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These people are convinced they’re building God. They will usher in a utopia. You’ll never convince them that the risks outweigh the benefits because they think the benefits will be infinite.

Either that, or OpenAI just sees an opportunity to attain total dominance of the world economy and they’re going to grab it, inequality be damned.

Their profits must be redistributed. The free market wasn’t designed to handle this.

It's funny the parallels between them and virologists who insist that gain of function testing will prevent all future pandemics and definitely had nothing to do with covid.

Edit: The more risky AI experiments you’re referring too, and the people leading them and thinking they’re ushering in the transhuman era should be doing these experiments on Mars, or in a space station or on the moon or something.

These companies who plan to take more risks in the future shouldn’t be risking everyone else’s safety.

I’m a little bit tired of the “oh we don’t know when we’re going to destroy civilisation with a paper clip optimizer, could be soon or in twenty years, who knows?”. How about we go do our risky experiments on another planet and if the experiment works out well. Great.

Personally I’m also not interested in if Russia or China are doing AI research too. We should be leading by example, not solely by economics or strange ideaology.

Regarding Microsoft / Open AI, they’ve stolen basically everyone’s work that was public facing, and I’d go as far to say taken all of the open source work, tax payer funded research and everything else and put a price tag on selling it back to the world while endangering many peoples careers all in the name of “safety”, it’s already unsafe.

If we let MS and OpenAI get away with mass IP theft then we are actually stupid.

How would doing it on Mars be any safer than on Earth? Clearly we will have some way of communicating with it, otherwise how are you getting the results of the experiment?

Because if it start self replicating on Mars, it’s better than if it self replicates on Earth…where you live ?

>> because they think the benefits will be infinite.

From the point of view of the creators & owners, that is pretty much true.

There is a ton of research that wealth & power reduce empathy.

They already are relatively unconcerned about what happens to the masses. When they get effectively infinite power, and the wealth that follows, the old saying will apply perfectly:

"Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely."

If it is going to be shut off, either the owners & creators will have to be truly exceptionally ethical, or it will have to be done by force. Most likely, it won't be done, and we'll have to live with it.

> Either that, or OpenAI just sees an opportunity to attain total dominance of the world economy and they’re going to grab it, inequality be damned.

OpenAI will likely capture very little of the economic value created by these models. Given that open source alternative are roughly 6 months behind varying by model type (language, image, audio) it's difficult to see them having much long term pricing power.

There's no network effect, copyright or sunk cost that stops their customers going to the open source models whose price is just the cost of compute for inference.

Open source models have been quickly following because most research has been happening in public. Who knows what will be if OAI, Google and Deepmind all stop publishing their results?

It’s unwise to keep comparing this situation to Luddite’s. It’s a mental trap.

This tool could be a lot more dangerous on many levels than a freaking loom, it’s ok to ask questions about turning it off.

Maybe time to start writing to politicians at least asking about how we are planning to try live with further automation etc before private companies just unleash massive beta programs on all of society. We should be asking government to setup independent bodies to over see this research.

I’m not anti technology or progress at all, but if something is harmful, distressing, dangerous etc, People have the right to question if we’re going in the right direction or not and feel empowered to make progress in the right direction.

I mean who the hell are OpenAI to be self-regulating masters of everyone's destiny?

How many hundreds of millions of people die of cancer caused by forever chemicals? Its not like we know or even really try to find out of course, but complaining about self-regulation of chemical companies seems almost quaint at this point. Or just think of dangerous chemicals on trains speeding through populated areas regularly crashing in a literal inferno, the first huge oil drilling projects in the north pole getting started now despite imminent climate catastrophy or deregulated banks too big to fail getting bailed out in regular intervals leading to huge profits to investors, I could literally go on like this for hours...

I mean if you think OpenAI self-regulating ethics questions on a chatbot is anywhere near a priority for you, you need to recalibrate your perception of the state of the western neoliberal hegemony.

This tool could be a lot more dangerous on many levels than a freaking loom

Not quite sure that's how the Luddites viewed it. I suspect they thought that if something is harmful, distressing, dangerous etc, People have the right to question if we’re going in the right direction or not. We've seen the same views with the introduction of every new technology but so far none of them have destroyed the human race.

This is seen as something earth shattering now, and in many ways it is but I suspect in time it will become a loom, another tool like all the others. One to be superseded in time by something another step beyond.

We can't keep using the same examples and arguments for different situations.

I like the quote: "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds."

Nukes, can kill all of us, it's only through non-proliferation effort we stand a chance. Gene drives, we can alter the environment dramatically. Burning coal at scale is arguably a technology, it will kill us if we don't change course.

I get you're point of view, I do, but I don't think it's a wise position to continue to take.

It's like watching Trump become popular again. It's an aberration that becomes more legitimate every day -- independently of the actions taken by any controlling parties.

> Observe: when the value of people is greater than the value of tools, a society becomes more free and equal. When wages depend on skill and knowledge, when an army depends on the prowess of the individual soldiers, these are the kinds of things that usually go along with mass democracy and empowerment, because economic production and war both require the consent of the individual to work.

This might have already passed -- how many people were sacrificed to COVID because of the "economy". A tool supposedly completely in the power of the people was exposed. Corporations can raise prices and don't have to worry about the whim of the people. Small groups of entrenched executives are now the powerful -- the rest of us skilled workers, arbiters of democracy, can either only dream of such power or disdain it. I think ChatGPT rose from this hubris. You have to be pretty privileged to think that what the People really need is a GPU making sentences up to make you happy.

If the tool that is GPT-4 is so dangerous, then we can leverage it against the systems now.

> Tools matter so much more than people that individuals are completely powerless and the elite ruling class holds all the cards.

This statement, taken literally, is false. Individuals are absolutely capable of joining together and overtaking systems, as well as creating replacements and using public-facing tools like GPT-4 to help do it. This is important work. I am one such person working to this end. Want to join me and/or others in it or do you choose the comforting lie that you're completely powerless?

How do you intend to do it?