Hacker News Reader

Comment by naasking | Hacker News Reader

> But the A.I. hype is out of hand. "A.I. Safety" research is the worst of it, as it suggests this technology is so powerful that it's actually dangerous.

It boggles my mind how anyone can think otherwise. Existential dangers of superintelligent or even non-intelligent AI are the long-term result of the dangers of AI being developed and misused over time for human ends.

It's the exact same argument behind why we should be trying to track asteroids, or why we should be trying to tackle climate change: the worst-case scenario is unlikely or in the future, but the path we're on has numerous dangers where suffering and loss of human life is virtually certain unless something is done.

View on HN

Because it's like cavemen pondering the safety of nuclear fusion after discovering fire. Yes: nuclear fusion could be dangerous. No: there is nothing useful that can come out of such "research".

You know what would be useful for cavemen to ponder? The safety of fire. Or you know, just staying alive because there are more dangerous things out there.

The current state of so-called "AI" is our fire. It's impressive and useful (and there are real dangers associated with it) but it has no bearing on intelligence, let alone superintelligence. It's more likely that a freak super-intelligent human will be born than that we accidentally produce a super-intelligent computer. We produce a lot of intelligent humans, and we've never produced a single intelligent computer.

As it stands, we don't have the understanding or the tools to do anything useful wrt safety from a super-intelligent AI. We do have the understanding and tools to do something useful about asteroids and climate change.

> No: there is nothing useful that can come out of such "research".

That's just wrong. This very paper we're discussing has AI safety factors built-in: the AI is not supposed to be able to lie, and yet it exhibited deceptive behaviours anyway. That falls squarely under AI safety, and is a pretty useful observation to inform future attempts.

> The current state of so-called "AI" is our fire. It's impressive and useful (and there are real dangers associated with it) but it has no bearing on intelligence, let alone superintelligence.

That's conjecture. We don't know what general intelligence really is, so you simply cannot gauge how close we are. For all you know we could be one simple tweak away from current architectures, and that should be terrifying.

> As it stands, we don't have the understanding or the tools to do anything useful wrt safety from a super-intelligent AI.

Even if that were true, which it's not, we certainly won't develop that understanding or those tools if we don't start researching them!

> We do have the understanding and tools to do something useful about asteroids and climate change.

Suppose you had a time machine and went back to the 19th century to explain the dangers of asteroids wiping out all of humanity. They didn't have the launch capability or the detection abilities we do now, but if they were sufficiently convinced of this real threat, does it not seem plausible that they could be motivated to more heavily fund research into telescopes and rockets? Couldn't we plausibly have reached space sooner and be even better prepared in the present to meet that threat than we are now?

Instead of a time machine, couldn't we just use our big brains to predict that something might actually be a serious problem in the future and that maybe we should devote a few smart people to thinking about these problems now and how to mitigate them?

This all just strikes me as incredibly obvious, and we do it in literally every other domain, but somehow say "AI" and basic logic goes out the window.

The word "safety" doesn't normally encompass lying or, more appropriately in this case, saying something untrue without realizing it. That's considered a very different kind of problem. Safety normally means there's a direct chance of physical harm to someone.

This kind of elasticity in language use is the sort of thing that gives AI safety a bad name. You can't take AI research at face value if it's using strange re-definitions of common words.

How exactly does honestly not clearly fall under safety? AI is an information system, and truthfulness from an information system that impacts human lives is clearly a safety concern.

This is not a redefinition, the harm results from the standard usage of the tool. If the AI is being used to predict the possible future behaviour of adversarial countries, then you need the AI to be honest or lots of people could die. If the AI concludes that your adversary would be more friendly towards its programmed objectives, then it could conclude lying to the president is the optimal outcome.

This can show up in numerous other contexts. For instance, should a medical diagnostic AI be able to lie to you if lying to you will statistically improve your outcomes, say via the placebo effect? If so, should it also lie to the doctor managing your care to preserve that outcome, in case the doctor might slip and reveal the truth?

How much software is safety critical in general, let alone software that uses deep learning? Very, very little. I'd actually be amazed if you can name a single case where someone has deployed a language model in a safety critical system. That's why your examples are all what-ifs.

There are no actual safety issues with LLMs, nor will there be any in the foreseeable future because nobody is using them in any context where such issues may arise. Hence why you're forced to rely on absurd hypotheticals like doctors blindly relying on LLMs for diagnostics without checking anything or thinking about the outputs.

