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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   40081 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 27, 2023

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Was a bit surprised to see this hadn't been posted yet, but yesterday Yudkowsky wrote an op-ed in TIME magazine where he describes the kind of regime that he believes would be necessary to throttle AI progress:

https://archive.is/A1u57

Some choice excerpts:

Many researchers working on these systems think that we’re plunging toward a catastrophe, with more of them daring to say it in private than in public; but they think that they can’t unilaterally stop the forward plunge, that others will go on even if they personally quit their jobs. And so they all think they might as well keep going. This is a stupid state of affairs, and an undignified way for Earth to die, and the rest of humanity ought to step in at this point and help the industry solve its collective action problem.

The moratorium on new large training runs needs to be indefinite and worldwide. There can be no exceptions, including for governments or militaries. If the policy starts with the U.S., then China needs to see that the U.S. is not seeking an advantage but rather trying to prevent a horrifically dangerous technology which can have no true owner and which will kill everyone in the U.S. and in China and on Earth. If I had infinite freedom to write laws, I might carve out a single exception for AIs being trained solely to solve problems in biology and biotechnology, not trained on text from the internet, and not to the level where they start talking or planning; but if that was remotely complicating the issue I would immediately jettison that proposal and say to just shut it all down.

Shut down all the large GPU clusters (the large computer farms where the most powerful AIs are refined). Shut down all the large training runs. Put a ceiling on how much computing power anyone is allowed to use in training an AI system, and move it downward over the coming years to compensate for more efficient training algorithms. No exceptions for anyone, including governments and militaries. Make immediate multinational agreements to prevent the prohibited activities from moving elsewhere. Track all GPUs sold. If intelligence says that a country outside the agreement is building a GPU cluster, be less scared of a shooting conflict between nations than of the moratorium being violated; be willing to destroy a rogue datacenter by airstrike.

if its presence in the CW thread needs justifying, well, it's published in a major magazine and the kinds of policy proposals set forth would certainly ignite heated political debate were they ever to be seriously considered.

"Yudkowsky airstrike threshold" has already become a minor meme on rat and AI twitter.

To defend Yudkowsky a bit, if his solution were predicated on international treaty when there are high economic and geopolitical incentives to defect, you would absolutely have to enforce it with an extreme amount violence or threat of violence. Airstrikes would probably not be good enough to stop nations from trying- although I look forward to the next Top Gun movie which will feature an airstrike on a data center instead of a nuclear research facility. Maverick will come out of retirement to deliver the killing blow to the grey goo after beating the AI-controlled bogeys in a dogfight. This will do much more to garner public support for Yudkowsky's proposal than his blog.

But there's too much pearl-clutching over the "advocating for violence" criticism. AI is going to be involved in violence, in many ways. Responses like:

There’s no such thing as lawful or legitimate aggression in int’l relations, because there’s no sovereign monopoly on its use which is the definition of legitimated force. It’s anarchy and it’s all illegitimate where aggressive.

Are just completely tedious. People are going to die because of AI, there's no question. It's only a question of when, how and why.

Are just completely tedious. People are going to die because of AI, there's no question. It's only a question of when, how and why.

Already happened.

https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/was-a-flying-killer-robot-used-in-libya-quite-possibly/

Last year in Libya, a Turkish-made autonomous weapon—the STM Kargu-2 drone—may have “hunted down and remotely engaged” retreating soldiers loyal to the Libyan General Khalifa Haftar, according to a recent report by the UN Panel of Experts on Libya. Over the course of the year, the UN-recognized Government of National Accord pushed the general’s forces back from the capital Tripoli, signaling that it had gained the upper hand in the Libyan conflict, but the Kargu-2 signifies something perhaps even more globally significant: a new chapter in autonomous weapons, one in which they are used to fight and kill human beings based on artificial intelligence.

The Kargu is a “loitering” drone that can use machine learning-based object classification to select and engage targets, with swarming capabilities in development to allow 20 drones to work together. The UN report calls the Kargu-2 a lethal autonomous weapon. It’s maker, STM, touts the weapon’s “anti-personnel” capabilities in a grim video showing a Kargu model in a steep dive toward a target in the middle of a group of manikins. (If anyone was killed in an autonomous attack, it would likely represent an historic first known case of artificial intelligence-based autonomous weapons being used to kill. The UN report heavily implies they were, noting that lethal autonomous weapons systems contributed to significant casualties of the manned Pantsir S-1 surface-to-air missile system, but is not explicit on the matter.)

BTW, Lybia was also place where air power was first used in war, back in 1911.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_invasion_of_Libya

On 15 October 1911, nine Italian "Specialist Battalion" aeroplanes and 11 pilots landed in Libya. On 24 October, the Italian pilot Captain Riccardo Moizo carried out a reconnaissance flight in Tripolitania, reportedly the first ever strategic reconnaissance by aeroplane.[7] On 1 November, another Italian pilot, Giulio Gavotti, dropped four 1.5 kg bombs on Ain Zara, pulling the pins with his teeth. This was the first aerial bombing in history.[8]

That’s a piece of software not AGI. Not proper AI either.

Shit, how’d we let Turkey get there first?

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