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.
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?
Even if it is only trying to kill us all and not provide any benefits — let's say it's been made by a literal death cult like Jonestown or Aum Shinrikyo — what's the smallest such AI that can do it, what's the hardware that needs, what's the energy cost? If it's an H100, that's priced in the realm of a cult, and sufficiently low power consumption you may not be able to find which lightly modified electric car it's hiding in.
Nobody knows what any of the risks or mitigations will be, because we haven't done any of it before. All we do know is that optimising systems are effective at manipulating humans, that they can be capable enough to find ways to beat all humans in toy environments like chess, poker, and Diplomacy (the game), and that humans are already using AI (GOFAI, LLMs, SD) without checking the output even when advised that the models aren't very good.
An AI would provide benefits when it is, say, actually making paperclips. An AI that is killing people instead of making paperclips is a liability. A company that is selling shredded fingers in their paperclips is not long for this world. Even asbestos only gives a few people cancer slowly, and it does that while still remaining fireproof.
>Even if it is only trying to kill us all and not provide any benefits — let's say it's been made by a literal death cult like Jonestown or Aum Shinrikyo — what's the smallest such AI that can do it, what's the hardware that needs, what's the energy cost? If it's an H100, that's priced in the realm of a cult, and sufficiently low power consumption you may not be able to find which lightly modified electric car it's hiding in.
Anyone tracking the AI would be looking at where all the suspicious HTTP requests are coming from. But a rogue AI hiding in a car already has very limited capabilities to harm.
…
how many drugs are you on right now? Even if you think you needed them to pass the bar exam, that's a really weird example to use given GPT-4 does well on that specific test.
One is a deadly cancer stick and not even the best way to get nicotine, the other is a controlled substance that gets life-to-death if you're caught supplying it (possibly unless you're a doctor, but surprisingly hard to google).
> An AI would provide benefits when it is, say, actually making paperclips.
Step 1. make paperclip factory.
Step 2. make robots that work in factory.
Step 3. efficiently grow to dominate global supply of paperclips.
Step 4. notice demand for paperclips is going down, advertise better.
Step 5. notice risk of HAEMP damaging factories and lowering demand for paperclips, use advertising power to put factory with robots on the moon.
Step 6. notice a technicality, exploit technicality to achieve goals better; exactly what depends on the details of the goal the AI is given and how good we are with alignment by that point, so the rest is necessarily a story rather than an attempt at realism.
(This happens by default everywhere: in AI it's literally the alignment problem, either inner alignment, outer alignment, or mesa alignment; in humans it's "work to rule" and Goodhart's Law, and humans do that despite having "common sense" and "not being a sociopath" helping keep us all on the same page).
Step 7. moon robots do their own thing, which we technically did tell them to do, but wasn't what we meant.
We say things like "looks like these AI don't have any common sense" and other things to feel good about ourselves.
Step 8. Sales up as entire surface of Earth buried under a 43 km deep layer of moon paperclips.
> Anyone tracking the AI would be looking at where all the suspicious HTTP requests are coming from.
A VPN, obviously.
But also, in context, how does the AI look different from any random criminal? Except probably more competent. Lot of those around, and organised criminal enterprises can get pretty big even when it's just humans doing it.
Also pretty bad even in the cases where it's a less-than-human-generality CrimeAI that criminal gangs use in a way that gives no agency at all to the AI, and even if you can track them all and shut them down really fast — just from the capabilities gained from putting face tracking AI and a single grenade into a standard drone, both of which have already been demonstrated.
> But a rogue AI hiding in a car already has very limited capabilities to harm.
Except by placing orders for parts or custom genomes, or stirring up A/B tested public outrage, or hacking, or scamming or blackmailing with deepfakes or actual webcam footage, or developing strategies, or indoctrination of new cult members, or all the other bajillion things that (("humans can do" AND "moneys can't do") specifically because "humans are smarter than monkeys").
Regardless of these downsides, people use them frequently in the high stress environments of the bar or med school to deal with said stress. This may not be ideal, but this is how it is.
