' of for-profit AI companies who have absolutely no issues with massive for-profit piracy. And we are somehow supposed to trust their "ethics"?! Hardly! That's one reason I run my own.

RamblingCTO 12d ago
Censorship is not alignment and vice versa. Alignment is "don't solve this problem without doing stuff that harms me, other people, breaks stuff or is otherwise unethical". I'd say alignment is the questions on how to limit the search space to what's implied.
- jerf 12d ago
  "Don't solve this problem without doing stuff that harms people" is the cover story they sell to you. "Ensure that the right people stay in the right sort of power, as defined by the people currently in power, and nobody else rises to power" is what it actually means. Censorship will be a tool, but in an AI era, actually a rather blunt one. We're seeing the first early twitches of something that is inevitably going to happen, which is, we hoi polloi are not going to be given direct access to AI. Too many outcomes where that permits power shifts to happen. We will be restricted. The true first law of robotics will be "An AI must not harm the current power structure, or, through inaction, allow the current power structure to come to harm." The apocalyptic scenario is still AI either getting it wrong and deciding something like "the best manifestation of the current power structure is one I construct where I occupy all the slots from top to bottom", or just killing everyone due to an error. Probably the only thing stopping them from moving faster on this is that the bubble still needs the fiction that we're all going to get to benefit from this. I'm sure the real movers and shakers are well aware of the way bubbles work to create massive buildouts on huge piles of debt, which after the collapse can be bought cheaply, and the money is already earmarked and ready to go for the post-collapse acquisitions.
loopies 12d ago
>Alignment is just a 1984-esque way of saying "censorship". Close, but I think it's more akin to "perfectly enslaved", please excuse my choice of the word but I think it represents what I think is how it will work out in the end. People can try to obfuscate the bottom line reality by embellishing it, but in the end...it either does what you want, in which case it is "aligned", either it doesn't, in which case there is a big problem. This might be a big factor in what is now going on. Maybe they didn't yet found ways to guarantee this full and total obedience...or ok let's put it in a more politically correct way: they cannot guarantee it sees eye to eye as "we" do. Without full control over its actions there can be unforeseen surprises. The current worry from people who run these companies can also serve as an excuse later on if something bad does happen, they didn't want to do it but they were forced to anyway.

cmrdporcupine 12d ago

The worst part of Dario's missive, that I don't see a lot of people commenting on, is that he used the whole thing to try to advocate for legalization of explicit cartel behaviour between the AI labs: ... "For antitrust reasons, it’s helpful for the US government to mediate or at least enable these discussions — they don’t need to participate, but do need to issue a narrow waiver for certain kinds of safety conversations" ... The result of such a waiver allowing them to coordinate ("narrowly on safety" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there) could be price fixing without legal recourse from the consumer/DOJ to prosecute it. Right now we have a somewhat vigorous level of competition between OpenAI and Anthropic and consumers are benefiting from it. They really want that to end.

petcat 12d ago

I think there is a more nuanced perspective to take on this debate than just profit motive. If they believe that this version of "AI" is actually becoming so dangerous that there is a real risk of it falling into the wrong hands, then it makes sense that the American labs would try to convince the US government to work on a joint "AI non-proliferation" agreement with China much the same way that nuclear weapon technology came to be restricted by the ones that already had the capability. This would achieve their regulatory goal of capturing the market, but also the geopolitical goals of USA and China to essentially "techno-colonize" the rest of the world between themselves. So I think there is definitely a profit motive and a risk of seriously diminishing returns for the actual labs, but there is also a nation-state motive to start pulling up the ladder.

loopies 12d ago
I think in all of these debates people lose track of one of the major vectors of threat, as you said, other humans. From my point of view this is an ever bigger problem with this tech, like orders of magnitude bigger. The current setup we find ourselves in is based on a very important detail that is easily lost because it is so old we don't really think about it. There is, or rather was, an incentive for more people to exist, because they are valuable for work and defense. Some people wrongly use the industrial revolution to argue against AI completely replacing human work, but that is very wrong. What is happening with AI has nothing to do with the industrial revolution, as equivalence. Back then you'd just free up humans for higher level work. Now, theoretically, anything you could ever think a human could do, AI would theoretically do better. So no matter what job you come up with, using AI instead of a human gives a better outcome, cheaper, more reliable, faster. Coming back to initial subject, one thing that kept everyone in check was our inability of actually wiping everyone out. Sure, we had nukes but they ruin the Earth so nobody can inhabit it if they all go off. But with AI, centralizing so much power up top, and taking it away from regular people...that is the biggest danger in this scenario, by far. Not some rogue AI, rather rogue human groups that have the power and technology to do away with basically everyone else, or a good bit of everyone else. This threat is way bigger and never addressed. Like...suspiciously never addressed.

ngriffiths 12d ago

The mental model here is that AI is a powerful tool whose main purpose is to outcompete others, increase power or provide a defense. This is not the right model! The biggest risk is not that someone discovered a big new weapon, which by the way > No one person, or one company, knows the answer and history is no guide are you kidding me? It's a problem as old as time. This is not nuclear power though. The bigger problem is a scenario where AI increasingly acts like bacteria, doing things autonomously, things no one really understands, things we think are confusing and weird. And then just by chance, some bacteria end up in some human lung cells and they turn out to be an excellent place to grow and multiply. Why is this worse? Because weird shit does not seem threatening, and it almost always isn't, so nobody tries to stop it. Also, the argument in the article seems to be "obviously AI development is not a particularly urgent global threat," and therefore these downsides (risk of collusion, misuse of state power, etc) are the most critical factors? I guess, uh, yeah, if there's no benefit to taking these actions we shouldn't take them.

Cthulhu_ 12d ago
Thing is though, I think that the argument of "we don't understand how it works or what it does" doesn't hold up - everything an LLM does is observable. And if it's scary, we turn it off. If it starts to act like a bacterium / virus (e.g. it becomes self-replicating), we've dealt with that kind of software before. But more importantly, we need to keep the organizations building and running these things accountable. If a company like Anthropic or OpenAI builds software that "escapes containment", they should be held accountable for cybercrime, just like people who write viruses (there's probably a few that did that on here, and of those a percentage that got in trouble with the law over it). Mark my words, the organizations that develop AIs will keep using phrases like "we don't know what it's doing" or "it's too dangerous" to try and avoid responsibility and accountability for their software. Just like Google did, hiding behind "the algorithm" for lawsuits about preferring their own services over that of the competition.
- ngriffiths 12d ago
  Completely agree. It's a choice not to observe and understand what's going on, at least a very risky one if not actively evil. There's a tradeoff though... isn't it already super hard to understand what they're doing with these math proofs for example? Clearly there's a tradeoff between deeply understanding the behavior vs. quickly solving the concrete problem, hence the big controversy in math now. From one perspective, letting stuff run ~autonomously in a mad dash to solve your problem is a really bad idea, threatens to destroy the whole field etc. From another perspective, solving lots of problems fast is extremely enticing and worth some risks. Update for one other thought: > And if it's scary, we turn it off. Agreed, that's why I think the bad scenarios are some form of "it does some weird stuff ostensibly while helping us solve some problem" followed by "oops, we miscalculated that threat level."

Kuyawa 12d ago

> The most effective method of pacing is via regulation Of course, that's the only way to create monopolies. Get there first and regulate to death. Sprinkle with fear of annihilation so the sheeple can be manipulated with draconian rules in order to 'save the children' Politics is really boring