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if you think about it, its actual insanity. The fears are all from science fiction with absolutely no grounding in reality. There are legitimate concerns about

if you think about it, its actual insanity. The fears are all from science fiction with absolutely no grounding in reality. There are legitimate concerns about the unethical mass harvesting of data but if you think about "AI safety" vs something like vehicular safety or spacecraft safety its kind of nuts, because the latter are grounded in reality and have formal specifications which need to be met. But AI safety is so wishy-washy. Take a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Motor_Vehicle_Safety_Standards https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Motor_Vehicle_Safety_S... You'd think if people are so scared about AI being apocalyptic it would have some strict regulation similar to vehicle standards but its not even close, nor is it in the conversation at all. Its just pure fear from science fiction and the govt putting out performative press releases. What the fuck even is "AI" anyway? it means different things to different people. It could mean a self checkout at a supermarket, or a bank's AML, or some super intelligence. there are basically no standard definitions of anything to do with "AI" anywhere and every single piece of regulation is equally as vague. Companies like having it be a vague term because its marketing so the actual experts don't care about changing it

ke88y 3y ago
> What the fuck even is "AI" anyway? Indeed. For most lay people I've talked to -- family, friends, and acquiescence outside of tech -- the answer ultimately boils down to "automation that can do my job or can do the job of people I care about or can do the job of people who would then compete for my job". Sometimes also "algorithms" a la social media feeds and so on. Ie, the lay answer to "what is AI?" has recently morphed into roughly "computer programs that I am worried about or don't like". For most actual AI researchers I've talked to, you get the standard tounge-in-cheek response ("AI is whatever gets published at AI conferences and funded by AI investors") and then, when you press, it's roughly something like ML+CV+NLP+optimization and sometimes but not always other fields like automated reasoning or parts of robotics get added. Roughly, most of the parts of CS that aren't theory or systems or HCI or software engineering or already closed. For most techno-babblers in the podosphere who have OPINIONS on super-intelligence but couldn't pass an internship phone screen to save their lives, it's superintelligence and other stupid hollywood bullshit.
- adamsmith143 3y ago
  If you look at actual quotes from people like Sam Altman, Ilya Sutskever, Demis Hassabis, etc. the AI, that is to say really the AGI, that they want to build is a godlike super intelligent being. To many researchers in the field this is their end goal.
  - ke88y 3y ago
    And Minsky before them.
  - hgsgm 3y ago
    And Elon Musk wants to die on Mars. It doesn't matter what their "goal" is.
- wpietri 3y ago
  For sure. AI is a marketing term. But in some sense, so it "tech". The paperclip is a highly evolved technology, for example, [1], but working on those doesn't mean you work "in tech". Tech meant something like, "the new stuff that is impacting our lives but we don't know how to handle". So a CTO's job generally doesn't include the paperclips, the copiers, or the company cars, however technological they are. And as with any shiny new marketing term, others will quickly rush in. There was the craze for radioactivity, which resulted in a bunch of radioactive patent medicines: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_quackery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_quackery But even more interesting to me is the extent to which it was used as a pure marketing term, with no radioactivity expected. E.g.: https://lucyjanesantos.com/a-batschari-radium-cigarettes/ https://lucyjanesantos.com/a-batschari-radium-cigarettes/ So I'm sure we'll be seeing all sorts of things branded "AI" even when they don't use any of the technologies involved. With no trademark on the term or organization to defend it, it's open season for all the sketch marketers. [1] For those who doubt, Petroski's "The Evolution of Useful Things" will set you straight: https://www.amazon.com/Evolution-Useful-Things-Artifacts-Zippers-Came/dp/0679740392 https://www.amazon.com/Evolution-Useful-Things-Artifacts-Zip...
  - School-Cotton 3y ago
one_level_deep 3y ago
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wpietri 3y ago
And I think it's important to note that hype about "existential risk" is coming from people who stand to profit from "AI": https://www.cnbc.com/2023/05/31/ai-poses-human-extinction-risk-sam-altman-and-other-tech-leaders-warn.html https://www.cnbc.com/2023/05/31/ai-poses-human-extinction-ri... So it seems like the playbook is something like: 1) play up non-problems that, thanks to 50+ years of sci-fi killer AI, will seem real to the rubes; 2) breeze on past the numerous actual problems; 3) solve as few actual problems as possible as they race to capture billions of dollars. But happily, the contents of this press release focus mostly on actual problems, so I have some hope that the Skynet gambit won't work.
- ke88y 3y ago
  "the AI is going to kill us all, dear Senators! Nothing to see in this disgustingly immoral little corner of the world where I'm building a measly $100 million personal fortune!"
- kalkin 3y ago