There are honesty/accuracy issues. There are not safety issues. The conflation of "safety" with other unrelated language topics like whether people feel offended, whether something is misinformation or not is a very specific quirk of a very specific subculture in the USA, it's not a widely recognized or accepted redefinition.

> I'd actually be amazed if you can name a single case where someone has deployed a language model in a safety critical system. That's why your examples are all what-ifs.

AI safety is not a near-term project, it's a long-term project. The what-ifs are exactly the class of problems that need solving. Like it or not, current and next generation LLMs and similar systems will be used in safety critical contexts, like predictive policing which is already a thing.

Edit: and China is already using these things widely to monitor their citizens, identify them in surveillance footage and more. I find the claim that nobody is using LLMs or other AI systems in some limited safety critical contexts today pretty implausible actually.

None of that is even remotely plausible. You're just making things up with zero basis in actual science. Essentially you are making a religious argument. There's nothing wrong with religion per se, but don't expect the rest of us to take action based on your personal faith or irrational fears.

> None of that is even remotely plausible. You're just making things up with zero basis in actual science.

None of what is remotely plausible?

Just calling something a "religious argument" as a way to dismiss it is pretty silly.

And there's lots of actual, real scientists who think AI risk is a real thing we should be concerned with. Both within the field (e.g. Stuart Russel) and outside of the field (e.g. Stephen Hawking.) Are all of these scientists also talking with zero basis in actual science?

Artificial general intelligence does not exist (yet). As of today, there are no actual scientists in that field. But even smart people love to pontificate about things they don't understand.

We don’t produce intelligent humans nature does. Otherwise I agree. We’re learning what the end result of intelligence looks like (predictions) not the actual intelligence yet.

The intelligence is what determines the shape of these networks so they can even learn a useful pattern. That’s still gonna be humans for the foreseeable future.

Yes, nature produced intelligence while optimizing only for reproductive fitness. In other words, intelligence emerged spontaneously while solving a seemingly completely unrelated problem. That should terrify you.

Current AI research largely isn't focused on general intelligence, but the possibility remains that it could still spontaneously emerge from it. We can't even quantify how likely that is because we don't understand intelligence, so whatever intuition you have about this likelihood it's completely meaningless and not based on any meaningful data. We're in uncharted waters.

That intelligence is a emergent property of reproductive fitness isn't terrifying- it's amazing and exciting and suggests a wide range of scientific opportunities.

For a while I ran a project that ran a (scientific) binary on every Google machine in production using all the idle cores on the machine to do protein design (it worked!). At the end of the project we seriously considered making the binary instead a learning system that had access to 'sensors' (IE, signals from Google production machines) and 'outputs' (the ability to change production parameters) and just let that run autonomously. I figured Google prod is one of the few computational/networking systems with enough inherent complexity and resources that spontaneously emergent general intelligence was not inconceivable. However, the project was deemed too risky by SRE, rightfully so. Not because of emergent intelligence but emergent disruption to serving ads.

> That intelligence is a emergent property of reproductive fitness isn't terrifying

You missed the terrifying aspect. It's not terrifying that general intelligence emerged from optimizing for reproductive fitness specifically, it's terrifying that general intelligence emerged while nature was stumbling around randomly in the dark trying to optimize for a complete unrelated property.

Guess what we're doing with machine learning?

This is a strange comparison that doesn’t seem logical to me. If we created intelligences and set them in competition with each other we may get something to evolve millions of years later.

General intelligence didn’t poof into existence it happened over half a billion years and even then it came from fungi which is itself an intelligence.

> If we created intelligences and set them in competition with each other we may get something to evolve millions of years later.

Why millions of years? Do you agree or disagree that humans can develop technology faster than nature could evolve it on its own? It took maybe 70 years for computers to go from not existing, to matching humans on visual recognition tasks.

As you just acknowledged, it took nature at least billions of years to evolve humans. Is not focused technological development obviously orders of magnitude faster at evolving intelligence than nature? Does it not then follow that artificial general intelligence is a lot closer than an argument based on natural evolution might imply?

What exactly is not logical about this argument?

It happened over billions of generations, and an AI generation can be millions of times shorter than a biological one. One of those is also shrinking rapidly.

Minor technical correction- it would be false to say that GI came from fungi as we humans have GI, but don't descend from fungi (we share a common ancestor) and likely haven't received the genes for GI (horizontal gene transfer) from them.

