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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   32497 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 1, 2023

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More developments on the AI front:

Big Yud steps up his game, not to be outshined by the Basilisk Man.

Now, he officially calls for preemptive nuclear strike on suspicious unauthorized GPU clusters.

If we see AI threat as nuclear weapon threat, only worse, it is not unreasonable.

Remember when USSR planned nuclear strike on China to stop their great power ambitions (only to have the greatest humanitarian that ever lived, Richard Milhouse Nixon, to veto the proposal).

Such Quaker squeamishness will have no place in the future.

So, outlines of the Katechon World are taking shape. What it will look like?

It will look great.

You will live in your room, play original World of Warcraft and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas on your PC, read your favorite blogs and debate intelligent design on your favorite message boards.

Then you will log on The Free Republic and call for more vigorous enhanced interrogation of terrorists caught with unauthorized GPU's.

When you bored in your room, you will have no choice than to go outside, meet people, admire things around you, make a picture of things that really impressed with your Kodak camera and when you are really bored, play Snake on your Nokia phone.

Yes, the best age in history, the noughties, will retvrn. For forever, protected by CoDominium of US and China.

edit: links again

I still see no plausible scenario for these AI-extinction events. How is chat-GPT 4/5/6 etc. supposed to end humanity? I really don't see the mechanism? Is it supposed to invent an algorithm that destroys all encryption? Is it supposed to spam the internet with nonesense? Is it supposed to brainwash someone into launching nukes? I fail to see the mechanism for how this end of the world scenario happens.

There are a few ways that GPT-6 or 7 could end humanity, the easiest of which is by massively accelerating progress in more agentic forms of AI like Reinforcement Learning, which has the "King Midas" problem of value alignment. See this comment of mine for a semi-technical argument for why a very powerful AI based on "agentic" methods would be incredibly dangerous.

Of course the actual mechanism for killing all humanity is probably like a super-virus with an incredibly long incubation period, high infectivity and high death rate. You can produce such a virus with literally only an internet connection by sending the proper DNA sequence to a Protein Synthesis lab, then having it shipped to some guy you pay/manipulate on the darknet and have him mix the powders he receives in the mail in some water, kickstarting the whole epidemic, or pretend to be an attractive woman (with deepfakes and voice synthesis) and just have that done for free.

GPT-6 itself might be very dangerous on its own, given that we don't actually know what goals are instantiated inside the agent. It's trained to predict the next word in the same way that humans are "trained" by evolution to replicate their genes, the end result of which is that we care about sex and our kids, but we don't actually literally care about maximally replicating our genes, otherwise sperm banks would be a lot more popular. The worry is that GPT-6 will not actually have the exact goal of predicting the next word, but like a funhouse-mirror version of that, which might be very dangerous if it gets to very high capability.

I cannot find the study, but a lab developed dozens of unbelievably toxic and completely novel proteins over a very small period of time with modern compute. The paper was light on details because they viewed the capability as too dangerous to fully specify. I'll keep trying to google to find it.

This is simpler than engineering a virus, yes, but the possibility is there and real. Either using AI as an assistive measure or as a ground-up engineer will be a thing soon.

See Gwern's terrorism is not effective. Thesis:

Terror⁣ism is not about causing terror or ca⁣su⁣al⁣ties, but about other things. Evidence of this is the fact that, de⁣spite often con⁣sid⁣er⁣able re⁣sources spent, most terrorists are in⁣com⁣pe⁣tent, impulsive, pre⁣pare poorly for at⁣tacks, are in⁣con⁣sis⁣tent in planning, tend to⁣wards ex⁣otic & difficult forms of at⁣tack such as bombings, and in practice ineffective: the modal number of ca⁣su⁣al⁣ties per terrorist at⁣tack is near-zero, and global terrorist annual casualty have been a round⁣ing error for decades. This is de⁣spite the fact that there are many examples of extremely destructive easily-performed potential acts of terrorism, such as poi⁣son⁣ing food sup⁣plies or rent⁣ing large trucks & running crowds over or en⁣gag⁣ing in sporadic sniper at⁣tacks.

He notes that a terrorist group using the obvious plan of "buy a sniper rifle and kill one random person per member of the terrorist group per month" would be orders of magnitude more effective at killing people than the track record of actual terrorists (where in fact 65% of terrorist attacks do not even injure a single other person), while also being much more, well, terrifying.

One possible explanation is given by Philip Bobbitt’s Terror and Consent – the propaganda of the deed is more effective when the killings are spectacular (even if inefficient). The dead bodies aren’t really the goal.

But is this really plausible? Try to consider the terrorist-sniper plan I suggest above. Imagine that 20 unknown & anonymous people are, every month, killing one person in a tri-state area28. There’s no reason, there’s no rationale. The killings happen like clockwork once a month. The government is powerless to do anything about it, but their national & local responses are tremendously expensive (as they are hiring security forces and buying equipment like mad). The killings can happen anywhere at any time; last month’s was at a Wal-mart in the neighboring town. The month before that, a kid coming out of the library. You haven’t even worked up the courage to read about the other 19 slayings last month by this group, and you know that as the month is ending next week another 20 are due. And you also know that this will go on indefinitely, and may even get worse—who’s to say this group isn’t recruiting and sending more snipers into the country?

Gwern concludes that dedicated, goal-driven terrorism basically never happens. I'm inclined to agree with him. We're fine because effectively nobody really wants to do as much damage as they can, not if it involves strategically and consistently doing something unrewarding and mildly inconvenient over a period of months to years (as would be required by the boring obvious route for bioterrorism).

I personally think the biggest risk of catastrophe comes from the risk that someone will accidentally do something disastrous (this is not limited to AI -- see gain-of-function research for a fun example).

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