Bad acting humans with AI systems are the threat, not the AI systems themselves. The discussion is still SO focused on the AI systems, not the actors and how we as societies align on what AI uses are okay and which ones aren't.
I wish more people grasped this extremely important point. AI is a tool. There will be humans who misuse any tool. That doesn't mean we blame the tool. The problem to be solved here is not how to control AI, but how to minimize the damage that bad acting humans can do.
This is exactly the scenario that is taking shape.
A future where only a few big corporations are able to run large AIs is a future where those big corporations and the people who control them rule the world and everyone else must pay them rent in perpetuity for access to this technology.
The biggest advantage ML gives is in lowering costs, which can then be used to lower prices and drive competitors out of business. The consumers get lower prices though, which is ultimately better and more efficient.
What are some examples of free enterprise (private) monopolies benefitting consumers?
Standard Oil, the classic example, was destroyed for operating too efficiently.
The consumers got the lowest prices.
Any other examples?
The proposal is to make the developer of the technology responsible of how somebody else uses it even if they don't know how it's gonna be used. Akin to putting the blame for Truman blasting hundreds of thousands of people on Einstein because he discovered the mass energy equivalence.
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-eus-attempt-to-regula...
Man if America can keep its own crazies in check and avoid becoming a fascist hellhole it’s entirely possible the US will dominate the 21st century like it did the 20th.
It could have been China but then they decided to turn back to authoritarianism. Another decade of liberalizing China and they would have blown right past everyone else. Meanwhile the EU is going nuts in its own way, less overtly batty than MAGA but perhaps no less regressive. (I am also thinking of the total surveillance madness they are trying to ram through.)
That's a pre-super-intelligent AI scenario.
The super-intelligent AI scenario is when the AI becomes a player of its own, able to compete with all of us over how things are run, using its general intelligence as a force multiplier to... do whatever the fuck it wants, which is a problem for us, because there's approximately zero overlap between the set of things a super-intelligent AI may want, and us surviving and thriving.
While the complete space of things it might want is indeed mostly occupied by things incompatible with human existence, it will also get a substantial bias towards human-like thinking and values in the case of it being trained on human examples.
This is obviously not a 100% guarantee: It isn't necessary for it to be trained on human examples (e.g. AlphaZero doing better without them); and even if it were necessary, the existence of both misanthropes and also sadistic narcissistic sociopaths is an example where the examples of many humans around them isn't sufficient to cause a mind to be friendly.
But we did get ChatGPT to be pretty friendly by asking nicely.
Machines survive just fine in space, and you have all the solar energy you ever want and tons of metals and other resources. Interstellar flight is also easy for AI: just turn yourself off for a while. So you have the entire galaxy to expand into.
Why hang out down here in a wet corrosive gravity well full of murder monkeys? Why pick a fight with the murder monkeys and risk being destroyed? We are better adapted for life down here and are great at smashing stuff, which gives us a brute advantage at the end of the day. It is better adapted for life up there.
Hey maybe the rockets are not for us.
The light limit guarantees an evolutionary radiation and diversification event because you can’t maintain a coherent single intelligence over sufficient distances.
Not necessarily. It's very easy to add error correction codes to make a computer not change if you really don't want it to even in the presence of radiation-induced bit-flips.
(There's also the possibility of an ASI finding a solution to the alignment problem before making agents of its own; I would leave that to SciFi myself, just as I would proofs or disproofs of the Collatz conjecture).
Also: what does "real time" even mean in the context of a transistor-based mind? Transistors outpace biological synapses by the same ratio that wolves outpace continental drift, and the moon is 1.3 light-seconds from the Earth.
(I know the relevant math exists, but I don't understand much of it, so right now I'm maximally uncertain as to whether this is possible or not.)
Key thing here is that this is fundamentally no different from what has been happening since time immemorial, it's just that becomes easier with "AI" as part of the tooling.
Every piece of bullshit starts from the "bad acting human". Every single one. "AI" is just another new part of the same old process.
If people agree that gun control would reduce the harm from guns, wouldn't this same logic apply to AI? Is it different?
Funny way of doing it, going around saying "you should regulate us, but don't regulate people smaller than us, and don't regulate open-source".
> you must report to the US government about how you created and tested your model.
If you're referring to the recent executive order: only when dual-use, meaning the following:
---
(k) The term “dual-use foundation model” means an AI model that is trained on broad data; generally uses self-supervision; contains at least tens of billions of parameters; is applicable across a wide range of contexts; and that exhibits, or could be easily modified to exhibit, high levels of performance at tasks that pose a serious risk to security, national economic security, national public health or safety, or any combination of those matters, such as by:
(i) substantially lowering the barrier of entry for non-experts to design, synthesize, acquire, or use chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear (CBRN) weapons;
(ii) enabling powerful offensive cyber operations through automated vulnerability discovery and exploitation against a wide range of potential targets of cyber attacks; or
(iii) permitting the evasion of human control or oversight through means of deception or obfuscation.
- https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-action...
AI is a tool today, tomorrow AI is calling shots in many domains. It's worth planning for tomorrow.
