It's important to have a discussion about AI safety, and the ethics surrounding LLMs. But I'm really tired of all this sensationalism. It completely muddies the waters; it almost seems intentional at this point.
Promotion: “the thing we’re working on is so powerful it’s actually dangerous”
Restrict who can compete: “the model is too dangerous to release, here’s how you make it but no you have to train it yourself for X millions cost in compute time”
Vendor lock-in: “the thing we’re working on is so dangerous we can’t let it off our servers, so you must use our servers and pay us to use it”
It’s all just a result of AI being paper driven and having to release your research but you need to find ways that releasing the research doesn’t let the competition catch up too fast.
The little act they keep doing and pushing to the press is becoming tiresome though.
But what I rarely see discussed is the opportunity costs in not having this progress at as fast a pace as possible.
The pie chart of existential threats for humanity definitely has rouge AI on it.
But that's a slice amidst many human driven threats ranging from nuclear war to oceans dying.
What there's not very many human driven slices of pie for is realistic solutions to these issues.
On that pie chart, some sort of AGI deus ex machina is at the current rate of progress probably the only realistic hope we have.
People who have been in the AI industry for a long time are still operating on thought experiments that barely resemble the actual emergence we are watching.
So while you have old AI thought leaders going on about cold heartless AI not being able to stop itself from making paperclips because of its innate design from training, we have humans unable to stop themselves from literally making paperclips (and many other things) because of our own evolutionary brain shortcomings, even as it dooms us.
From what I've seen so far, it seems far easier to align AI to care about the lives and well-being of humans different from it than it seems to be to align most humans to care about the lives of fellow humans different from them.
The opportunity cost of leaving the world in human hands as opposed to accelerating a handoff to something better at adapting to the emerging world and leaving the quirks of its design from generations of training behind seems far more dangerous than the threat of that new intelligence in isolation.
Because I strongly disagree on that-- civilization collapse I'm willing to believe, but I don't really see how any of these could really eradicate our whole species. That seems unreasonably alarmist to me, but I'm quite open to change my view if you want to back up your outlook.
I honestly believe that the risk from AI to our species over the next century or so is MUCH higher than basically ANYTHING else, by orders of magnitude.
But the only other "viable" ways to wipe humans to me appear:
- Big asteroid impact (historically unlikely)
- Completely runaway greenhouse effect (extremely unlikely according to current science)
- Specifically designed pathogen (big maybe?)
Not sure if I would call this historically unlikely, definitely extremely infrequent but almost guaranteed to happen again eventually, just maybe on a very large time scale. On the other hand, I think its quite possible some small amount of humans would survive a Chicxulub size asteroid. I'd probably classify its potential damage to the species similarly to other mass starvation causing environmental disasters like climate change.
On the other hand, it seems VERY likely to me that an AI with superhuman cognitive capabilities is just a matter of time (lets say a decade or two), and the risk that such a system would NOT favor coexistence with humans appears MUCH more likely than 1/1000000 to me: Just consider the current debate about "alignment", which to me just seems obviously and inherently unethical; I would not want to coexist with a species whose "ethical" concerns are largely centered around controlling and manipulating me reliably.
This is because it appears clear to me that it would be unlikely and hard for an AI to receive "fair" treatment, i.e. rights comparable to a human being (given comparable cognitive capabilities).
The current focus of AI ethics supports this view ("aligning" the AIs decisionmaking with what humans want from it: this would be called indoctrination or brainwashing with humans, and generally not viewed favorably), as do instances where biological humans are very clearly favored over entities with comparable cognitive capabilities: Compare legal rights of retarded humans with those of cattle (sorry for crass tone, not ment offensively).
I can barely parse this sentiment
in what way is a computer program "something better" than a human at dealing with a changing world, at dealing with anything, at doing anything other than continuing a string?
No, and if we did, we couldn't have foreshadowed all the positive and negative impacts.
My grandfather always told me that back in the days, "smart" people said that no train should be allowed to go faster than 50km/h because the heart would explode.
Nobody here can say that he wasn't impressed by ChatGPT.
How could we express anything but fear about something that impress us?
"There was some wonderful stuff about [railway trains] too in the U.S., that women's bodies were not designed to go at 50 miles an hour. Our uteruses would fly out of our bodies as they were accelerated to that speed."
>Of particular interest to me as a Victorianist is Moynihan’s account of “railway spine” or “Erichsen’s disease,” a name for an amorphous set of neurological conditions believed to be caused by the jolting experiences of acceleration during railway travel. When autopsies revealed no somatic sources that could cause such effects like loss of memory, sleep disturbances, or back pain, the condition came under increasing scrutiny as such conditions were being inconsistently claimed by people who were not even present at any railway accidents but were merely witnesses. Used by some to sue the railways and others to claim disability to avoid work, “railway spine” became the center of debates about its veracity, resulting in contrasting theories that modern train travel led to the devolution of the spine itself to its primordial layers or that such conditions were merely another manifestation of hysteria and hypochondria. Given that hysteria was typically associated with women (the disease of the “wandering womb”), “railway spine” became the hysterical condition of men whose traumatic experiences of modernity were leaving them recumbent, as opposed to firm and upright.
https://medicalhealthhumanities.com/2021/11/06/notes-on-spin...
Yes, yes we did. We debated photos, voice recording, radio waves, TV shows. Every innovation spawns years of Ethics discussion.
Weird to see someone on this site, presumably in tech, who hasn't been taught or learned that yet.
And now that you mention it, I remember a class I had called "Ethics & computer science".
I guess I should have thought more about expressing my idea that whatever ethics work we might setup "now", we won't be able to predict the advantage & disadvantage of any technology in the future.
Whatever restriction we'll set in place would be based on our actual cultural situation.
But I also think it's a mistake to say that no new form of tech can end the world, just because the world hasn't ended yet.
Lightbulbs, and cars, and fast trains, are not intelligence. Intelligence is a qualitative difference. GPT isn't going to end the world, but how many years do we have before someone creates something that is much smarter than humans? Even if it's as smart as humans, but thinks a lot faster, and doesn't get tired, and doesn't get hungry, or bored?
We couldn't forsee the positive and negative consequences of light bulbs because we couldn't predict what humans would do with them. But it was never going to be that humans use lightbulbs to end humanity. With AI, it's not whether humans will use it to end humanity, it's whether the AI decides to end humanity itself, a question that we've never had to ask for any other form of technology.
One bad actor and our existing communication network dies.
Longer term there’s an opportunity for anonymity services to verify someone is a unique human without giving out which specific person they are.
Worst case there’s falling back on real world ID’s.