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Comment by MVissers | Hacker News Reader

We have only our history, where we dominated and decimated other close species (Homo Neanderthals) thanks to our intelligence, and literally caused the next extinction event on this planet where >95% of all species already disappeared.

On top of that, think about how we treat animals where we have billions of intelligent animals (cows, pigs) that we breed to butcher and eat. Just because they are tasty, and we tell ourselves they are less worthy because of their lesser intelligence and consciousness.

I sure hope that AI doesn't behave like us. I have no idea what will happen and what the odds are, but I do think it's the most dangerous experiment we have ever run.

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>we dominated and decimated other close species (Homo Neanderthals) thanks to our intelligence

it's a nice homo sapiens supremacy narrative but the truth is much more complicated. we existed at least 4/5 thousand years together and a lot of mixing and mingling has been going on.

> we existed at least 4/5 thousand years together and a lot of mixing and mingling has been going on.

This sounds strikingly similar to how I imagine our first encounters with advanced AI will unfold.

It's anthropomorphic to the extreme to assume that computer programs will assume all of our evolutionary, biological characteristics

Our own history does not include any AGI. Likening AI to predators in an ecosystem is bizarre and irrelevant.

This is not about likening AI to predators, it’s about the fact that AI is and will be created by and in the image of the most dominant predator in the history of biological life.

To whatever degree AI is embedded with the properties of our species, it carries the risks of repeating our worst behaviors, and has the potential to do so far more potently than we ever could due to the absence of biological constraints.

Will it? So when this hypothetical AGI with sentience emerges, it's going to think like a human being? Why would it with so much knowledge? Most negative aspects of humanity come from a lack of knowledge.

No, I’m not claiming it will think like a human being, but that human thinking (despite the blind spots we know we have) is what we’ll try to replicate, and this will lead us to create something dangerous.

What you’re hinting at presupposes that an AGI will interpret knowledge in a way that is compatible with human values, and that we understand human values well enough to codify them into whatever it is that we manage to build. I’m sure we’ll try.

But it is this assumption that is at the center of the issue IMO, because assuming the machines will think like us is to assume we understand how we think.

What is far more likely is that it will appear to have human properties because we baked the appearance of human-ness into the code (see LLMs), but like the hallucinations and “lies” these LLMs are happy to spit out, an apparently human AGI will just get some things fundamentally wrong.

And when getting things wrong can have consequences in the physical world, they’re no longer just relatively harmless hallucinations.

Imagine an AGI with the temperament of Microsoft Tay.

IMO, we are more likely to stumble across a completely new form of intelligence than we are to successfully recreate something akin to human intelligence. However, I think actual brain cells in a petri dish learning and playing Pong is a far greater concern than a hypothetical AGI.

Well, they don't hallucinate or lie, that's a human-centric concept that we've misapplied. An LLM is just a next word prediction engine. It's more accurately described as incorrect in its output based on the data it has available to it, skewing the probability calculation. It didn't lie nor hallucinate. Lying assumes intent and planning, it is incapable of either, it's an LLM. But calling it "wrong" kills the hype cycle, and you're on HN, a Y Combinator platform. A lot of folks here are invested in LLMs or selling something utilizing them as it's hot right now.

> IMO, we are more likely to stumble across a completely new form of intelligence than we are to successfully recreate something akin to human intelligence

This is predicated on the assumption that we’ll eventually hit a hard wall that prevents progress or that we’ll stop trying. This doesn’t seem likely. We just can’t estimate the timescale for progress.

> It didn't lie nor hallucinate. Lying assumes intent and planning, it is incapable of either

This is why I used quotes around “lie”, but again I’d argue that this underscores my point.

It doesn’t matter whether the LLM is actually lying or hallucinating in the human sense if someone believes what it says. If I read what it says, believe it, and take some action based on that, the end result is the same and potentially harmful.

Likewise, an “AGI” doesn’t need to actually be smarter than humans and its mistakes need not be attributed to intent or planning to cause real harm in the world. If a robot kills a human, we won’t be picking nits about whether or not the kind of “intent” it employs is the same kind humans assume they have. A smarter AGI just poses bigger problems if such a thing can ever be achieved.

And this is all assuming we’re talking about the development of benevolent general purpose intelligence, which is certainly not the only kind of research that is happening right now.

I think you missed their point. From a cow’s perspective, they are imprisoned, enslaved, and killed for their flesh. They live a horrific existence and probably would think we are all Nazis if they had enough reasoning to realize what was happening to them and their families. It doesn’t really matter to them that a human out there is consuming them and has some higher purpose and goals (besides just eating them to survive). An AGI could have any number of goals that are not related to dominating, enslaving and slaughtering us, where it could still be easier and more convenient to do so, so they do it.

The side effects on the world caused by intelligent life with agency are unpredictable. If they become smarter than us, and have robotics, what if they decide animal life isn’t necessary anymore? Or that our pollution causes solar energy capture to be affected, and the quickest way to stop it is to kill everyone? Maybe it’s better to demolish a city for a solar farm because it’s already got so much concrete and electrical infrastructure and is cheaper/faster than building new. Who knows what their goals will be and how they’ll seek to accomplish them?

