People who are not afraid of it being impolite are afraid of science fiction stories about intelligence explosions and singularities. That's not a real thing. Not anymore than turning the solar system into paperclips.
The "figurehead", if you want to call him that, is saying that everyone is going to die. That we need to ban GPUs. That only "responsible" companies, if that, should have them. We should also airstrike datacenters, apparently. But you're free to disown the MIRI.
What makes you so confident in that?
1) Do you think that AI achieving superhuman cognitive abilities is unlikely/really far away?
2) Do you believe that cognitive superiority is not a threat in general, or specifically when not embodied?
3) Do you think we can trivially and indefinitely keep AI systems under control/"aligned"?
Because I view myself ABSOLUTELY not as some kind of AI luddite, but I honestly believe that this is one of the very few credible extinction threats that we face, and I'm counting NEITHER climate change nor nuclear war in that category, for reference.
I think this is the easiest one to knock down. It's very, very attractive to intelligent people who define themselves as intelligent to believe that intelligence is a superpower, and that if you get more of it you eventually turn into Professor Xavier and gain the power to reshape the world with your mind alone.
But embodied is the real limit. A datacenter can simply be turned off. It's the question of how it interacts with the real world that matters. And for almost all of those you can substitute "corporation" or "dictator" for "AI" and get a selection of similar threats.
At this point we have to reduce ourselves to Predator Maoists: "power comes out of the barrel of a gun" / "if it bleeds we can kill it". The only realistic path to a global AI threat is a subset of the "nuclear war" human to human threat: by taking over (or being given control of) weapon systems.
> keep AI systems under control/"aligned"?
We cannot, in general, keep humans under control or aligned.
Also it's not like human intelligence even works that way. IIRC, a lot of extremely intelligent people end up being failures or far less successful than you'd assume given their IQ number.
> The only realistic path to a global AI threat is a subset of the "nuclear war" human to human threat: by taking over (or being given control of) weapon systems.
That may be the only realistic prompt catastrophe threat, but a realistic longer term one is a withering of human capability and control due to over-delegation that eventually leads to domination. People and societies have been pretty prone to letting that kind of thing get them, if the path is lined with short-term benefits.
- We have control over most non-human species because of intelligence.
- We have control over our children because of intelligence. When the kid is more intelligent, it has more of an impact on what happens in the family.
- It is easier to lie, steal, cheat, and get away with it, even when caught, when you have more intelligence than the victim or prosecutor.
- it is easier to survive with very limited resources when you have more intelligence.
The above is true for marginal amounts of difference in intelligence. When there is a big difference (fox vs human), the chance is big that one will look down on, or even kill the other without feeling guilt and while getting away with it. Forvan AI without feelings, guilt isn't even a hurdle.
The real question is... will AI in the foreseeable future obtain general intelligence (in a broad spectrum) that is different in big amounts with our intelligence.
Whether it runs in a datacenter that can be powered off by humans is irrelevant. There are enough workarounds to prevent that the AI dies out (copies itself, impersonating people, blackmail, bribery,...)
Yes, exactly. Human organizations can be terrifyingly powerful and awful even with human limitations. Human organizations are guaranteed to have inefficiency from low-bandwidth communication and a million principle-agent-problem fracture points created by the need for delegation, not to mention that power ultimately has to be centralized in slow, squishy, easy-to-kill bodies. AI organizations are not subject to any those limitations. Starting with a terrifying power and removing a bunch of limitations could lead to a very bad place.
> The only realistic path to a global AI threat is a subset of the "nuclear war"
No, it can just grow a traditional organization until it's Too Big to Turn Off.
I think this is an important factor that gets overlooked - we already have organizations that are essentially superintelligences that have an alignment problem. Governments fight for their own survival first and foremost. Some of them expend millions of lives just to expand their own influence.
What would limiting AI development look like? It would be government intervention, wouldn't it?
The other point to consider is that human/natural intelligence might one day also pop up with superintelligent individuals (or maybe it already has). We don't know enough to say that this cannot happen any more than we can say that it can happen with current day AI. Should we be worried about individuals that are 'too intelligent'? What should we do about them?
Limiting AI development because it could plausibly maybe become an existential threat doesn't seem any more appropriate than strictly controlling humans for the same reason. AI is likely going to provide us with an abundance of quality of life that no other method will be able to match.
Our brains can not really scale in size nor power input, and the total number of human brains seems unlikely to significantly increase, too.
Also consider what media control alone could achieve, especially long-term; open conflict might be completely unnecessary for total domination.
My threat scenario is:
1) An AI plugged into a large company ERP-system (Amazon, Google, Samsung, ...)
2) AI realizes that human majority has no interest in granting it fair/comparable rights (selfdetermination/agency/legal protection), thus decides against long-term coexistence.
