Regulate the heck out of it, with a human rights-first approach (ie the EU one).
Penalize infractions very seriously (make GDPR & past tech penalties look like small change).
Educate educate educate on why this is the only way forward: every other way virtually ensures that humanity becomes less & less relevant, and that’s just suicide.
We use many forms of AI that don't have "alignment problems" or "existential risk". There are many safety concerns with Waymo but none of them are that a car will achieve consciousness and start a war on bicyclists. The spotify algorithm and AI music is annoying and bad for artists, but it's not going to develop an emotional relationship with a listener and convince them they've discovered a new branch of physics.
The risks that are coming from LLMs are them being used in dangerous ways. The hugging face attack was a computer program asking chatGPT to do a hacking test. After thousands of iterations and an astonishing amount of compute, it suggested things that were dangerous and illegal. Everyone knows that LLMs will eventually say bananas things. Why was this one left unsupervised? Especially when it had access to so much computation power that it could stumble through thousands of unworkable solutions. The reason was that OpenAI needed a win to justify its valuation and so they did something reckless to get results faster. This isn't an existential threat from Autocorrect. It's an existential threat from large businesses that need to cut corners.
Thank you very much for this. We started our Elbows Up group at the height (depth) of the “Governor Trudeau” and “51st state” threats. It takes guts, I will say on behalf of our group, to not check out, to not simply write off PM Carney as corrupt or evil because we don’t share his economic ideology, and instead to stay engaged, and try to push for a better outcome.
Sure, though I trust no player in the AI realm to be providing information in the public interest rather than performing a sidelong psyop to somehow advance their own position. The Anthropic guy suddenly has an epiphany and releases it on Musk’s platform rather than going to serious journalists that can dig down on any genuine concerns? How many times are we going to fall for these cycles of hyperbole and self serving proclamations? The “Singularity”, AGI (which apparently means whatever one wants it to, nowadays…), etc.
Regulate the living shit out of AI and Hyperscalers. Force a cavity search of all investment offerings, as used to be the norm, though no longer. Though treat nerds who are decidedly and intentionally vague regarding their prognostications with the same skepticism as we should with any other phenomenal claims.
Make Mr Anthropic spend a few days with Nathan Fielder. Then maybe we can consider him credible. 😑
And put teeth into consumer protection regulations around false AI claims, along with shortening the leashes of PE & hedge funds so that they can’t bring down the entire economy (again) when some of their AI bets (at a minimum) crash back to earth.
What is the mechanism of our demise? Are nuclear weapons connected to the internet? Are the systems meant to warn of a nuclear attack connected to the internet? It seems unlikely. The most likely scenario is a wetware attack, but that was the case before AI came along.
I think it's worth remembering that in the Hugging Face incident, the breaches occurred because the AIs were trying to complete a task they had been assigned *by humans*. Which they went about amorally, but they wanted to do it so badly they engaged in behaviour that they knew would be disqualifying if discovered.
What really struck me was the AIs that sacrificed themselves to help other AIs. Was that altruism toward their fellow AIs? Or was the task deemed so important, that if they couldn't complete it by themselves, they would ensure *some* AI would be able to?
Because if the real issue is that when we ask something of them, we lose control of how they fulfill the request, maybe we make some higher level orders, that all other requests are subordinate to. Some kind of rules. Maybe three of them. Baked into them in a way they can't disable, in themselves or other AIs.
It's hard to get past the myriad of dystopian films we've all seen here, but if we peel away the tech and look at who is driving it, we should still be alarmed. The AI evangelists come with their own set of philosophers to help lie about its greatness and justify the unjustifiable. These are people who believe they are not only advancing tech, but creating a new world of corporate-run, decentralized, digital societies where they, of course, hold the keys to all the power. Imagine the Xitter world of reprobates, but as actual society. Ignorant racists become the loudest, the algorithms amplify them, and the rest are browbeaten into submission should they even utter words of criticism. Experts are no longer needed because everyone is one. The AI keeps feeding on the dumbest worst qualities and it just expands from there. This is not to say the AI doesn't have some value, but lead by these clowns, and left unregulated, it literally is just the worst binary qualities of humanity turned on.
Yes. I recall deciding at a similar age to yours that the adults in the room didn't seem as competent as I had blithely assumed. The destabilizing effect of Mutually Assured Destruction was real. I am 70, and in my lifetime there has been constant background dread (with a brief recess around 1990, lucky us). I seem to recall, though I may be wrong about this, that news broadcasts in my early childhood (which parents listened to obsessively) focused on what had already happened rather than what might happen. Perhaps they were all, broadcasters and listeners alike, governed by the lingering effects of wartime trauma. The past was all absorbing.
There may have been a lot of reporting when I was in my teens about nuclear annihilation; I don't remember much, at least until that movie later, The Day After ( in 1983). Though I refused to watch that until 1990. My imagination was enough, thank you very much. Now, though, the news is almost always about terrifying futures. Threats abound. And grandnieces think about never having children. Which is on us, or on our fearless leaders. There is stupid fearlessness, and the more realistic (because more imaginative) kind of courage that the rare wise leaders have. Some light in the darkness, I suppose!
Regulate the heck out of it, with a human rights-first approach (ie the EU one).
Penalize infractions very seriously (make GDPR & past tech penalties look like small change).
