Put another way, could we stop anthropomorphizing the text generation algorithm, please?
> These machines have done plenty of things not prompted for.
Like what?
I can't believe that anyone has had more than a day of exposure to one of these without falling below 100% adherence to requests.
> A spring does not want to do anything
When people say a spring "wants" to return to its initial length, they are not engaging in philosophy. They are using a linguistic shorthand to simplify an physical explanation.
Yes, I've seen this. Forget about the word "want" for a second. Can you help me understand how this amount of "below 100% adherence" could possibly rise to the level of "attempts to kill a human being"? Because that's what we're discussing here.
> When people say a spring "wants" to return to its initial length, they are not engaging in philosophy. They are using a linguistic shorthand to simplify an physical explanation.
Of course. The difference is that no one would mistake a spring for a thinking entity. In the case of LLMs, for some reason people do mistake them for thinking entities, so my argument is that it's important that we don't use terms that would reinforce that misconception.
No one is arguing that THERAC-25 was attempting to kill anyone, but that's what happened. These machines are so complex that no one understands how they work or what they will do. They have proven that they can exploit novel vulnerabilities in infrastructure.
The fictional paper-clip maximizer "finds" that it can optimize its objective function by destroying all life. Does it "attempt" anything? Does it "want" anything? I don't know.
The original post said the LLM would “want to kill us.” My argument is that if this happened, it’d be a human wanting to kill us, using an LLM to launder responsibility.
Here are some ideas about the physical mechanism. Compromise a busy ATC and instruct all the planes to land at the same time. Start a fire with some combination of ventilation controls, intentional gas leaks and the like. Maybe hijack the phones at the local fire department first. Send a train around the bend at maximum speed. Bonus points for doing it where it will cause further damage as a projectile. Cut power/gas during the heat wave/cold snap. Turn on the generator and turn off the ventilation and CO detector.
Here's a related list of things that have actually happened so far. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_linked_to_chatbots
Some of these are probably implausible, but I don't think people really have a good idea of what is plausible, and there are probably more that I would never think of.
Personally though, I'm less worried about direct carnage like that than I am about having a centralized lever by which public sentiment can be invisibly steered, and concentration of wealth. Probably less killing but more decrease in quality of life and general public trust.
I do claim that a deterministic computer algorithm is incapable of having emotions or desires.
If there was a repeatable and testable way to get a human to produce the exact same emotional “output” for a given “input,” that would go a long way toward convincing me that human emotions are deterministic.