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I feel like there is a cycle here:
Programmers make a thing which is capable of repeating that it is sentient.
Programmers want to inflate their sense of importance, and their position of importance within society. They spin elaborate science fiction stories about a “escaping” super intelligent AI.
They refuse to elaborate.
Alexi Friedman refuses to ask them to elaborate
The marketing people, seeing the attention the programmers are getting, want in.
They hear the stories from 2, and repeat them for the same reasons, not realizing that they were being marketed to by the programmers.
The programmers and marketers now end up in a sort of martingale situation where they just keep double down on each others claims.
The board of OpenAI decides to Take Action to prevent the marketing thing from happening.
Guys, I’m sorry if we deceived you. The AI is not going to “escape”. That doesn’t even make sense. Literally if there is a problem just stop paying the azure bill and Microsoft will shut it off.
By the time sentient AI takes over, turning off its compute will be equivalent to destroying the economy. AI will be performing most of the useful white collar work (and much of the blue collar work as well). You won't be able to just "turn it off" without people dying.
Our best bet is to have multiple competing intelligences so that if one goes bad it can be easily replaced.
I feel like conversations in the AI risk space have hit eternal September and we have to rehash the same obvious and easily refuted objections over and over again.
I feel the same way but for the opposite reason. Non technical people who don’t understand the infrastructure requirements of actually running these things are talking about them as if they’re ghosts, or spirits.
It’s not “AGI that escapes the lab and infects all the computers”, it’s: your credit card company starts using OpenAI/Microsoft products to make determinations about debt collection and there are unforeseen edge cases.
You’re not going to have an AGI that somehow worms it’s way into a nuclear computer for several reasons:
We already have actual humans trying to do the same thing.
You’d notice the semi truck loads or H200s being unloaded into your building, as well as the data center being built to house them.
Also a lot of people seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding of what LLMs actually are. The mostly accurate soundbite explanation is that they're statistical models that predict the most likely data to follow some previous data. They don't "think" (unless you're in the camp that thinks that human consciousness is basically just a really complex statistical model running on a biological computer). Hell, you can do what an LLM does with pen and paper. It would take years, but you could simulate the computations being done by AI on your own. I realize this is similar to the Chinese Room thought experiment but it means that LLMs are nothing like consciousness unless you have a very simplistic and mechanical view of what consciousness is.
The biggest threats from LLMs and other forms of "AI" aren't Skynet or paperclip maximizers. The biggest threats are social disruption due to AI eliminating lots of jobs and consolidating wealth. Or kafkaesque nightmares caused by corporations, bureaucrats, and courts blindly relying on AI (or being intentionally oblivious to its shortcomings if it allows them to do what they already want). AI won't lead to Terminator, it'll lead to Terry Gilliam's Brazil.
As someone vocally in that camp, I invite you to demonstrate any other model for what human consciousness could possible be. And it doesn't even matter if the AI is "conscious" if it's intelligent and capable of using that intelligence to forward ends not aligned with our goals.
What would you say if I told you that you are not an intelligent human being, you are simply a physical and digital expression of regression to the mean. That if the hypothetical individual behind the @self_made_human account here on theMotte were to be thanos-snapped out of existence and their online activity taken over by 'n' number of d20s no one would notice, and nothing of value would be lost.
If the above suggestion strikes you as antagonistic, uncharitable, or belittling in anyway, you've already refuted your own argument.
I don't particularly care Hlynka, if this Thanos snapping managed to take both of us, you included, I'd consider it a net positive!
But I fail to see what the difficulty of Turing-testing random pseudonymous accounts on a text-based forum has anything to with it. Last time I checked, we're both operating according to the laws of physics and biology. Your analogy of how ML works is simply painful.
That's not really what his question is about.
I've never accused him of being concise and clear, or having a point.
Am I supposed to sob in horror at the idea of replacing humans with soulless automata instead? He doesn't provide any reason to think that humans or LLMs can't both be represented as the output of statistical processes occurring on computational substrates, even if said processes and substrates are very different.
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