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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 15, 2024

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The LLM based systems that exist have problems with basic logical tasks or addition. There's been no demonstrated agents capable of doing anything interesting on their own.

We are as far away from even the possibility of 'live rogue AI' as 1890 people were from supersonic jet bombers. So, sixty years, maybe.

It's an entirely theoretical problem, nothing like the self-improving system Big Yud has been dooming about has even the whiff of reality on it. The only legitimate fear we can have now is that LLM powered bots are going to crap up social media with fake content.

It doesn’t need agency to do something awful, though. Doesn’t even have to be smart. Just stupid, fast, and attached to some real-world effects. Military research is rather interested in attaching such effects.

Nor is “60 years” a refutation of anything Magic said. What happens in the meantime that gets us out of the bind?

What happens in the meantime that gets us out of the bind?

What bind? Progress is going to be slow, and between cybercrime, cybercrime augmented with 'dumb' AI systems, everything is going to be hardened to hell by the time there are any actual 'rogue' AIs.

That's my guess of how things will work out.

And in any case, there never was a realistic, good option of stopping dangerous AI, because militaries want 'dangerous' AIs.

If they didn't want them, that'd be entirely horrific - it'd imply planet dominated by a single government and able to puppet everything so nothing ever happens. That's a game-over condition of stasis and decay.