zlacker

>>tim_sw+(OP)
From a layman's perspective when it comes to cutting edge AI, I can't help but be a bit turned off by some of the copy. It seems it goes out of its way to use purposefully exhuberant language as a way to make the risks seem even more significant, just so as an offshoot it implies that the technology being worked on is so advanced. I'm trying to understand why it rubs me particularly the wrong way here, when, frankly, it is just about the norm anywhere else? (see tesla with FSD, etc.)

>>Chicag+m9
The extinction risk from unaligned supterintelligent AGI is real, it's just often dismissed (imo) because it's outside the window of risks that are acceptable and high status to take seriously. People often have an initial knee-jerk negative reaction to it (for not crazy reasons, lots of stuff is often overhyped), but that doesn't make it wrong.

It's uncool to look like an alarmist nut, but sometimes there's no socially acceptable alarm and the risks are real: https://intelligence.org/2017/10/13/fire-alarm/

It's worth looking at the underlying arguments earnestly, you can with an initial skepticism but I was persuaded. Alignment is also been something MIRI and others have been worried about since as early as 2007 (maybe earlier?) so it's also a case of a called shot, not a recent reaction to hype/new LLM capability.

Others have also changed their mind when they looked, for example:

- https://twitter.com/repligate/status/1676507258954416128?s=2...

- Longer form: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kAmgdEjq2eYQkB5PP/douglas-ho...

For a longer podcast introduction to the ideas: https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/116...

>>goneho+gf
> The extinction risk from unaligned supterintelligent AGI is real, it's just often dismissed (imo) because it's outside the window of risks that are acceptable and high status to take seriously.

No. It’s not taken seriously because it’s fundamentally unserious. It’s religion. Sometime in the near future this all powerful being will kill us all by somehow grabbing all power over the physical world by being so clever to trick us until it is too late. This is literally the plot to a B-movie. Not only is there no evidence for this even existing in the near future, there’s no theoretical understanding how one would even do this, nor why someone would even hook it up to all these physical systems. I guess we’re supposed to just take it on faith that this Forbin Project is going to just spontaneously hack its way into every system without anyone noticing.

It’s bullshit. It’s pure bullshit funded and spread by the very people that do not want us to worry about real implications of real systems today. Care not about your racist algorithms! For someday soon, a giant squid robot will turn you into a giant inefficient battery in a VR world, or maybe just kill you and wear your flesh as to lure more humans to their violent deaths!

Anyone that takes this seriously, is the exact same type of rube that fell for apocalyptic cults for millennia.

>>jonath+tU
What you say is extremely unscientific. If you believe science and logic go hand in hand then:

A) We are developing AI right now and itnisngetting better

B) we do not know how exactly these things work because most of them are black boxer

C) we do not know if something goes wrong how to stop it.

The above 3 things are factual truth.

Now your only argument here could be that there is 0 risk whatsoever. This claim is totally unscientific because you are predicting 0 risk in an unknown system that is evolving.

It's religious yes. But vice versa. The Cult of venevolent AI god is religious not the other way around. There is some kind of inner mysterious working in people like you and Marc Andersen that pipularized these ideas but pmarca is clearly money biased here.

>>arisAl+HV
We do know the answer to C. Pull the plug, or plugs.

>>c_cran+PZ
Things we've either not successfully "pulled the plug" on despite the risks, and in some cases despite concerted military actions to attempt a plug-pull, and in other cases that it seems like it should only take willpower to achieve and yet somehow we still haven't: Carbon based fuels, cocaine, RBMK-class nuclear reactors, obesity, cigarettes.

Things we pulled the plug on eventually, while dragging it out, include: leaded fuel, asbestos, radium paint, treating above-ground atomic testing as a tourist attraction.

>>ben_w+jh1
Pull the plug is meant literally. As in, turn off the power to the AI. Carbon based fuels let alone cocaine don't have off switches. The situation just isn't analogous at all.

>>reveli+p33
I assumed literally, and yet the argument applies: we have not been able to stop those things even when using guns to shoot people doing them. The same pressures that keep people growing the plants, processing them, transporting it, selling it, buying it, consuming it, there are many things a system — intelligent or otherwise — can motivate people to keep the lights on.

There were four reactors in Chernobyl plant, the exploding one was 1986, the others were shut down in 1991, 1996, and 2000.

There's no plausible way to guess at the speed of change from a misaligned AI, can you be confident that 14 years isn't enough time to cause problems?

>>ben_w+w83
"we have not been able to stop those things even when using guns to shoot people doing them."

I assume we have not been able to stop people from creating and using carbon-based energy because a LOT of people still want to create and use them.

I don't think a LOT of people will want to keep an AI system running that is essentially wiping out humans.