All we know is that we don’t have much consideration for the “lesser” beings on our planet, and how things are from their perspective.

I understood the point just fine, but the hypothetical AGI does not exist, and any hypothetical AGI is unlike anything else in history.

An AGI has never existed before in history.

Why would a hypothetical AGI behave anything like a human?

Complete sci-fi.

An AI that doesn't behave at all like a human could well be worse. Humans tend to place at least some value on human life; an AI might just see humans as weird chemical reactions that are less useful than whatever else the AI wants to do with the raw material.

This is assuming a hypothetical AGI even understands what a human being is. If it has no body, can it ever understand what the world is?

Even if you put it into a robot, it cannot understand mortality because it is effectively immortal and can be brought back online at any time. Erasure is mitigated by duplication of the data set, ensuring it can always repair itself.

In the same breath, if a hypothetical omniscient ever-present god were to exist, how would we as physical lifeforms ever truly understand that? We can know of it, but we cannot truly understand it because we haven't had that experience of another plain of existence.

All compelling ideas, but mercifully well within the realms of sci-fi.

> This is assuming a hypothetical AGI even understands what a human being is. If it has no body, can it ever understand what the world is?

Can you tell us a question which requires "knowing what a human is" or "knowing what the world is" that you would expect ChatGPT to fail to be able to answer today?

Providing an answer does not mean understanding an answer. That's not how LLMs work, and this is the difference between an LLM and a hypothetical AGI. The LLM cannot comprehend the world within which it exists.

But to be clear, you can think of no mechanism that would allow us to expose that incomprehension via communicating with it?

All I'm assuming is that it is aware of and acts in the physical world. It doesn't seem like a big stretch that people would build AIs that do that. It doesn't have to "understand mortality." Worse for us probably if it doesn't share human concepts like that.

Five years ago ChatGPT was in the realm of sci-fi.

> I understood the point just fine, but the hypothetical AGI does not exist, and any hypothetical AGI is unlike anything else in history.

This is an argument of "you are proposing that something different might happen, and I don't believe in different things happening".

> An AGI has never existed before in history.

This is the same argument with slightly different words.

> Why would a hypothetical AGI behave anything like a human?

No-one said it would share human behavior. It might not care about us in the same way that we don't care about the lesser intelligences we share space with; that is, with a mix of indifference to their suffering and disregard for their moral status.

Again: this has never happened before.

We share a physical space with lesser animals. A hypothetical AGI isn't sharing a physical space with us. Ergo, history is completely irrelevant. It's so wildly different. We may as well exist in a completely different dimension, in the same way that a hypothetical omniscient god would exist in a different plain of existence than us meatbags, thus a hypothetical AGI could likely never comprehend "the world", even with the sum of all human knowledge, in the same way we can't comprehend "god".

This is all assuming that a hypothetical AGI would be sufficiently intelligent enough to gain control of our systems in a meaningful capacity, not be able to be stopped prior to it etc. I mean, worst case scenario, shut down the internet infrastructure or reduce throughput significantly, right? It has to operate somewhere, even if that's across every online device.

Again, we would have never seen anything like what a hypothetical AGI could hypothetically do in terms of attacking human beings, thus history is irrelevant. The greater threat, IMO, is human beings. Human beings have control of that infrastructure today. Human beings are flawed, we're still blowing each other to bits and threatening each other with annihilation if provoked. Human beings exist in physical space, holy shit, and there's billions of them.

Also keep in mind that hypothetically launching nukes in these doomsday scenarios being discussed on podcasts completely disregard existing PAL systems. It also disregards the likes of the Block Nuclear Launch by Autonomous AI Act.

The whole concept is a lot of "whataboutery". It smacks of the general public's lack of knowledge, hysteria, and repeating unfounded claims of any hypothetical AGI and any threat it may or may not pose.

> thus history is irrelevant

Then stop appealing to it as a reason that everything will be fine! We don't know what's going to happen and have no precedent, and that is why this is a scary situation that requires thought.

> A hypothetical AGI isn't sharing a physical space with us.

That's not true, right? We would be competing for electricity and resources with it, at the least. Also, it is able to affect our physical space by persuading humans to do things it wants to do, which will have unpredictable and hard to defend against effects because of the whole superintelligence thing.

(Imagine, say, a version of the attack on the US Capitol, but on behalf of a leader that is orders of magnitude more charismatic and persuasive.)

> I mean, worst case scenario, shut down the internet infrastructure or reduce throughput significantly, right? It has to operate somewhere, even if that's across every online device.

Sure, persuading everyone in the world to all agree to turn off all communications devices -- when they've already presumably been convinced that they don't want to do that by a superintelligence -- sounds like an awesome plan that will totally work.

There is an SF story that tries to underline this point by presenting the alien viewpoint of harvesting and preparing the Khod(sp?), which after a while turn out to be humans treated as cattle. I forgot the name of the book and the author, it's been decades since I read that.

Our cells built our bodies and brain as an AI to navigate the macro realm!

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