Shame on all of the people involved in this: the people in these companies, the journalists who shovel shit (hope they get replaced real soon), researchers who should know better, and dementia ridden legislators.
So utterly predictable and slimy. All of those who are so gravely concerned about "alignment" in this context, give yourselves a pat on the back for hyping up science fiction stories and enabling regulatory capture.
Give them a semi human sounding puppet and they think skynet is coming tomorrow.
If we learned anything from the past few months is how gullible people are, wishful thinking is a hell of a drug
> Some of the dangers of AI chatbots were “quite scary”, he told the BBC, warning they could become more intelligent than humans and could be exploited by “bad actors”. “It’s able to produce lots of text automatically so you can get lots of very effective spambots. It will allow authoritarian leaders to manipulate their electorates, things like that.”
You can do bad things with it but people who believe we're on the brink of singularity, that we're all going to lose our jobs to chatgpt and that world destruction is coming are on hard drugs.
Geoff Hinton, Stuart Russell, Jürgen Schmidhuber and Demis Hassabis all talk about something singularity-like as fairly near term, and all have concerns with ruin, though not all think it is the most likely outcome.
That's the backprop guy, top AI textbook guy, co-inventor of LSTMs (only thing that worked well for sequences before transformers)/highwaynets-resnets/arguably GANs, and the founder of DeepMind.
Schmidhuber (for context, he was talking near term, next few decades):
> All attempts at making sure there will be only provably friendly AIs seem doomed. Once somebody posts the recipe for practically feasible self-improving Goedel machines or AIs in form of code into which one can plug arbitrary utility functions, many users will equip such AIs with many different goals, often at least partially conflicting with those of humans. The laws of physics and the availability of physical resources will eventually determine which utility functions will help their AIs more than others to multiply and become dominant in competition with AIs driven by different utility functions. Which values are "good"? The survivors will define this in hindsight, since only survivors promote their values.
Hassasbis:
> We are approaching an absolutely critical moment in human history. That might sound a bit grand, but I really don't think that is overstating where we are. I think it could be an incredible moment, but it's also a risky moment in human history. My advice would be I think we should not "move fast and break things." [...] Depending on how powerful the technology is, you know it may not be possible to fix that afterwards.
Hinton:
> Well, here’s a subgoal that almost always helps in biology: get more energy. So the first thing that could happen is these robots are going to say, ‘Let’s get more power. Let’s reroute all the electricity to my chips.’ Another great subgoal would be to make more copies of yourself. Does that sound good?
Russell:
“Intelligence really means the power to shape the world in your interests, and if you create systems that are more intelligent than humans either individually or collectively then you’re creating entities that are more powerful than us,” said Russell at the lecture organized by the CITRIS Research Exchange and Berkeley AI Research Lab. “How do we retain power over entities more powerful than us, forever?”
“If we pursue [our current approach], then we will eventually lose control over the machines. But, we can take a different route that actually leads to AI systems that are beneficial to humans,” said Russell. “We could, in fact, have a better civilization.”
Should we be concerned about networked, hypersensing AI with bad code? Yes.
Is that an existential threat? Not so long as we remember that there are off switches.
Should we be concerned about kafkaesqe hellscapes of spam and bad UX? Yes.
Is that an existential threat? Sort of, if we ceded all authority to an algorithm without a human in the loop with the power to turn it off.
There is a theme here.
Remember there are off switches for human existence too, like whatever biological virus a super intelligence could engineer.
An off-switch for a self-improving AI isn't as trivial as you make it sound if it gets to anything like in those quotes, and even then you are assuming the human running it isn't malicious. We assume some level of sanity at least with the people in charge of nuclear weapons, but it isn't clear that AI will have the same large state actor barrier to entry or the same perception of mutually assured destruction if the actor were to use it against a rival.
If we have a superhuman AI, we can run down the powerplants for a few days.
Would it suck? Sure, people would die. Is it simple? Absolutely -- Texas and others are mostly already there some winters.
Maybe it needs a full cluster for training if it is self improving (or maybe that is done another way more similar to finetuning the last layers).
If that is still the case with something super-human in all domains then you'd have to shut down all minor residential solar installs, generators, etc.