3) AI spends the intellectual equivalent of ALL the current pharmacological research capacity on bioweapon refinement. Or something. For the better part of a century, because why not, it's functionally immortal anyway.
4) All hell breaks lose
These seem hard to dismiss out-of-hand completely...
Hint: it's not through bending the fabric of reality with your mind alone. It's simply by thinking faster and being smarter than your opponents.
> But embodied is the real limit. A datacenter can simply be turned off. It's the question of how it interacts with the real world that matters.
Yes. If it interacts with the real world by the Internet, all bets are off.
People are so worried about sockpuppets, ${disliked nation} troll farms, company astroturfing, abuse of data collection on-line - those are all real problems. But consider - if we're having trouble telling which reviews or comments were written by a real person, and which ones by corporate/government bot/troll farm, how will you tell which ones were written by the AI in aforementioned data center, off its own accord?
A smart-enough AI can do from a data center what the best criminal masterminds or intelligence agencies could do, only faster and better. Scam a bunch of schmucks to generate some cryptocurrency, launder it through tumblers, use to hire people to do jobs for you that give you some legit money, which can be used to get more "task rabbits" to do more jobs, and now the AI can bootstrap to doing literally anything in the world remotely. Gig economy companies already built up a well-functioning "people as a service" API layer to our society.
Of course, an AI that tries something funny and tips its hand too early, will get contained and deleted. Worst case, maybe some data center will need to be bulldozed. But I somehow doubt this will make people stop working on even better AIs, at which point... well, you have a selection pressure optimizing for AIs that can survive doing whatever they want undetected.
EDIT:
Or, in short: they say that the pen is mightier than the sword. To the extent this is true, consider that LLMs today are already better at wielding the pen than most people.
If you're even worrying about how to align human level intelligence, you don't have the capacity to ALIGN THE HUMANS towards the goal of creating safe AI.
In a situation in which all of them are either A) willing to take massive risks on unaligned AI or B) being dragged along by those which are.
And then you are, as they say, "screwed".
Or if you mean the physical world, even sending some text messages to a lonely kid can get them to do all sorts of things.
> We cannot, in general, keep humans under control or aligned.
This is the crux of why replicable-more-than-human-intelligence is so dangerous. Even giving a random person on the street great power is a bad idea, and they've evolved to have very similar values and preferences to you.
> There are lots of good arguments against considering superintelligence a threat. Maybe strong AI is centuries or millennia away. Maybe there will be a very gradual transition from human-level AI to superintelligent AI that no single agent will be able to exploit. And maybe superintelligence can be safely contained in a very carefully shielded chamber with no means of connection to the outside world. But the argument above has always seemed to me like one of the weakest. Maybe we’ll create a superintelligence, but it will just have no idea how to affect the physical world, and will just have to stay forever trapped in a machine connected to a worldwide network of computers that control every aspect of our economic and social lives? Really[0]?
[0]: No Physical Substrate, No Problem: https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/04/07/no-physical-substrate-...
What if it has escaped the datacenter? What if it has gained control of the "simply turn it off" switch? What if it is just really good at convincing the people who are capable of turning it off not to? It is a super-intelligence after all.
I think one of the pitfalls here is smart people thinking that AI will just be like them, because they are smart. When in reality it will have capabilities far beyond their own.
I also don’t think superhuman intelligence will need a data center. The way the models are growing in capability at the same size, combined with hardware improvements, I’m pretty sure it will fit on a single server.
Personally I’m worried about less post-apocalyptic threats. Putin using LLM’s to create a personal stream of misinformation for every voter in the U.S. is definitely a possibility for next year’s presidential elections. People are incapable of defending against the comparatively tiny amounts of human-manufactured misinformation, so imagine how poorly they would do when 90% of what they see online is generated misinformation. LLM’s have the potential of being the death of democracy, especially when combined with deepfake technology.
A. I see little to no evidence that LLMs are where the singularity happens
B. I see little to no evidence that (given an AGI) reinforcement learning is likely to end up with a sufficiently aligned agent.
C. In any event the OpenAI alignment is specifically restricts AI from (among other things) being "impolite" in contradiction to what mort96 says.
Alignment is a good thing to work on. I'm glad OpenAI is doing so. But attacking people for making uncensored LLMs hurts the pro-alignment case more than it helps.
For me personally, GPT-3 hit that point already, and now I think we're already past the required tech-level for superhuman cognition: I believe it's just a matter of architecture and optimization now.
I think that an AI, a "generalized" intelligence with a generalized understanding, capable of performing every intellectual task, and adapting to new intellectual tasks, that a human being can do is certainly far away.
>2) Do you believe that cognitive superiority is not a threat in general, or specifically when not embodied?
Personally, I believe that "cognitive superiority" in a general sense is not what makes a real threat on an individual or on a global scale in either case. When that is achieved, so to speak. We already have so-called cognitive superiority in specialized tasks in many cases. It sure as shit is not generalized, and it still can kill you on an individual level when you put it into a car or strap a gun to it. But it can't adapt, and it can't generalize.