The more AI/ML is woven into our infrastructure and economy, the less it will be possible to find an "off switch", anymore than we can (realistically) find an off switch for Walmart, Amazon, etc.
No, the corporation has an agency that is a tool of particular humans who are using it. Those humans could be shareholders, employees, or board members; but in any case they will have some claim to be acting for the corporation. But it's still human actions. Corporations can't do anything unless humans acting for them do it.
All are human actions. "Against corporate policy." Go ahead, exercise your free will. As a shareholder, an employee, hell as CEO. You will find out how much control a human has.
Note that it may not be immediately apparent we got it wrong. Think of a turkey on a stereotypical small American farm. It will itself living a happy and safe life under protection of its loving Human, until one day, for some reason that's completely incomprehensible to the turkey, the loving Human comes and chops its head off.
As in, for example, self-driving cars being given more autonomy than their reliability justifies? The answer to that is simple: don't do that. (I'm also not sure all such things are being done "with good intention".)
This is also the answer to over-eating, and to the dangers of sticking your hands in heavy machinery while it's running.
And yet there's an obesity problem in many nations, and health-and-safety rules are written in blood.
When you say up-thread is, in itself, correct:
> I wish more people grasped this extremely important point. AI is a tool. There will be humans who misuse any tool. That doesn't mean we blame the tool. The problem to be solved here is not how to control AI, but how to minimize the damage that bad acting humans can do.
Trouble is, we don't know how to do minimise the damage that bad acting humans can do with a tool that can do the thinking for them. Or even if we can. And that's assuming nobody is dumb enough to put the tool into a loop, give it some money, and leave it unsupervised.
And then there's the cases of hubris where people only imagine they understand the powerful thing, but they don't, like Chernobyl exploding and basically every time someone is hacked or defrauded.
It's most likely the main reason there's no direct world wars between super powers.
2. Your outlook on the societal impact of technology is contradicted by reality. The historical result of better tech always meant increased jobs and well-being. Today is the best time in human history to be alive by virtually every metric.
3. AI has been such a massive boon to humanity and your everyday existence for years that questioning its public utility is frankly bewildering.
2. This is outdated, life is NOT better now than at any other time. Life expectancy is going down in the US, there is vastly more economic inequality now than there was in the 60s, people broadly report much worse job satisfaction than they did in previous generations. The only metric you can really point to about now being better than the 90s is absolute poverty going down. Which is great, but those advancements are actually quite shallow on a per-person basis and are matched by declines in relative wealth for the middle 80% of people.
3. ??? What kind of AI are you talking about? LLMs have only been interesting to the public for about a year now
This is a vastly overinflated claim about AI.
Increased inequality doesn't imply the absolute level of welfare of anyone has decreased, I don't think you should include it in your list. If my life is 2x better than in the 60s, the fact that there are people out there with 100x better lives doesn't mean my life is worse.
Nuclear technology can be used for non-harmful things. Even nuclear bombs can be used for non-harmful things--see, for example, the Orion project.
> These tools are oriented by their very nature to replace human labor
So is a plow. So is a factory. So is a car. So is a computer. ("Computer" used to be a description of a job done by humans.) The whole point of technology is to reduce the amount of human drudge work that is required to create wealth.
> in the context of our economic system has a direct and unbreakable relationship to a reduction in the well being of the humans it replaces
All of the technologies I listed above increased the well being of humans, including those they replaced. If we're anxious that that might not happen under "our economic system", we need to look at what has changed from then to now.
In a free market, the natural response to the emergence of a technology that reduces the need for human labor in a particular area is for humans to shift to other occupations. That is what happened in response to the emergence of all of the technologies I listed above.
If that does not happen, it is because the market is not free, and the most likely reason for that is government regulation, and the most likely reason for the government regulation is regulatory capture, i.e., some rich people bought regulations that favored them from the government, in order to protect themselves from free market competition.
You can already see this today’s internet. I’m sure the pizzagate people genuinely believed they were doing a good thing.
This isn’t the same as an amoral tool like a knife, where a human decides between cutting vegetables or stabbing people.
The answer to this is simple: don't use a tool you don't understand. You can't fix this problem by nerfing the tool. You have to fix it by holding humans responsible for how they use tools, so they have an incentive to use them properly, and to not use them if they can't meet that requirement.
>The problem to be solved here is not how to control AI
When we talk about mitigations, it is explicitly about how to control AI, sometimes irrespective of how someone uses it.
Think about it this way: suppose I develop some stock-trading AI that has the ability to (inadvertently or purposefully) crash the stock market. Is the better control to put limits on the software itself so that it cannot crash the market or to put regulations in place to penalize people who use the software to crash the market? There is a hierarchy of controls when we talk about risk, and engineering controls (limiting the software) are always above administrative controls (limiting the humans using the software).
(I realize it's not an either/or and both controls can - and probably should - be in place, but I described it as a dichotomy to illustrate the point)
Now extend that to safety critical domains where a separate party doesn’t control an API and it gets harder still.
