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Comment by vjvjvjvjghv | Hacker News Reader

Are there any realistic ways to achieve AI safety? Whatever that even means. How can they avoid users doing stupid/dangerous stuff with the AI?

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The company's board and c-suite should be held legally responsible if the company's services do damaging things. Punished by jail time, fines targeting their equity etc.

That would certainly change the game of perverted incentives. I'm afraid they're currently trying to push some sort of absolution of this risk. Even if damage happens they will say we warned people in advance, this was always a risk it's not our fault these systems are opaque black boxes, it's a matter of national security to develop them etc etc.

Nothing is ever 100% safe, it’s about a right balance of safety to the benefit.

Or, in other words - we have two P(Doom), one for AI being developed, and another for AI being not developed. The latter is not discussed enough imho.

We have P(Doom) also for "kolinko not wiring me a million dollars today" and that is not being discussed enough either imho.

What on earth are you talking about?

P(doom) for not making an ASI is pretty well established, I'm not really sure why everyone in the 21st century seems to have completely forgotten the risk of nuclear war (as the single largest example).

That's just another P(doom), or does making an ASI somehow negate the risk of nuclear war? Cause I'd assume it actually increases it.

Climate change is one risk that AGI will most likely fix. End of antibiotics is another (sure, possibly offset by a risk of new bioweapons). And a bunch of others where it’s more complicated.

But that’s my point - we should compare the risks of having AGI with the risks of not having it. And not pretend it’s roses or rainbows without it.

If anyone out there genuinely believes that Silicon Valley is going to solve nuclear war, then I have a hard drive full of NTFs to sell them.

Prosperity inhibits all war, nuclear or otherwise.

Why would a person who is happy, entertained, wealthy, well fed, and have 200 years of healthy high quality life expected ahead of them going to risk losing what they have in war?

-- there aren't zero reasons, sure-- but there are fewer.

And our technology has brought us absolutely tremendous prosperity in many regards and there is good reason to believe that AI can help create much more.

You do realize that the people currently holding their fingers over the proverbial Big Red Button are some of the wealthiest, most over-privileged people to have ever lived?

'Prosperity' has never been and will never be enough for some people. And unfortunately those are the same kinds of people who relentlessly seek power.

And not pushing it. QED.

There's no advantage to be had, for anyone, by pushing the red button.

The opposite is true of releasing ever more powerful AI into the world to do your bidding.

The comment was unclear, but my interpretation (also my opinion):

1) there are inherent risks involved with developing AI,

2) there are benefits to developing AI,

3) thus, it's entirely possible that the downside from the risks outweighs the upsides. In this case, the correct thing to do would be to not develop AI at all.

Regarding 1), there are many non-existential problems with AI that are already causing societal harm, i.e. debasing truth via generated videos and images, AI girlfriends, overwhelming quantities of slop content, unemployment, record carbon emissions, etc.

Regarding 2), I'm not personally convinced that the upside is there for the average person. I really hope to be convinced otherwise however.

Climate change for one, civil unrest due to a growing societal divide, end of antibiotics… A bunch of dangers we are facing right now and that AGI stands a chance of solving. It can increase the problem as well, but any discussion should really be between „is the world more likely to die with or without AGI”, and not just „with AGI”.

Or, in other words, sure, crossing this chasm is dangerous, but this side is on fire anyway and we don’t have many ways out otherwise.

Like any technology. Make it a crime when appropriate, otherwise expose bad behavior to legal liability.

By capping the capabilities at the level of existing models and banning any further development.

And how exactly do you stop further development? With what we have public right now we could still get decades of fruitful and hidden research out of it leading to smaller, more efficient, and smarter models.

By making it illegal and punishable with a long prison term. Something like "if you train a model more capable that what we have nowadays, you have to destroy it and notify the authorities within few hours, otherwise you go to prison and your company is dissolved".

"Smaller and more efficient" models are fine. It's "smarter" the problem.

Training new frontier models will likely require a huge amount of computational resources for a long time. Few companies worldwide are capable of that. It's not like someone will train a new GPT 6 - like model in their garage.

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