Personally I figure that once you have a complex enough system with feedback regulation and self-preservation, something like general intelligence occurs spontaneously through the normal mechanisms of evolution (probably more than once in different kingdoms) because it provides a heritable survival edge.

I never said we got those genes from them just that intelligence has been a slow grind to reach human beings.

I agree that the simplest properties of neural networks are an emergent property of multicellular life.

> It boggles my mind how anyone can think otherwise.

Some AI dangers are certainly legitimate - it's easy to foresee how an image recognition system might think all snowboarders are male; or a system trained on unfair sentences handed out to criminals would replicate that unfairness, adding a wrongful veneer of science and objectivity; or a self-driving car trained on data from a country with few mopeds and most pedestrians wearing denim might underperform in a country with many mopeds and few pedestrians wearing denim.

But other AI dangers sound more like the work of philosophers and science fiction authors. The moment people start predicting the end of humans needing to work, or talking about a future evil AI that punishes people who didn't help bring it into existence? That's pretty far down in my list of worries.

> But other AI dangers sound more like the work of philosophers and science fiction authors.

Your ability to read this sentence right now when we have never met and may not even be on the same continent was once in the domain of science fiction. Don't underestimate technological progress, and specifically, don't underestimate the surprising directions it could go.

Some fantastical AI predictions will happen, most probably will not, and some utterly terrifying ones no one foresaw will almost certainly happen. The unknown unknowns should worry you, and AI is full of them.

> The unknown unknowns should worry you, and AI is full of them.

Sure, but where should that rank in my worries relative to 'designer babies' and 'rise of authoritarian states as economic powerhouses' and 'corporations that can commit crimes with impunity' and 'rising medical bills' and 'widening gap between rich and poor' and 'far right extremism' and 'water shortages' and 'economic crisis wipes out my savings' and 'cyber warfare targeting vital infrastructure' and 'rising obesity' and 'voter suppression' and the many other things a person could worry about?

In my view, the only wrong opinions on where to rank this are "at the very top" and "at the very bottom or not at all". We will only know the correct answer in hindsight, so the sensible position is to just start funding some legitimate AI safety research.

A whole lot of the arguments about why we shouldn't be concerned really boil down to "I cannot conceive of risk until that risk has materialized." Impossible to argue against, really.

"the worst-case scenario is unlikely or in the future ... loss of human life is virtually certain"

These two things are in conflict. We could ignore both asteroids and climate change and according to the best known science there'd be very little impact for vast timespans and possibly no impact ever (before humanity is ended by something else like war).

Yes, also for the climate. Look at the actual predictions and it's like a small reduction in GDP growth spread over a very long period of time, and that's assuming the predictions are actually correct when they have a long track record of being not so.

Really stuff like asteroids and climate is a good counter-argument to caring about AI risk. Intellectuals like to hypothesize world-ending cataclysms that only their far sighted expertise can prevent, but whenever these people's predictions get tested against something concrete they seem to invariably end up being wrong. Our society rewards catastrophising far too generously and penalizes being wrong far too little, especially for academics, NGOs etc. It makes people feel or seem smart in the moment, and they can punt the reputational damage from being wrong far into the future (and then pretend they never made those predictions at all or there were mitigating factors).

> We could ignore both asteroids and climate change and according to the best known science there'd be very little impact for vast timespans and possibly no impact ever (before humanity is ended by something else like war).

That's just incorrect. The Tunguska event was a nuclear-weapon scale asteroid. These are predicted to happen once every hundred years or so. If it happens over a populated city millions would die. If a person wrongly concludes this was a surprise nuclear attack, maybe everyone would die, to say nothing of the real risk that the asteroid itself could be big enough to wipe us all out.

There's a lot of uncertainty around climate change, but changing climate patterns will certainly change resource allocations (fresh water, arable land, etc.). This will lead to shortages in places that were once abundant, which could easily lead to wars in which millions die.

> Really stuff like asteroids and climate is a good counter-argument to caring about AI risk.

This. This boggles my mind. Long-tail risks exist, and burying your head in the sand and pretending they don't just places millions of lives at risk, and potentially the entire human race. You don't have to think these are top priorities, but to dismiss them as complete unimportant is frankly bonkers.

"The Tunguska event was a nuclear-weapon scale asteroid"

Which had very little impact on humanity because it exploded in the middle of the tundra.

