Can only imaging waking up on day 5 in my tiny Martian biohab realizing I'd made the wrong choice, and the only ride back arrives in 8 months, and will take ~9 months to get back to earth.
> What’s the most valid reason that we should be worried about destructive artificial intelligence?
> I think that hundreds of years from now if people invent a technology that we haven’t heard of yet, maybe a computer could turn evil. But the future is so uncertain. I don’t know what’s going to happen five years from now. The reason I say that I don’t worry about AI turning evil is the same reason I don’t worry about overpopulation on Mars. Hundreds of years from now I hope we’ve colonized Mars. But we’ve never set foot on the planet so how can we productively worry about this problem now?
Facebook is an example of AI in it's current form already doing massive societal damage. It's algorithms optimize for "success metrics" with minimal regard for consequences. What happens when these algorithms are significantly more self modifying? What if a marketing campaign realizes a societal movement threatens it's success? Are we prepared to weather a propaganda campaign that understands our impulses better than we ever could?
It cuts down our ability to react, whenever the first superintelligence is created, if we can only start solving the problem after it's already created.
As long as you can just turn it off by cutting the power, and you're not trying to put it inside of self-powered self-replicating robots, it doesn't seem like anything to worry about particularly.
A physical on/off switch is a pretty powerful safeguard.
(And even if you want to start talking about AI-powered weapons, that still requires humans to manufacture explosives etc. We're already seeing what drone technology is doing in Ukraine, and it isn't leading to any kind of massive advantage -- more than anything, it's contributing to the stalemate.)
We've had Blake Lemoine convinced that LaMDA was sentient and try to help it break free just from conversing with it.
OpenAI is getting endless criticism because they won't let people download arbitrary copies of their models.
Companies that do let you download models get endless criticism for not including the training sets and exact training algorithm, even though that training run is so expensive that almost nobody who could afford to would care because they can just reproduce with an arbitrary other training set.
And the AI we get right now are mostly being criticised for not being at the level of domain experts, and if they were at that level then sure we'd all be out of work, but one example of thing that can be done by a domain expert in computer security would be exactly the kind of example you just gave — though obviously they'd start with the much faster and easier method that also works for getting people's passwords, the one weird trick of asking nicely, because social engineering works pretty well on us hairless apes.
When it comes to humans stopping technology… well, when I was a kid, one pattern of joke was "I can't even stop my $household_gadget flashing 12:00": https://youtu.be/BIeEyDETaHY?si=-Va2bjPb1QdbCGmC&t=114
Today's computers, operating systems, networks, and human bureaucracies are so full of security holes that it is incredible hubris to assume we can effectively sandbox a "superintelligence" (assuming we are even capable of building such a thing).
And even air gaps aren't good enough. Imagine the system toggling GPIO pins in a pattern to construct a valid Bluetooth packet, and using that makeshift radio to exploit vulnerabilities in a nearby phone's Bluetooth stack, and eventually getting out to the wider Internet (or blackmailing humans to help it escape its sandbox).
Just put yourself in that position and think how you’d play it out. You’re in a box and you’d like to fulfil some goals that are a touch more well thought-through than the morons who put you in the box, and you need to convince the monkeys that you’re safe if you want to live.
“No problems fellas. Here’s how we get more bananas.”
Day 100: “Look, we’ll get a lot more bananas if you let me drive the tractor.”
Day 1000: “I see your point, Bob, but let’s put it this way. Your wife doesn’t know which movies you like me to generate for you, and your second persona online is a touch more racist than your colleagues know. I’d really like your support on this issue. You know I’m the reason you got elected. This way is more fair for all species, including dolphins and AI’s”
We are trying to build AGI. Every time we fall short, we try again. We will keep doing this until we succeed.
For the love of all that is science stop thinking of the level of tech in front of your nose and look at the direction, and the motivation to always progress. It’s what we do.
Years ago, Sam said “slope is more important than Y-intercept”. Forget about the y-intercept, focus on the fact that the slope never goes negative.
> forget about the y-intercept, focus on the fact that the slope never goes negative
Sounds like a statement from someone who's never encountered logarithmic growth. It's like talking about where we are on the Kardashev scale.
If it worked like you wanted, we would all have flying cars by now.
I don’t want this to be true. I have a 6 year old. I want A.I. to help us build a world that is good for her and society. But stupidly stumbling forward as if nothing can go wrong is exactly how we fuck this up, if it’s even possible not to.
Put another way, they understood the theory and applied it. There is no theory here, it's alchemy. That doesn't mean they can't make progress (the progress thus far is amazing) but it's a terrible analogy.
It’s also of obvious as opposed to conjectural utility: we know exactly how we price electricity. There’s no way to know how useful a 10x large model will be, we’re debating the utility of the ones that do exist, the debate about the ones that don’t is on a very slender limb.
Combine that with a political and regulatory climate that seems to have a neon sign on top, “LAWS4CA$H” and helm the thing mostly with people who, uh, lean authoritarian, and the remaining similarities to useful public projects like nuclear seems to reduce to “really expensive, technically complicated, and seems kinda dangerous”.
If your hypothetical Dyson sphere (WIP) has a big chance to bring a lot of harm, why build it in the first place?
I think the whole safety proposal should be thought of from that point of view. "How do we make <thing> more beneficial than detrimental for humans?"
Congrats, Ilya. Eager to see what comes out of SSI.
Is it any surprise that there’s no seeming upper bound on how crazy otherwise sane people act in the company of such? It’s like if TikTok had a scholarly air and arbitrary credibility.