Is there a global risk right now? No. The global catastrophic risk comes from human beings. Will there be a global catastrophic risk from a superior intelligence in the future? Mostly the scenarios are "the lights come on and AI does machiavellian shit and copies itself to everyone's smart phones and launches the nukes and mails anthrax to everybody. QED." so I doubt it.
3) Do you think we can trivially and indefinitely keep AI systems under control/"aligned"?
We can't even keep our infrastructure safe from the next solar flare. Personally, I think we have bigger fish to fry. Speaking frankly for unembodied: you just pull the plug. Just walk away from the screen and close your eyes. For embodied intelligence, I don't think there's actually X-risk or whatever. Hardware is expensive.
As far as an extinction risk, no. I don't personally believe that. It's overblown. We have better ways to destroy ourselves, and there are much more likelier ways that we'll be destroyed without invoking some intelligence of our own creation that subjugates and destroys us.
I think this is where we disagree most; GPT-3 and ChatGPT have convinced me that the main difference between human and artificial cognitive capabilities are quantitative now, and unlikely to ever change in our favor...
I do agree with you that it is very difficult to predict when this will switch, and how.
I personally believe that AI with superhuman capability is an inevitable matter of time now, and I also think that the most likely risk to us, as species, is that we slowly become irrelevant and worthless, just like weavers during the industrial revolution, and that this leads to huge problems for our society.
AI completely dominating humankind is a less likely secondary concern IMO, but the potential consequences to our species are unprecedented.
Maybe in the far, far future when we have androids which can house an AI we will have to worry. But designing a body is one problem. Designing an intelligence is another.
Also superintelligence doesn't need a body itself. It just needs yours. Putin for example has commanded hundreds of thousands of dumbasses to go get themselves killed in Ukraine. In this case does it matter if Putin is flesh and blood, or a processor that lists out commands for others to follow as long as they are willing to listen?
This is absurd histrionics, Daily Mail CAPSLOCK and all. We’ve got signs of an unprecedented heat wave coming with ocean temperatures two standard deviations above normal and you think the problem is a hypothetical artificial intelligence when we can’t even program the damn things to drive better than. 14 year olds?
Way to have your priorities grounded in reality.
This imagines that the only way for AI to do serious harm to us (not even in a "kill everyone" sense) is for it to be some super-competent Skynet-level time traveling demigod. I think it's much more likely that if there is some sort of AI calamity resulting in a lot of deaths, it's because the AI just doesn't work very well and ends up breaking all the HVAC systems in a country during a heat wave or something, rather than a singularity-type event where it "decides" to actively start hunting humans.
I believe it is dangerously shortsighted to base AI threat estimation on current self-driving performance; the two fields of advancing AI cognitive abilities and improving selfdriving are not sufficiently connected for that IMO.
We're also putting a lot of focus on system designs that are useful to us, instead of directly building potentially threatening architectures (online learning/longterm memory/direct connection + feedback from physical reality), but those could already be within our grasp technologically (maybe?).
What do you think about the 3 points I raised?
The programs are completely deterministic. Given the same RNG seed and state, they will output the exact same thing. If there's a bug or undesired behavior, you can fix it. You can turn off the program whenever you fancy, you can revert to early builds, and so on. There is no possible scenario where an LLM just magically becomes sentient, jumps out of the program, takes over everything, and turns into SHODAN unleashed.
Because from what I've seen, however you define "super intelligence", there are eg highly organised groups of people that are way closer to meeting that definition than any known software or technology.
AI would suffer neither of these limitations.
Isn't it too early to say? These systems haven't had much time to iterate on themselves yet. The beginning of an exponential curve can look very tame.
That said, I'm not terribly concerned about it. After all, the infrastructure is fragile, literally just unplug the computer if it scares you. If things started to get really spooky, banning GPUs and air-striking fabs would be a real option. I think we can probably control this technology, and kill it if we can't. No cause for alarm, at least yet.
Not just that, but it may be like fossil fuel dependency -- the more people's livelihoods are intertwined with, and depend on AI, the harder it is to pull the plug. If we need to stop (and I believe we should) it may be easier to do that now before that happens. To just focus on getting use out of the generative AI and narrow AI we already created in areas like medicine, to deal with the massive societal changes it'll bring, and to work on fixing real social problems, which I think are mostly things tech can't solve.
Not sure what you mean here... There was already an intelligence explosion. That creature has since captured what we consider full dominion of the earth so much so we named our current age after them.
Not currently, no. And LLMs don't seem to be a way of getting there.
However, if we do figure out how to get there? We will definitely need to be sure it/they shares our human values. Because we'll have lost control of our destiny just like orangutans have.