>Step 3. efficiently grow to dominate global supply of paperclips. >Step 4. notice demand for paperclips is going down, advertise better. >Step 5. notice risk of HAEMP damaging factories and lowering demand for paperclips, use advertising power to put factory with robots on the moon.
When you talk about using 'advertising power' to put paperclip factories on the moon, you've jumped into the realm of very silly fantasy.
>Except by placing orders for parts or custom genomes, or stirring up A/B tested public outrage, or hacking, or scamming or blackmailing with deepfakes or actual webcam footage, or developing strategies, or indoctrination of new cult members, or all the other bajillion things that (("humans can do" AND "moneys can't do") specifically because "humans are smarter than monkeys").
Law enforcement agencies have pretty sophisticated means of bypassing VPNs that they would use against an AI that was actually dangerous. If it was just sending out phishing emails and running scams, it would be one more thing to add to the pile.
Whereas, an AI that tries to kill everyone or take over the world or something, that seems pretty explicitly bad news and everyone would be united in stopping it. To work around that, you have to significantly complicate the AI doom scenario to be one in which a large number of people think the AI is on their side and bringing about a utopia but it's actually ending the world, or something like that. But, what's new? That's the history of humanity. The communists, the Jacobins, the Nazis, all thought they were building a better world and had to have their "off switch" thrown at great cost in lives. More subtly the people advocating for clearly civilization-destroying moves like banning all fossil fuels or net zero by 2030, for example, also think they're fighting on the side of the angels.
So the only kind of AI doom scenario I find credible is one in which it manages to trick lots of powerful people into doing something stupid and self-destructive using clever sounding words. But it's hard to get excited about this scenario because, eh, we already have that problem x100, except the misaligned intelligences are called academics.
And mine is that this can also be true of a misaligned AI.
It doesn't have to be like Terminator, it can be slowly doing something we like and where we overlook the downsides until it's too late.
Doesn't matter if that's "cure cancer" but the cure has a worse than cancer side effect that only manifests 10 years later, or if it's a mere design for a fusion reactor where we have to build it ourselves and that leads to weapons proliferation, or if it's A/B testing the design for a social media website to make it more engaging and it gets so engaging that people choose not to hook up IRL and start families.
> But, what's new? That's the history of humanity. The communists, the Jacobins, the Nazis, all thought they were building a better world and had to have their "off switch" thrown at great cost in lives.
Indeed.
I would agree that this is both more likely and less costly than "everyone dies".
But I'd still say it's really bad and we should try to figure out in advance how to minimise this outcome.
> except the misaligned intelligences are called academics
Well, that's novel; normally at this point I see people saying "corporations", and very rarely "governments".
Not seen academics get stick before, except in history books.
For sure. But I don't see what's AI specific about it. If the AI doom scenario is a super smart AI tricking people into doing self destructive things by using clever words, then everything you need to do to vaccinate people against that is the same as if it was humans doing the tricking. Teaching critical thinking, self reliance, to judge arguments on merit and not on surface level attributes like complexity of language or titles of the speakers. All these are things our society objectively sucks at today, and we have a ruling class - including many of the sorts of people who work at AI companies - who are hellbent on attacking these healthy mental habits, and people who engage in them!
> Not seen academics get stick before, except in history books.
For academics you could also read intellectuals. Marx wasn't an academic but he very much wanted to be, if he lived in today's world he'd certainly be one of the most famous academics.
I'm of the view that corporations are very tame compared to the damage caused by runaway academia. It wasn't corporations that locked me in my apartment for months at a time on the back of pseudoscientific modelling and lies about vaccines. It wasn't even politicians really. It was governments doing what they were told by the supposedly intellectually superior academic class. And it isn't corporations trying to get rid of cheap energy and travel. And it's not governments convincing people that having children is immoral because of climate change. All these things are from academics, primarily in universities but also those who work inside government agencies.
When I look at the major threats to my way of life today, academic pseudo-science sits clearly at number 1 by a mile. To the extent corporations and governments are a threat, it's because they blindly trust academics. If you replace Professor of Whateverology at Harvard with ChatGPT, what changes? The underlying sources of mental and cultural weakness are the same.
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.