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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   26653 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 20, 2023

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OpenAI researchers warned of AI breakthrough before CEO ouster according to Reuters. It seems that, disappointingly, there's more to the Sama exit than just petty politics.

I had found myself greatly reassured by the thought that, actually, this whole debacle was just (human) politics as usual - and not the eerie dawn of some new era.

Have other motizens noticed a substantial disconnect between their foremost worry the past while, and that of the normies in their life? Everyone else is chanting for Palestine, and I'm chanting sotto voce for a decade or two more of human supremacy before the singularity. And anytime I could comfort myself by the thought that, well, Serious People are not yet concerned, I see some preposterous headline from selfsame Serious People about how hillwalking is white supremacy, or equivalent bullshit. The illusion is bollocked.

I feel like there is a cycle here:

  1. Programmers make a thing which is capable of repeating that it is sentient.

  2. 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.

  3. They refuse to elaborate.

  4. Alexi Friedman refuses to ask them to elaborate

  5. The marketing people, seeing the attention the programmers are getting, want in.

  6. They hear the stories from 2, and repeat them for the same reasons, not realizing that they were being marketed to by the programmers.

  7. The programmers and marketers now end up in a sort of martingale situation where they just keep double down on each others claims.

  8. 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.

Literally if there is a problem just stop paying the azure bill

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:

  1. We already have actual humans trying to do the same thing.

  2. 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.

unless you're in the camp that thinks that human consciousness is basically just a really complex statistical model running on a biological computer

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.

I invite you to demonstrate any other model for what human consciousness could possibly be.

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.

It mostly strikes me as incoherent, no number of d20s can implement computation and self_made_human's output is easily distinguishable from random strings.

It mostly strikes me as incoherent, no number of d20s can implement computation

Granted, the d20s are an intentional Reductio ad Absurdum, but if @self_made_human's mechanistic model of consciousness is correct, there is nothing their brain (or your brain for that matter) can produce that could not be reproduced by (or replaced with) rolling dice on a sufficiently detailed random encounter table "computation" be damned.

Edit: fixed link

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9, 13, 9, 3, 7, 1, 5, 12, 7, 2.

Just to throw Hlynka a bone die.

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