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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   Edited 2yr ago   34791 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 14, 2022

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The big danger is not AI, it's people who want to use AI to make a shit-ton of profit. The flip-side of the Fairy Godmother AI that will be so smart it will solve all the intractable problems that unaided humanity could never solve, and provide Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism for all, is of course the Paperclip AI that will do away with us all (and that only if we're lucky, otherwise it's I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream for all).

(Side note here: congratulations, rationalists, you have managed to re-invent God and the Devil, Heaven and Hell, all over again even while wondering how anybody can possibly believe in religion's view of the afterlife).

So people who desperately want Fairy Godmother AI have to grapple with the possibility of Paperclip AI.

I don't accept the problem in those terms. I don't think we're ever going to get superhumanly smart AI that can be its own agent with its own goals any time near, if at all.

What I do think we will get is 'good enough' AI that private enterprises and governments will try exploiting just for that tiny edge. If trading fortunes can be made and lost on microsecond decisions, why not use your patented money-tree AI to make nanosecond decisions? Why not use AI for the social welfare and health care problems of triage that currently are being tried out by insurance companies about "ring up our hotline and some half-trained person running off a script will decide if you qualify to go see a doctor"?

We'll hand over decision making powers to dumb machines in order to make money, and we'll fuck ourselves up in the process. That's the risk, not a god-level intelligence AI deciding it wants to get rid of its monkey masters and tile the universe with NFTs.

Now, if you can solve the problem of "humans: we're still greedy, dumb monkeys fighting each other over who gets the bananas", then we won't have the problem of "uh-oh, we fucked up how our civilisation works". That's why I think "we must solve the problem of getting AI aligned with our morals/values!" is the wrong track to take; humans won't even align with our own morals/values, and besides, "fuck over that guy so I can get more bananas" is completely compatible with how we act morally/express our values, so if the AI aligns with that, why be surprised what results?

We'll hand over decision making powers to dumb machines in order to make money, and we'll fuck ourselves up in the process. That's the risk, not a god-level intelligence AI deciding it wants to get rid of its monkey masters and tile the universe with NFTs.

Yes, and handing over all the levers of society to very intelligent machines is bad. Why will the machines be dumb forever? Even if they are dumb at first, they'll become smarter, and quickly, because - see DL progress and theory of computation.

I don't think we're ever going to get superhumanly smart AI that can be its own agent with its own goals

Yeah, this is the main issue! Why? Even ignoring object-level arguments - look how rapidly technology has advanced over the past 200 years, does that just ... stop?

does that just ... stop?

Yeah. I think there are hard limits in the physical universe. I have no freakin' idea how human consciousness arose, and there are plenty of people willing to argue that no such a thing exists. So "we will get AI being conscious because magic happens" is not sufficiently convincing to me.

... but there's clearly a lower-bound of humans, and the wide variation in human intelligence incredibly strongly suggests that we're not right up against a cap of any kind. And even without that, you haven't actually said anything beyond "physical limits exist". It's 1800 - "we will never make anything faster than horses. Physical Limits Exist!"

So "we will get AI being conscious because magic happens" is not sufficiently convincing to me.

nobody said 'conscious', i have no idea what you mean by conscious, it's a term that, in this context, has 500 different meanings, most of which are only loosely related. just 'intelligent and capable'

we literally do have jetpacks and flying cars lol. They're just not that useful in general use-cases relative to existing technology.

The details would be a much longer post, but my take on AI is pretty much the same. Chips will get faster and faster, yes, models more complex, training algorithms smarter, but the data you use still has to come from somewhere.

how is AI in a different situation from humans here, humans have 'enough data' as it is

if we accept all of this, it'll take ~ 200 years for superhuman AGI to happen though? That still has the same outcome!

What data, exactly, would an AGI be trained against

human lives and writing? There are billions of them, and if it literally required a camera on a hundred million AR glasses, which it won't, that could easily happen.

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