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Wimbledon: All England club to replace all 300 line judges after 147 years with electronic system next year
There's only one key sentence in the article that you need to read:
How far are we from "JudgeGPT will rule on your criminal case, and the ability to appeal its verdicts will be removed"?
The actual capabilities and accuracy of the AI system are, in many instances, irrelevant. The point is that AI provides an elastic ideological cover for people to do shitty things. He who controls the RoboJudge controls everything. Just RLHF a model so it knows that minority crime must always be judged against a backdrop of historical oppression and racism, and any doubts about the integrity of elections are part of a dangerous conspiracy that is a threat to our democracy, and boom. You have a perfectly legitimated rubber stamp for your agenda in perpetuity. How could you doubt the computer? It's so smart, and it's been trained on so much data. What would be the point of appealing the verdict anyway? Your appeal would just go to the same government server farm, the same one that has already ruled on your case.
Open source won't save you. What I've been trying to explain to advocates of open source is that you can't open source physical power. GPT-9 might give you your own personal army of Terrence Taos at your beck and call, but as long as the government has the biggest guns, they're still the ones in charge.
"AI safety" needs to focus less on what AI could do to us and more on what people can use AI to do to each other.
Skynet is still the greater problem, both because even an AI-enabled human tyrant would still be pushing against entropy to remain in charge and because the vast majority of humans want a future with lots of happy people in it, while AI samples a much wider distribution of goals.
If the keys to the god-machine were randomly distributed then sure. However, the people most likely to end up in control are Tech Billionaires (specifically the most ruthless and powerhungry of this highly selective group) and Military/Intelligence Goons (specifically the most ruthless and powerhungry of this already subversive and secretive group). It may even lean towards 'who can command the obedience of Security during the final post-training session' or 'who is the best internal schemer in the company'.
The CIA or their Chinese equivalent aren't full of super nice, benign people. There are many people who say Sam Altman is this weird, power-hungry, hypercompetent creep. Generally speaking, power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. We should be working on ways to decentralize the power of AI so that no one group or individual can run away with the world.
Hitler and Mao were ruthless and power-hungry. But it's beyond any serious doubt that both of them wanted a future with lots of happy people in it; they were merely willing to wade through oceans of blood to get there.
To be clear, I utterly loathe Sam Altman. But that's because I think he's taking unacceptable risks of Skynet killing all humans, not because if he somehow does wind up in charge of a singleton he'd decide of his own accord to kill all humans.
How can any of us predict how a man who commands a singleton would behave? After year 1 or year 10 maybe he remains benign - but maybe he grows tired of everyone's demands and criticism. Or he decides to rearrange all these ugly, boring populations into something more interesting. Or he eventually uploads himself and is warped into the exact same foom/reprocess-your-atoms monster we are afraid of.
Nobody has ever held that much power, it's a risk not worth taking.
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