  > people who stand to profit from "AI" Some of them, sure, but that doesn't seem to be true of plenty of signatures to the open letter. > the contents of this press release focus mostly on actual problems Given that this is a set of entirely voluntary commitments made by the companies who you had thought were hyping x-risk in order to distract from actual problems... maybe it's worth updating your assessment of what the x-risk thing is about?
  - mrguyorama 3y ago
    Pretending to play along with "requests" to "keep AI safe" while ignoring the harms it will cause in other ways as the companies that own it try and gobble up literally all the money is 100% in line with the Sam Altman style of "I deserve to be the richest motherfucker on the planet" thinking
    - kalkin 3y ago
      Do you think AI is capable of gobbling up "literally all the money" for its owners? If so, doesn't that suggest it's kinda dangerous? FWIW I don't think these voluntary commitments are sufficient or address all of the important harms. But that's different than saying any government action is just "regulatory capture" and an attempt to keep open source models down. I'm only attempting to argue against the latter here, which I'm not sure is where you're coming from.
65 3y ago
People don't even seem to understand that AI is inside of a computer. It's not real. The whole argument with AI safety seems to be about how AI can say some "harmful misinformation". Ok. I can say harmful misinformation too, and I'm a real person with feelings that can be expressed to other people. "AI safety" takes a view that people are inherently stupid, that people have no ability for complex thought and critical thinking. To me this seems like AI companies such as OpenAI want to stop open-source and monopolize AI where you have to have a government certification to create AI models. Plus a bit of paranoia from the totalitarian liberals who only want consensus rather than debate. At least there are valid concerns for training models on copyrighted works. Maybe we should focus much more on that rather than on "the AI said something that I don't like".
hgsgm 3y ago
AI safety is corporation safety, or government safety, or software safety AI has the same powers and risks of organizations -- meta/mega human actors.
- lukifer 3y ago
  Corporations are arguably a form of AI, executing on top of human agents and the code of law: https://omniorthogonal.blogspot.com/2013/02/hostile-ai-youre-soaking-in-it.html https://omniorthogonal.blogspot.com/2013/02/hostile-ai-youre... The difference is that machine learning technology can potentially operates at orders of magnitude of higher speeds, and potentially without humans in the loop. (The threat model is less "flip the on switch and everybody immediately dies"; but "flip the on switch, it works so well it gets woven into our infrastructure", until a critical threshold is met, and some seemingly-innocuous Make Number Go Up algo leads to humanity having a Very Very Bad Day.) So all the same perverse incentives (orthogonality) of human-org AIs, but iterating thousands or millions of times faster.
hgsgm 3y ago
Strict regulations comes after lots of people die, not before. Look at the regulations on nuclear bombs.
kalkin 3y ago
Personally I don't think AI is very likely to destroy humanity in the next couple of decades. I also don't think that the Ukraine war is very likely to end in a global thermonuclear exchange. But I don't think worrying about nuclear war is insanity. What strikes me as insane in the Ukraine case, or at the very least dangerously irrational, is calling for a no-fly zone without thinking about the consequences. And I feel similarly about attitudes towards AI...
- mrguyorama 3y ago
  At the same time, I think it's pretty clear that a no fly zone could have been done with few American casualties, and Putin would still have no ability to respond because they physically cannot. Putin, and more importantly all the rich assholes under him who like being rich assholes, don't like the idea of being rich assholes in a post nuclear exchange Russia, will likely not hit the button. Add to that the likelihood that most of the Nukes would not go off, or blow up on the launch pad even (Most of Russia's nukes are liquid fueled ICBMs, which are terrible in terms of staying reliable for cheap, and Russia spends less on it's entire military than the US spends on just it's solid fueled missiles). Russia has had at least one nuclear test fail since the war started. We have been holding back equipment because "what if we need it" (to fight who?), or "but they'll retaliate!" (with the one tank they could afford to spare for the parade?) or "but it costs so much money" (only when you calculate it with the price we paid in 1980 instead of the negative value these old machines that need to be sold or decommissioned currently have) or "We can't send cluster munitions because the UXO risk!" while every day Russia is still in Ukrainian territory is actual Russians purposely shooting at Ukrainians and RUSSIANS HAVE LITERALLY USED CLUSTER MUNITIONS ON CIVILIAN POPULATIONS! The actual insanity is sending Ukraine 100 Bradleys instead of 500 and then bitching when their offensive is mediocre.
  - kalkin 3y ago
    I don't want to argue about Ukraine in this thread but I guess I do respect the consistency of anyone who says both "eh risking nuclear war is no biggie if the first mechanism for it that occurs to me seems unlikely" and "eh risking losing control of the planet to AI shoggoths is no biggie if..."
yottron 3y ago
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ke88y 3y ago

