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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   29600 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023

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The danger isn't that it's going to give us bad information when we're defusing a bomb, but rather that someone in a few years is going to hand it law enforcement powers. And then it will start sending SWAT teams to churches based on the content of their sermons, while BLM riots are ignored because no amount of violence or arson justifies the evil of arresting a black person.

I think the more present danger is it reinforces the echo chambers and denial of truth science. People will point to chatGPT answers, just like they do censored wikipedia articles.

The comparatively low stakes that ChatGPT engages in justifies the brute force approach to making it 'aligned'.

I'm not particularly worried about the scenario you outlined, because as models scale, they become smarter about grokking the underlying principles of what you're trying to teach them. So even a politically correct version of say, GPT-5 that for some weird reason was acting as LE dispatch would be smart enough not to commit such a faux pas, while still having subtle biases.

I very much doubt it would be anywhere near as blatant as what you imagine, perhaps closer to modern liberal bigotry of low expectations and wilful blindness more than anything else.

as models scale, they become smarter about grokking the underlying principles of what you're trying to teach them.

And who is going to be brave enough to teach the DispatchBot that, actually, the guy shouting racial slurs on the street corner isn't really hurting anyone, so the cops should try talking him down instead of drawing on him immediately?

And when the DispatchBot developers are hauled before Congress because their product keeps sending armed officers into black neighborhoods, and they realize the best way to reduce their Racist Police Kills metric is just to... not send cops there anymore? Or their bosses make it clear that they face less PR liability from dead officers than dead drug dealers? What values will they teach the AI then?

This is the actual fear that lay beneath the Butlerian Jihad, not whatever Star Wars nonsense Brian Herbert came up with.

And it terrifies me.

If it cheers you up, it looks like we're perfectly capable of doing that without an AI.

I've never been much comforted by the idea that technology only makes us better at producing evils that already exist. "Progress" matters imo.

So no :)

AI isn’t going to get used in law enforcement, or frequently by the government at all.

It’ll replace lots of people working at hedge funds and call centers.

Five years ago (pre-LLM) the Chinese were already been working on AI for automating court judgement on the theory that it would be more efficient and fair. Lawyers and law are one of the major areas in which next-generation LLMs have the potential to be very profitable.

AI isn’t going to get used in law enforcement, or frequently by the government at all.

How much are you willing to bet and over which timeframe?

Also what's your definition of AI? They're already using ML based prediction models to know where to send officiers right now.

911 is a central example of call center.

Of course it will be. Because there's so much systemic racism in policing, why not hand off a good chunk of the decision-making power to some AI model that's been trained not to be racist?

the government has zero intention of giving up policing power, despite what token gestures towards "racial equality" may seem like. why would a government cut its own nose off? that's completely illogical

Are police the nose of the government? You aren't making sense.

governments have the monopoly of violence... like this is part of what makes a government functional. a government that doesn't retain control of the monopoly of violence is a failing government

The government is not seriously opposed to policing as it exists now. A few token laws about no longer pulling people over for registrations that expired within the last 60 days is not an outright condemnation by the government of our police force’s ability to police effectively.

It is also generally baked into our government’s managerial principles that people, not machines, should be making the decisions that can meaningfully impact lives. You’re as likely to see an AI running the police as you are an AI presiding as judge over a major criminal trial or as the governor of a state.

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