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Comment by YZF | Hacker News Reader

Creating a super-intelligence that kills all of us?

A group of humans is a super-intelligence; a group-of-groups is even smarter. The 8 billion of us, together, have an unimaginable intelligence. AGI isn't going to be a problem.

I feel like this is missing the point. There is no amount of human effort that can do things like break modern encryption in any reasonable timescale. There is an upper bound on what can be comprehended, and especially in the timescale of decades, by any amount of humans. An ASI would have the ability to comprehend and problem solve on a level thousands of times higher than a human, and if we had the source code for an ASI today, without any previous training, it could likely both train itself on the entire world's body of knowledge and break AES-strength encryption in a matter of seconds.

Encryption is just one example. Its ability across the entirety of math and science would be equally powerful.

Maybe it would take a sabbatical to heal its trauma like real humans. Maybe it would go to therapy.

As my physics professor said, "the intelligence of committees adds like resistors in parallel".* There are 8 billion of us, but it's hard to get us all pulling in the same direction: we're limited by communication bandwidth, distrust, incentives to defect and freeload, ~20 years of education to get up to speed, duplication of efforts, and other organizational difficulties. Meanwhile, we're manufacturing about 50 million discrete GPUs per year, which is about the same as the number of humans we add per year (60 million and falling). Obviously it's not simply 1 GPU per AI agent, but just in terms of rough trends, there you are.

* See also: Kasparov Versus the World, in which grandmaster Garry Kasparov defeated the "superintelligence" of thousands of chess masters combined: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kasparov_versus_the_World

We've got a Kasparov because there are N billion of us: he is the Chess superintelligence for humanity. Similarly, my aunt is the person helping him eat soy beans, through the proper investment & maintenance of her combine.

Fair enough, but these N billion humans also comprise the "unimaginable super-intelligence" that fails to solve basic collective action problems like climate change and overfishing, and which fights immensely destructive wars with itself every generation. It's exactly what it says on the tin, the common greatness and stupidity of humanity that we are all familiar with from every day experience; there's no need to dress it up as a superintelligence to claim that AI will never be able to rival it. AI can certainly beat Kasparov at chess, and another N billion humans won't change that by producing a Magnus Carlsen. With our collective efforts we might produce a better Stockfish, but that rebuttal would be begging the question.

Sci-fi.

Worry about human beings being the one to kill us all because that's a threat that's existed for decades with nukes and biological warfare. If it isn't weapons, it'll be self-inflicted climate change, or an asteroid we haven't noticed. SkyNet isn't happening.

Six billion human beings of average intelligence are a greater threat than a single hypothetical superintelligence.

Maybe watch the video. The argument isn't that it's going evil and going to kill everyone but that we'll be obsolete as a species.

I'll pass. If it's worth knowing about then there'll be a paper on it that isn't generating someone money as a commercial podcast with sensationalist takes.

Hypothetical obsolescence is not the same as being killed by a hypothetical superintelligence. We would be no more hypothetically obsolete than the overwhelming majority of lifeforms.

Which video did you watch? Tegmark certainly is afraid that the first smarter-than-human AI will kill everyone: he dicsusses how that might happen at 2:08:40

Your argument is missing an important element: SkyNet isn't happening because _________

Because LLMs have reached a point of diminishing returns and there isn't enough compute globally to do produce a hypothetical AGI.

The argument for SkyNet happening is missing an important element: why would it happen? Because sci-fi says it will?

> The argument for SkyNet happening is missing an important element: why would it happen? Because sci-fi says it will?

That element isn't missing. It's explained every time someone asks, and the answer never relies on sci-fi as evidence. The reason is because of (A) orthogonality and (B) instrumental convergence. If you aren't familiar with those terms, (A) refers to the thesis that an AI's degree of logical reasoning ability is independent of its goals. This stems from Hume's Law [1]. (B) refers to the observation that regardless of an agent's terminal goal, many instrumental goals will be predictably shared: the agent will be incentivized to increase its own capabilities, as a means toward nearly any possible end. This includes steps that would prevent humans from interfering with the AI's goals, such as a human attempting to turn it off or reprogram it.

If you have questions about either of those, there are great learning materials available, including a well-made youtube series by Robert Miles. [2]

> Because LLMs have reached a point of diminishing returns and there isn't enough compute globally to do produce a hypothetical AGI.

What makes you think LLMs have reached a point of diminishing returns? So far, the benchmarks are continuing to show accelerating returns, to the point that it's becoming difficult for benchmarks to keep up.[3]

[1]: Hume's Law, AKA the Is-Ought problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is%E2%80%93ought_problem

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEUO6pjwFOo

[3]: "Foundation models and the next era of AI", Microsoft Research, https://youtu.be/HQI6O5DlyFc?t=958

Wouldn’t nation states with nuclear weapons count as a form of existing super intelligence?

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