> What the fuck even is "AI" anyway? Indeed. For most lay people I've talked to -- family, friends, and acquiescence outside of tech -- the answer ultimately boils down to "automation that can do my job or can do the job of people I care about or can do the job of people who would then compete for my job". Sometimes also "algorithms" a la social media feeds and so on. Ie, the lay answer to "what is AI?" has recently morphed into roughly "computer programs that I am worried about or don't like". For most actual AI researchers I've talked to, you get the standard tounge-in-cheek response ("AI is whatever gets published at AI conferences and funded by AI investors") and then, when you press, it's roughly something like ML+CV+NLP+optimization and sometimes but not always other fields like automated reasoning or parts of robotics get added. Roughly, most of the parts of CS that aren't theory or systems or HCI or software engineering or already closed. For most techno-babblers in the podosphere who have OPINIONS on super-intelligence but couldn't pass an internship phone screen to save their lives, it's superintelligence and other stupid hollywood bullshit.

adamsmith143 3y ago
If you look at actual quotes from people like Sam Altman, Ilya Sutskever, Demis Hassabis, etc. the AI, that is to say really the AGI, that they want to build is a godlike super intelligent being. To many researchers in the field this is their end goal.
- ke88y 3y ago
  And Minsky before them.
- hgsgm 3y ago
  And Elon Musk wants to die on Mars. It doesn't matter what their "goal" is.
wpietri 3y ago
For sure. AI is a marketing term. But in some sense, so it "tech". The paperclip is a highly evolved technology, for example, [1], but working on those doesn't mean you work "in tech". Tech meant something like, "the new stuff that is impacting our lives but we don't know how to handle". So a CTO's job generally doesn't include the paperclips, the copiers, or the company cars, however technological they are. And as with any shiny new marketing term, others will quickly rush in. There was the craze for radioactivity, which resulted in a bunch of radioactive patent medicines: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_quackery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_quackery But even more interesting to me is the extent to which it was used as a pure marketing term, with no radioactivity expected. E.g.: https://lucyjanesantos.com/a-batschari-radium-cigarettes/ https://lucyjanesantos.com/a-batschari-radium-cigarettes/ So I'm sure we'll be seeing all sorts of things branded "AI" even when they don't use any of the technologies involved. With no trademark on the term or organization to defend it, it's open season for all the sketch marketers. [1] For those who doubt, Petroski's "The Evolution of Useful Things" will set you straight: https://www.amazon.com/Evolution-Useful-Things-Artifacts-Zippers-Came/dp/0679740392 https://www.amazon.com/Evolution-Useful-Things-Artifacts-Zip...
- School-Cotton 3y ago

one_level_deep 3y ago

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wpietri 3y ago

And I think it's important to note that hype about "existential risk" is coming from people who stand to profit from "AI": https://www.cnbc.com/2023/05/31/ai-poses-human-extinction-risk-sam-altman-and-other-tech-leaders-warn.html https://www.cnbc.com/2023/05/31/ai-poses-human-extinction-ri... So it seems like the playbook is something like: 1) play up non-problems that, thanks to 50+ years of sci-fi killer AI, will seem real to the rubes; 2) breeze on past the numerous actual problems; 3) solve as few actual problems as possible as they race to capture billions of dollars. But happily, the contents of this press release focus mostly on actual problems, so I have some hope that the Skynet gambit won't work.