"These are predicted to happen once every hundred years or so"

What is predicted exactly, by whom and how were these predictions validated against testable reality given the postulated rareness? If they're so common then why is it so hard to name the last 10? I think in reality these events are very rare and will almost always happen over the oceans, deserts, poles etc where not many people live.

"Long-tail risks exist, and burying your head in the sand and pretending they don't"

They exist and I am not pretending they don't. I am saying that this style of reasoning in which an extremely unlikely event is unfalsifiably and arbitrarily assigned near infinite downsides in order to justify spending time and resources on it, is problematic and as a society we are far too generous towards people who do this.

> If they're so common then why is it so hard to name the last 10?

"I can't name such events therefore they're not worth thinking about" is a ridiculous argument.

The most recent one happened less than 10 years ago and almost 1,500 people were injured, and we completely missed its approach:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chelyabinsk_meteor

Luckily, it again happened near a depopulated zone, but the damage was still extensive.

> I think in reality these events are very rare and will almost always happen over the oceans, deserts, poles etc where not many people live.

Most car accidents will happen to bad drivers, so if you're a good driver you don't need to wear your seatbelt, amirite?

The fact that an easily preventable event typically happens without much damage is no consolation when that's not the case.

> They exist and I am not pretending they don't. I am saying that this style of reasoning in which an extremely unlikely event is unfalsifiably and arbitrarily assigned near infinite downsides

Your mistake is thinking the likelihoods assigned are arbitrary and unfalsifiable. By your logic, COVID-19 was unlikely as most outbreaks are small and isolated, and the likelihood of a global contagion so unfalsifiably remote it's not worth thinking about. Therefore pandemic preparation is a waste of time and money. Now that 6 million people have died, that view doesn't look so rosy in hindsight.

The calculations on asteroid threats have been done based on known data, and even with our current preparations we still miss some potentially devastating ones like Chelyabinsk:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_event#Frequency_and_ris...

The so called "AI safety" researchers issuing breathless warnings about the dangers of superintelligence are nothing but grifters. They are the modern equivalent of shaman, telling the common people that they need ever increasing amounts of resources to continue their vital work in protecting us from wrathful spirits. There is zero actual scientific evidence to support their claims. It is essentially a modern-day secular religion.

(There is value in doing research and ethical analysis into AI/ML statistical algorithms to prevent hidden biases or accidental physical harm. People working in those areas are producing real benefits for the rest of us and I'm not criticizing them.)

> The so called "AI safety" researchers issuing breathless warnings about the dangers of superintelligence are nothing but grifters.

Who are you talking about exactly? Who are these alleged grifters and who are they grifting?

> There is zero actual scientific evidence to support their claims

What claims are you talking about, exactly? Let's get specific.

>> the path we're on has numerous dangers where suffering and loss of human life is virtually certain unless something is done

What sort of AI catastrophe do you think would happen?

That's akin to asking "what sort of human catastrophe do you think would happen?" A whole host of things are possible in principle on a long enough timeline. If you constrain the timeline, then you'll get more plausible answers but with potentially wide error bars because we don't really understand what "intelligence" really is, ie. current research could be pretty close but could also be pretty far from it.

The fact that we don't know how close we are is itself dangerous. It's like doing gene editing on pathogens without a proper understanding of germ theory and biosafety. That's where we are with AI.

> unless something is done

We must do something.

This is something.

Therefore, we must do this.

1. We must do something because AIs can be dangerous.

2. AI safety research attempts to mitigate some AI dangers.

3. Therefore we must fund AI safety research.

Yup, checks out.

The gods are vengeful.

The priests say virgin sacrifices pacify the gods.

Therefore we must sacrifice a virgin on every new moon. While we are at it, we should also build a palatial mansion for the wise priests.

Yup, checks out.

> The priests say virgin sacrifices pacify the gods.

An argument that depends on equating priests and scientists is an argument that fails.

Except most AI safety doesn't involve scientists. In an extreme example, AI safety research funding funded harry potter fanfiction.

Do you actually have empirical data demonstrating that scientists aren't concerned about AI, or that "most" AI safety doesn't involve scientists, or is this just your gut feeling?

Edit: for instance, here's a computer science professor and neurologist who published a book about all of the serious dangers of AI, and calling for funding safety research:

https://www.amazon.com/Human-Compatible-Artificial-Intellige...

Furthermore, AI safety programs are hiring AI researchers and computer scientists to actually do the work, so are you claiming that these people don't sincerely believe in the work they're doing?

This would be more convincing if it wasn’t so bad faith

Reply on news.ycombinator.com