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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.
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.
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
Memory and response to inputs both mean the actual number of outputs would be infinite if not for mortality. As is, it's probably only one of those meaninglessly large journalist numbers like the number of atoms in the solar system or something. Not that you could in any way generate such a list of outputs without fully understanding and simulating my brain in the first place, even discounting the impossible time/space requirements of such a task.
More importantly, the computation is the entire fucking point. That this post could technically just be a meaningless random string of characters doesn't mean it is one, and you will not perceive it as one. It is very clearly chosen in a nonrandom process. Getting from your post to this reply required processing in my brain, something you can in no way skip by randomly picking one out of a list of all the possible outputs of my brain.
Precisely. But how would you go about demonstrating that?
Basic information theory would suffice, unless you want me to demonstrate the concepts of meaning or the validity of induction. In which case you've retreated from your original point to the standard 'treating solipsism as a gotcha against materialists' position. This has come up so often on this board, I should come up with a catchy enough formulation to make it my flair: either any communication happens between real minds existing in an inductive external reality (including thoughts as communication across time) or the concept of communication is nonsense. So prepend any communication ever with "Conditional on solipsism being false,".
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