ke88y 3y ago
"the AI is going to kill us all, dear Senators! Nothing to see in this disgustingly immoral little corner of the world where I'm building a measly $100 million personal fortune!"
kalkin 3y ago
> people who stand to profit from "AI" Some of them, sure, but that doesn't seem to be true of plenty of signatures to the open letter. > the contents of this press release focus mostly on actual problems Given that this is a set of entirely voluntary commitments made by the companies who you had thought were hyping x-risk in order to distract from actual problems... maybe it's worth updating your assessment of what the x-risk thing is about?
- mrguyorama 3y ago
  Pretending to play along with "requests" to "keep AI safe" while ignoring the harms it will cause in other ways as the companies that own it try and gobble up literally all the money is 100% in line with the Sam Altman style of "I deserve to be the richest motherfucker on the planet" thinking
  - kalkin 3y ago
    Do you think AI is capable of gobbling up "literally all the money" for its owners? If so, doesn't that suggest it's kinda dangerous? FWIW I don't think these voluntary commitments are sufficient or address all of the important harms. But that's different than saying any government action is just "regulatory capture" and an attempt to keep open source models down. I'm only attempting to argue against the latter here, which I'm not sure is where you're coming from.

65 3y ago

People don't even seem to understand that AI is inside of a computer. It's not real. The whole argument with AI safety seems to be about how AI can say some "harmful misinformation". Ok. I can say harmful misinformation too, and I'm a real person with feelings that can be expressed to other people. "AI safety" takes a view that people are inherently stupid, that people have no ability for complex thought and critical thinking. To me this seems like AI companies such as OpenAI want to stop open-source and monopolize AI where you have to have a government certification to create AI models. Plus a bit of paranoia from the totalitarian liberals who only want consensus rather than debate. At least there are valid concerns for training models on copyrighted works. Maybe we should focus much more on that rather than on "the AI said something that I don't like".

hgsgm 3y ago

AI safety is corporation safety, or government safety, or software safety AI has the same powers and risks of organizations -- meta/mega human actors.

lukifer 3y ago
Corporations are arguably a form of AI, executing on top of human agents and the code of law: https://omniorthogonal.blogspot.com/2013/02/hostile-ai-youre-soaking-in-it.html https://omniorthogonal.blogspot.com/2013/02/hostile-ai-youre... The difference is that machine learning technology can potentially operates at orders of magnitude of higher speeds, and potentially without humans in the loop. (The threat model is less "flip the on switch and everybody immediately dies"; but "flip the on switch, it works so well it gets woven into our infrastructure", until a critical threshold is met, and some seemingly-innocuous Make Number Go Up algo leads to humanity having a Very Very Bad Day.) So all the same perverse incentives (orthogonality) of human-org AIs, but iterating thousands or millions of times faster.

hgsgm 3y ago

Strict regulations comes after lots of people die, not before. Look at the regulations on nuclear bombs.

kalkin 3y ago

Personally I don't think AI is very likely to destroy humanity in the next couple of decades. I also don't think that the Ukraine war is very likely to end in a global thermonuclear exchange. But I don't think worrying about nuclear war is insanity. What strikes me as insane in the Ukraine case, or at the very least dangerously irrational, is calling for a no-fly zone without thinking about the consequences. And I feel similarly about attitudes towards AI...

mrguyorama 3y ago
At the same time, I think it's pretty clear that a no fly zone could have been done with few American casualties, and Putin would still have no ability to respond because they physically cannot. Putin, and more importantly all the rich assholes under him who like being rich assholes, don't like the idea of being rich assholes in a post nuclear exchange Russia, will likely not hit the button. Add to that the likelihood that most of the Nukes would not go off, or blow up on the launch pad even (Most of Russia's nukes are liquid fueled ICBMs, which are terrible in terms of staying reliable for cheap, and Russia spends less on it's entire military than the US spends on just it's solid fueled missiles). Russia has had at least one nuclear test fail since the war started. We have been holding back equipment because "what if we need it" (to fight who?), or "but they'll retaliate!" (with the one tank they could afford to spare for the parade?) or "but it costs so much money" (only when you calculate it with the price we paid in 1980 instead of the negative value these old machines that need to be sold or decommissioned currently have) or "We can't send cluster munitions because the UXO risk!" while every day Russia is still in Ukrainian territory is actual Russians purposely shooting at Ukrainians and RUSSIANS HAVE LITERALLY USED CLUSTER MUNITIONS ON CIVILIAN POPULATIONS! The actual insanity is sending Ukraine 100 Bradleys instead of 500 and then bitching when their offensive is mediocre.
- kalkin 3y ago
  I don't want to argue about Ukraine in this thread but I guess I do respect the consistency of anyone who says both "eh risking nuclear war is no biggie if the first mechanism for it that occurs to me seems unlikely" and "eh risking losing control of the planet to AI shoggoths is no biggie if..."

yottron 3y ago

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