He's actually suggested it may happen within 10 years. Which makes it hard to take him seriously in general.
(I do personally take his overall concerns seriously, but I don't trust his timeline predictions at all, and many of his other statements.)
(I do personally take his overall concerns seriously, but I don't trust his timeline predictions at all, and many of his other statements.)
AI I'd a great spell checker, a REALLY good spell checker, and people are losing their minds over it, I don't get it.
Michael Lewis writes that what is remarkable about these guys [i.e. EAs] is that they're willing to follow their beliefs to their logical conclusion (paraphrasing) without regard to social cost/consequences or just inconvenience of it all. In fact, in my estimation this is just the definition of religious fundamentalism, and gives us a new lens with which to understand EA and the well funded brain children of the movement.
Every effective religion needs a doomsday scenario, or some 'second coming' apocalyptic like scenario (not sure why, just seems to be a pattern). I think all this fear mongering around AI is just that - it's based on irrational belief at the end of the day - its humanism rewashed into tech 'rationalism' (which was originally just washed from Christianity et. al.)
Still, I'm not sure that I see the 'AI jumping out of the box scenario' any time soon (or ever). Chat apps finding missile codes, or convincing your smart toaster to jump in your bubble bath while you're inside seem only as real as a man in a box with intentions is (and unfortunately humans can kill from inside and out of boxes).
I'm definitely concerned about the implications to social welfare, the social bias involved in systems that make big decisions about an individuals freedom, etc, but these leaps from super impressive automated text analysis to humanity doomsday scenario seem like fear mongering to me mostly because these are scenarios that already exist today (along with massive problems in general social welfare).
The scenarios that don't exist (like Nick Bostrom's "An objective function that turns the world into a paper clip factory in "Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies") strike me as easy to fix by just standing by the power outlet so things don't get out of hand. There are a lot of risks that don't exist yet. Alien contact is one of them - never happened, but it could happen, and if it does it could wipe us out - so be afraid and do something noble for the cause. This to me feels like a very rational response to what is essentially a 'magical' prior. We're scared now because we 'feel' close to General AI, but we really have no way of quantifying how close we are to it, and how dangerous (if at all) it would actually be. I'm definitely open to being wrong, but its hard not to agree with LeCun on a level.
Then Yudkowsky spins a gauntlet of no-evidence hypotheses for why such an accident is inevitable and leads to the death of literally all humans in the same instant.
But the first part of the argument is something that will be the critical piece of the engineering of such systems.
I've been programming since highschool, 5 years doing data science and I am at a total loss as to what people that the threat it.
Like, ACTUALLY, what do you think is the fear?
However, even given the current state of “AI”, I think there are countless dangers and risks.
The ability to fabricate audio and video that’s indistinguishable from the real thing can absolutely wreck havoc on society.
Even just the transition of spam and phishing from poorly worded blasts with grammatical errors to very eloquent and specific messages will exponentially increase the effectiveness of attacks.
LLM generated content which is a mix of fact and fantasy will soon far outweigh all the written and spoken content created by humans in all of history. That’s going to put humans in a place we’ve never been.
Current “AI” is a tool that can allow a layman to very quickly build all sorts of weapons to be used to meet their ends.
It’s scary because “AI” is a very powerful tool that individuals and states will weaponize and turn against their enemies.
It will be nice to finally have a good spellchecker though.
Only for as long people hold on to the idea that videos are reliable. Video is a medium. It will become as reliable as text. The existence of text, and specifically lies, has not wrecked society.
Literacy is not required.
Watching video is far more engaging and entrancing than reading books to most people.
Video can be broadcast and consumed by huge numbers of people _much_ faster than written text.
Unless someone is reading text out loud, the people around them aren't influenced.
In court, especially the court of public opinion, video is currently infallible.
So we can't trust video or audio of famous people anymore, again what is the fear?
The chat web app is fun, but people shouldn’t be worried about that at all - people should be worried about a hierarchy of 100,000 chat web apps using each other to, idk, socially engineer their way into nuclear missile codes or something —- pick your favorite doomsday ;).