> Over time, it has allowed a fierce competitiveness and mounting pressure for ever more funding to erode its founding ideals of transparency, openness, and collaboration
Team Helen acted in panic, but they believed they would win since they were upholding the principles the org was founded on. But they never had a chance. I think only a minority of the general public truly cares about AI Safety, the rest are happy seeing ChatGPT helping with their homework. I know it's easy to ridicule the sheer stupidity the board acted with (and justifiably so), but take a moment to think of the other side. If you truly believed that Superhuman AI was near, and it could act with malice, won't you try to slow things down a bit?
Honestly, I myself can't take the threat seriously. But, I do want to understand it more deeply than before. Maybe, it isn't without substance as I thought it to be. Hopefully, there won't be a day when Team Helen gets to say, "This is exactly what we wanted to prevent."
[1]: https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/02/17/844721/ai-openai...
Pretty soon AI will be an expert at subtly steering you toward thinking/voting for whatever the "safety" experts want.
It's probably convenient for them to have everyone focused on the fear of evil Skynet wiping out humanity, while everyone is distracted from the more likely scenario of people with an agenda controlling the advice given to you by your super intelligent assistant.
Because of X, we need to invade this country. Because of Y, we need to pass all these terrible laws limiting freedom. Because of Z, we need to make sure AI is "safe".
For this reason, I view "safe" AIs as more dangerous than "unsafe" ones.
This paper explores one such danger and there are other papers which show it's possible to use LLM to aid in designing new toxins and biological weapons.
The Operational Risks of AI in Large-Scale Biological Attacks https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA2977-1.html?
An example of such an event: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokyo_subway_sarin_attack
How do you propose we deal with this sort of harm if more powerful AIs with no limit and control proliferate in the wild?
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Note: Both sides of the OpenAI rift care deeply about AI Safety. They just follow different approaches. See more details here: >>38376263
Don't forget that it would also increase the power of the good guys. Any technology in history (starting with fire) had good and bad uses but overall the good outweighed the bad in every case.
And considering that our default fate is extinction (by Sun's death if no other means) - we need all the good we can get to avoid that.
In a free society, preventing and undoing a bioweapon attack or a pandemic is much harder than committing it.
> And considering that our default fate is extinction (by Sun's death if no other means) - we need all the good we can get to avoid that.
“In the long run we are all dead" -- Keynes. But an AGI will likely emerge in the next 5 to 20 years (Geoffrey Hinton said the same) and we'd rather not be dead too soon.
But in reality you can’t protect from all the possible dangers and, worse, fear-mongering usually ends up doing more bad than good, like when it stopped our switch to nuclear power and kept us burning hydrocarbons thus bringing about Climate Change, another civilization-ending danger.
Living your life cowering in fear is something an individual may elect to do, but a society cannot - our survival as a species is at stake and our chances are slim with the defaults not in our favor. The risk that we’ll miss a game-changing discovery because we’re too afraid of the potential side effects is unacceptable. We owe it to the future and our future generations.