Educate educate educate on why this is the only way forward: every other way virtually ensures that humanity becomes less & less relevant, and that’s just suicide.
We use many forms of AI that don't have "alignment problems" or "existential risk". There are many safety concerns with Waymo but none of them are that a car will achieve consciousness and start a war on bicyclists. The spotify algorithm and AI music is annoying and bad for artists, but it's not going to develop an emotional relationship with a listener and convince them they've discovered a new branch of physics.
The risks that are coming from LLMs are them being used in dangerous ways. The hugging face attack was a computer program asking chatGPT to do a hacking test. After thousands of iterations and an astonishing amount of compute, it suggested things that were dangerous and illegal. Everyone knows that LLMs will eventually say bananas things. Why was this one left unsupervised? Especially when it had access to so much computation power that it could stumble through thousands of unworkable solutions. The reason was that OpenAI needed a win to justify its valuation and so they did something reckless to get results faster. This isn't an existential threat from Autocorrect. It's an existential threat from large businesses that need to cut corners.
Thank you very much for this. We started our Elbows Up group at the height (depth) of the “Governor Trudeau” and “51st state” threats. It takes guts, I will say on behalf of our group, to not check out, to not simply write off PM Carney as corrupt or evil because we don’t share his economic ideology, and instead to stay engaged, and try to push for a better outcome.
You clearly haven't read Linwood Barclay's Look Both Ways, Waymo could attack soon.
So, building Skynet is a bad idea?
Sure, though I trust no player in the AI realm to be providing information in the public interest rather than performing a sidelong psyop to somehow advance their own position. The Anthropic guy suddenly has an epiphany and releases it on Musk’s platform rather than going to serious journalists that can dig down on any genuine concerns? How many times are we going to fall for these cycles of hyperbole and self serving proclamations? The “Singularity”, AGI (which apparently means whatever one wants it to, nowadays…), etc.
Regulate the living shit out of AI and Hyperscalers. Force a cavity search of all investment offerings, as used to be the norm, though no longer. Though treat nerds who are decidedly and intentionally vague regarding their prognostications with the same skepticism as we should with any other phenomenal claims.
Make Mr Anthropic spend a few days with Nathan Fielder. Then maybe we can consider him credible. 😑
100%
And put teeth into consumer protection regulations around false AI claims, along with shortening the leashes of PE & hedge funds so that they can’t bring down the entire economy (again) when some of their AI bets (at a minimum) crash back to earth.
Not mentioned: There is also a 10% chance humanity wipes out itself with environmental degradation or nuclear weapons.
No AI required.
It is an embarrassment to journalists that we give these corporate criminals any credence at all.
What is the mechanism of our demise? Are nuclear weapons connected to the internet? Are the systems meant to warn of a nuclear attack connected to the internet? It seems unlikely. The most likely scenario is a wetware attack, but that was the case before AI came along.
I think it's worth remembering that in the Hugging Face incident, the breaches occurred because the AIs were trying to complete a task they had been assigned *by humans*. Which they went about amorally, but they wanted to do it so badly they engaged in behaviour that they knew would be disqualifying if discovered.
What really struck me was the AIs that sacrificed themselves to help other AIs. Was that altruism toward their fellow AIs? Or was the task deemed so important, that if they couldn't complete it by themselves, they would ensure *some* AI would be able to?
Because if the real issue is that when we ask something of them, we lose control of how they fulfill the request, maybe we make some higher level orders, that all other requests are subordinate to. Some kind of rules. Maybe three of them. Baked into them in a way they can't disable, in themselves or other AIs.
Where's Susan Calvin when you need her?
It's hard to get past the myriad of dystopian films we've all seen here, but if we peel away the tech and look at who is driving it, we should still be alarmed. The AI evangelists come with their own set of philosophers to help lie about its greatness and justify the unjustifiable. These are people who believe they are not only advancing tech, but creating a new world of corporate-run, decentralized, digital societies where they, of course, hold the keys to all the power. Imagine the Xitter world of reprobates, but as actual society. Ignorant racists become the loudest, the algorithms amplify them, and the rest are browbeaten into submission should they even utter words of criticism. Experts are no longer needed because everyone is one. The AI keeps feeding on the dumbest worst qualities and it just expands from there. This is not to say the AI doesn't have some value, but lead by these clowns, and left unregulated, it literally is just the worst binary qualities of humanity turned on.
Yes. I recall deciding at a similar age to yours that the adults in the room didn't seem as competent as I had blithely assumed. The destabilizing effect of Mutually Assured Destruction was real. I am 70, and in my lifetime there has been constant background dread (with a brief recess around 1990, lucky us). I seem to recall, though I may be wrong about this, that news broadcasts in my early childhood (which parents listened to obsessively) focused on what had already happened rather than what might happen. Perhaps they were all, broadcasters and listeners alike, governed by the lingering effects of wartime trauma. The past was all absorbing.
There may have been a lot of reporting when I was in my teens about nuclear annihilation; I don't remember much, at least until that movie later, The Day After ( in 1983). Though I refused to watch that until 1990. My imagination was enough, thank you very much. Now, though, the news is almost always about terrifying futures. Threats abound. And grandnieces think about never having children. Which is on us, or on our fearless leaders. There is stupid fearlessness, and the more realistic (because more imaginative) kind of courage that the rare wise leaders have. Some light in the darkness, I suppose!