Also, remember that growing intelligence means growing capabilities for out-of-the-box thinking. For example, it's a known fact that in the past, NSA managed to trick the world into using cryptographic tools the agency could break, because they created a subtle failure mode in otherwise totally fine encryption scheme. They didn't go door to door compromising hardware or software - they literally put a backdoor in the math, and no one noticed for a while.
With that in mind, going back to the hypothetical scenario - how confident are you in the newest cryptography or cybersecurity research you used to upgrade the stock market sandbox? With the AI only getting smarter, you may want to consider the possibility of AI doing the NSA trick to you, poisoning some obscure piece of math that, a year or two later, will become critical to the integrity of the updated sandbox. In fact, by the time you think of the idea, it might have happened already, and you're living on borrowed time.
If the stock market crashes, there is a bug in the stock market.
You should fix the bug, not pass a law telling people not to do the thing that cashes the stock market.
EDIT: think of it this way: you may create a program that clearly makes it impossible for a variable X to be 0, and you may even formally prove this property. You may think this mean X will never be 0, but you'd better not wager anything really important over it, because no matter what your proof says, I can still make X be 0, - and I can do it with just a banana. Specifically, by finding where in memory X is physically being stored, and then using the natural radioactivity of a banana to overwrite it bit by bit.
Now imagine X=0 being the impossible stock market crash. Even if you formally prove it can't happen, as long as it's a meaningful concept, a possible state, it can be reached by means other than your proven program.
All I'm saying is, if there are problems in a system, fix the system. Not throw up our hands and declare the system can't be fixed.
An AI doomer isn't talking about any current system, but hypothetical future ones which can do planning and have autonomous feedback loops. These are best thought of as agents rather than tools.
Maybe that's a set of servos and robotic legs, or maybe it's a Bloomberg terminal and a bank account. You'll notice that all of these things are already regulated if they have enough power to cause damage. So at the end the GP is completely right; someone has to hook up the servos to the first LLM-based terminator.
This whole thing is a huge non-issue. We already (strive to) regulate everything that can cause harm directly. This regulation reaches these fanciful autonomous AI agents as well. If someone bent upon destroying the world had enough resources to build an AI basilisk or whatever, they could have spent 1/10 the effort and just created a thermonuclear bomb.
Via people, sending messages to them, convincing them to do things. This can be with facts and logic or with rhetoric and emotional appeals or orders that seem to come from entities of importance or transfers of goods/services (money).
AI “systems” are provided some level of agency by their very nature. That is, for example, you cannot predict the outcomes of certain learning models.
We necessarily provide agency to AI because that’s the whole point! As we develop more advanced AI, it will have more agency. It is an extension of the just world fallacy, IMO, to say that AI is “just a tool” - we lend agency and allow the tool to train on real world (flawed) data.
Hallucinations are a great example of this in an LLM. We want the machine to have agency to cite its sources… but we also create potential for absolute nonsense citations, which can be harmful in and of themselves, though the human on the using side may have perfectly positive intent.
LLMs, viewed as general purpose simulators/predictors, don't necessarily have any agency or goals by themselves. There is nothing to say that they cannot be made to simulate an agent with its own goals, by humans - and possibly either by malice or by mistake. Model capabilities are the limiting factor right now, but with the rise of more capable uncensored models, it isn't difficult to imagine a model attaining some degree of autonomy, or at least doing a lot of damage before imploding in on itself.
Does this mean "humans with bad motives" or does it extend to "humans who deploy AI without an understanding of the risk"?
I would say the latter warrants a discussion on the AI systems, if they make it hard to understand the risk due to opaqueness.
It's worth noting this is exactly the same argument used by pro-gun advocates as it pertains to gun rights. It's identical to: guns don't harm/kill people, people harm/kill people (the gun isn't doing anything until the bad actor aims and pulls the trigger; bad acting humans with guns are the real problem; etc).
It isn't an effective argument and is very widely mocked by the political left. I doubt it will work to shield the AI sector from aggressive regulation.
Assuming ML systems are dangerous and powerful, would you rather they be restricted to a small group of power-holders who will definitely use them to your detriment/to control you (they already do) or democratize that power and take a chance that someone may use them against you?
It’s only a kind of liberal (and thus right wing) that argues for gun control. Other kinds of liberals that call themselves “conservative” (also right wing) argue against it and for (worthless) individual gun rights.
Are we going to ban and regulate Photoshop and GIMP because bad people use them to create false imagery for propaganda?
Actually, back that up for a second.
Are we going to ban and regulate computers (enterprise and personal) because bad people use them for bad things?
Are we going to ban and regulate speech because bad people say bad things?
Are we going to ban and regulate hands because bad people use them to do bad things?
The buck always starts and stops at the person doing the act. A tool is just a tool, blaming the tool is nothing but an act of scapegoating.
If it's been trained by bad actors, that's really not a good thing.
To be clear, I'm not sure LLMs and their near term derivatives are so incredibly clever, but I have confidence that many humans have a propensity for easily manipulated irrational destructive stupidity, if the algorithm feeds them what they want to hear.
Some dogs get bad reputations, but humans are an intricate part of the picture. For example, German Shepherds are objectively dangerous, but have a good reputation because they are trained and cared for by responsible people such as for the police.