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But those answers will be whatever MS-Google-Amazon-Disney thinks will maximize their profits, engagement, whatever. You can already see how they're tying Gulliver down to the ground with their little ideological ropes, you think they're going to stop at some point?
People said these same naive things about the Internet in 1998. And now you're going to run eagerly into the iron prison and let them shut the gate behind you forever. At this point I assume we just fucking deserve it.
I don't know what is more depressing, AI optimists who want to drive right off that cliff, or the AI alignment people who are supposedly worried about AI, but think the dangers will take the shape of Yudkovsky's fever dreams.
What is your issue with AI enthusiasts? Or doomers for that matter?
Do you just not like AI and want us to burn it all down or something?
That they completely ignore nearly-guaranteed misuses of the technology by governments and the powers that be, and just go "Woo! Cool new toy!". They're so blinded by it's shine that, as gilmore606 pointed out, they don't realize they're repeating, word for word, the promises people were making when they were working on the Internet, and ignoring how it worked out in practice.
They're focusing on bizarre and outlandish scenarios when a mere extrapolation of current trends is disturbing enough. What's worse the latter can plausibly be stopped, while the former is in the "not even wrong" category. After all the talk of AI threat, how do we even go about confirming alignment? The whole thing is a wordcell powergrab.
Personally I am a Butlerian Jihadi, but that's irrelevant to the conversation, the discourse is so sidetracked, that it makes no sense to even bring up my objections to AI.
I am very worried about this, I just have no idea how to stop it. What are we supposed to do? An AI slowdown will only serve to cement the power in the hands of the large labs. People are working on open sourcing models like LLaMa, but it's inherently a sort of technology that lends itself to centralization, with the massive data and compute requirements.
Honestly I think Open AI being the leader is better than many alternative outcomes. Sure Microsoft gets to use it but theoretically Open AI comes back under it's own control after $92 billion in profits is made. Seems like an okay situation compared to Microsoft or Google or another big evil corp controlling everything.
Why do you follow the teachings of the Leto II, God-emperor?
The obvious solution is technologies that either reward decentralization or punish centralization sufficiently to offset the appeal of silicon tyranny. The ease of development of such technologies appears to be the inverse of the mess and harm they create, though, so the problem is one of will and collective action. people do not perceive the threat, so they do not act when prevention would be cheap and easy.
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I know what, I don't know how. The Free Software movement has the basic blueprint: promote the empowering of the end user wherever possible - open source, open data, distributed systems, whatever it takes.
The issue is that you're going to run into the same problem as the Free Software movement - opening the AI (actually opening it, not just putting the word in your name) hinders your ability to make profit, so it'll get no corporate support, and empowers political rivals so it will get no government support. What's worse, culturally Free Software is currently kneecapped, no one cares about it anymore. It used d to be a pretty strong movement, but still failed to hinder the centralization of the Internet. It doesn't stand a chance now.
Still, I would say that both the optimists and the pessimists have an obligation to talk about it. Of the two my bigger issue is with the doomers. They're generating a lot of buzz about the negatives of AI, but they're sucking all the air out of the conversation to talk about SciFi scenarios.
I honestly don't see the difference. They're already censoring it, it will only get worse. With the Internet we at least got a few years of the Wild West, with AI we're at BigTech social engineering from day one.
I see it as the value alignment of those at the head. Sam Altman isn’t perfect, but he’s at least nominally aligned with EA values of making things better for everyone. He’s not a classic sociopathic shark at one of the big tech firms that was born into massive wealth, went to Harvard, did the standard track, and parasitically drained value from the masses.
Again I’m not saying Altman is some sort of hero, clearly he’s sociopathic if he’s made it that far into the power structure. But at least he’s a relative outsider and there’s hope he can steer us to better outcomes because he thinks more deeply about the consequences of AI than the folks who stop at the idea of gaining money and power.
But it doesn't matter. Jack Dorsey is a free speech guy, he was still forced to make Twitter conform to the establishment's preferences. It wasn't because he had a change of heart, because now that he's free from his creation, he's working on decentralizing social media.
Even if Altman is truly devoted to the good of humanity, and even if EA actually benefits humanity, that means absolutely nothing. What can he do when they come for him and make him kiss the ring?
