This is relative to something like every nation owning nuclear weapons by 1960 and civil wars usually beginning with a nuclear strike by a standing government.
A ban on technology results in underground research, migration of intellectuals, monopolies, seething parties...
Or you think that «Advanced AI development» does not imply attempting the achievement of Intelligence?
We don't. The need for Intelligence to fill the scarcity is unthinkable. The urgency is the highest, especially ever since simil-intelligence (LLMs) was implemented. To research Intelligence "safely" you simply do not give it agency (you do not let it control computers), for example. To have "safety" in general, you cannot empower morons - humanity is doing the opposite. We cannot rest with incomplete LLMs, nor we can with this dumb, intrinsically dangerous humanity.
What does "safely" mean? Getting stuck with this infra-humanity?! That is the radically unsafe thing.
I just wanna say, I really admire the irony of this sentence. Maybe once we invent superintelligence it will be able to think enough to tell us how badly we needed it before we had it.
> The urgency is the highest, especially ever since simil-intelligence (LLMs) was implemented.
It isn't. If we stopped all work on LLMs and AI we'd be more than OK. There's no imminent danger or threat.
> To research Intelligence "safely" you simply do not give it agency (you do not let it control computers), for example.
Something can't both be smarter than us and completely controllable by us. The whole point of inventing superintelligence is so it can do things we can't. Humans can already break out of sandboxes, invent bioweapons, manipulate each other to invent bioweapons, etc. What makes you think superintelligence can't or won't do these things?
> To have "safety" in general, you cannot empower morons - humanity is doing the opposite. We cannot rest with incomplete LLMs, nor we can with this dumb, intrinsically dangerous humanity.
Hey, you're talking to a guy who's got a list of tech to ban: nukes, social media, all forms of video news, etc. What does Taylor Swift say, "I've got a blank space, baby, and I'll write your name (Claude)".
> What does "safely" mean? Getting stuck with this infra-humanity?! That is the radically unsafe thing.
You literally just ban it and turn it off. People are always like "you can't ban it bawwwwwww!" but we ban tech all the time. Try buying a bunch of fertilizer, try buying equipment to research gain of function, try buying anti-aircraft guns, try building fuselages to enrich uranium. LLM research requires extraordinary amounts of hardware, electricity, data, funding, and all the things upstream of that (cooling, shipping, space, financing, etc.) The effort you'd have to go through to do this clandestinely, illegally, while also finding researchers willing to take the risk is all prohibitive. There's a list of all nuclear scientists in the entire world. They have to go to school somewhere. Same for AI researchers. If, say, half a dozen of them suddenly disappear, and a random town in Wyoming suddenly starts making millions of requests per second across the whole internet, guzzling electricity, producing a lot of heat, or ordering a shitload of insulation and ducting, we'll know!
Unthinkable magnitude, I meant.
> no imminent danger or threat
Current technologies are already a danger as agents - they can already do damage - and an unfinished product that cannot be aborted at this stage - Intelligence is not there yet, we have post-Eliza things promising and greatly dumb. We have already started, we have to finish - which is, having the NNs reach a stage of reliability.
> smarter than us and completely controllable by us
Something which is smarter than you should probably even not be controlled by that same "you" that have difficulties controlling a backyard. The concept of «us» there is not consistent with a proper framework.
> who's got a list of tech to ban
I got that suggestion, that it could be your mentality. Banning will not create growth (remember Hegel). Humanity as an aggregate stalls, let us depower aggregate humanity and create further better instruments.
> literally just ban it
And, as I said remain stuck with this trash level infra-humanity. No, very much not.
Get back to the main points:
-- Intelligence is a Value. We are trying to achieve it. That berniesanders fights studying, distilling and augmenting a value. That berniesanders is in that regard a satanist.
-- Humanity as it is has proven very partial value. For which good reason should it be attributed a fair right to protect its perpetration? Are you taking for granted some "right to persist"? To claim a right to existence it should prove goodwill and growth - not the behaviour of an infestant.
-- The real problem is that we have humans and partial unfinished technology in the loop of the progress: both humans (generally speaking) and partial unfinished technology are liabilities. Nonetheless, we cannot stall, so we must proceed.