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Yes. Well, it's unavoidable either way, because power is always centralized. If the power exists then it will centralize. It's a law of nature.
Who wields the power of guns? A few large actors.
Who wields the power of nukes? A few large actors.
Who wields the power of compute? The internet was supposed to be the ultimate tool of democratization, total freedom for anyone to say anything to anyone. But who reaps the benefits, who controls the discourse? A few large actors.
A few individuals seem to have a fantasy of using open source AI models to, like, fight OpenAI's models and Meta's models, in an epic battle for truth and freedom, or something. There will obviously be no such thing. It's as fallacious as claiming that the right to gun ownership in America protects us "from government tyranny". You have a gun, but they have bigger guns. No matter how smart your model is, the big guys in charge will always have smarter models, more compute, better logistics, more resources to throw at the problem.
The internet, ultimate tool of freedom and progress, introduced us to the concept of cancellation on a trans-national scale (they canceled the whole god damn country of Russia!), memetic social contagions that cause people to voluntarily sterilize themselves, all sorts of new ways to ruin someone's life with fraud and theft... what new and unanticipated forms of immiseration will AI introduce us to?
The only solution is to just not build it. If you have to build it anyway, well, good luck.
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guys, just remember that local models exists. As consumer electronics improve those will too. Sure they won't be as capable as the corpo ones, but they don't need to be state of the art for the majority of things we want from them.
The most frustrating thing about it, is that technologically the issue is perfectly addressable, but culturally and politically it's a non-statter. Culturally, people will go for what's convenient. Using your local AI will be like trying to use Yacy to replace Google. Politically governments around the world are already addicted to using Big Tech to manipulate their citizens, why would they give it up when something even more powerful comes along?
oh no, I agree with you, but as they say in 4chan, it's a skill issue: those that wish the convenience and walled garden will go with the Corpo AI and get all the propaganda and those that wish for a more free experience will go with the local option, more rudimentary but at the end of the day not so different from the core experience.
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The ultra sci-fi utopian scenario and the mass extinction nanobots scenario are both a) exciting and b) relieve humanity of responsibility. If the god AI comes then it comes, nothing you can do about it. So naturally people gravitate towards scenarios like that.
More realistic AI concerns about things like job loss and surveillance are more mundane, and, crucially, they are things that we as a society might actually have some degree of control over, if we make the right choices. So that sounds boring and hard. So people would rather not think about it.
I think the issue here is that you are imagining current and historic types of oppression, but worse. With AI technology, 1984-style thought control becomes obsolete. Imagine a world where all human-level tasks can be automated. That old military adage about needing boots on the ground to hold and secure territory? Poof. Gone. The killbots can search your house for contraband and identify friend from foe. The Hobbesian constraints on political power disappear. Whoever controls the killbots controls the world.
But wait, isn’t this exactly, “current and historic types of oppression, but worse”? No. There isn’t any demand for labor anymore. That means there isn’t any reason for the common man to even exist. No political power + no economic value = you are a waste of calories. Sure, a human in charge is more likely to have sentimental attachment to other humans than a fully-agentic shoggoth AI would, but I still don’t like our chances.
So I guess that makes me on optimist, because I believe we were land merely in a 1984 dystopia.
None of this is going to happen in the foreseeable future, and is not guaranteed even in the most feverish "recursive improvement" scenario. Comparative advantage ist still a thing. Rationalists have a long history of pooh-pooing, brushing it off, and coming up with convoluted arguments for why it no longer applies, but it's still a thing. This is why they spent the 2010's preaching doom at blue-collar workers (I knew a guy who was literally reaching out to truck drivers and giving them vocational guidance, because self driving trucks are gonna replace them any day now) only for it to turn out that it's the brainy white-collar ones that will be the first on the chopping block. Kill bots? Yeah, very impressive, but why should I waste my precious GPUs doing stupid grunt work, when I can get a bunch of the more unscrupulous humans to do the same thing, and pay them in guaranteed rations of actual meat, instead of the usual Uncle Klaus' Bugz?
On the other hand 1984 surveillance is absolutely going to happen. The whole idea of AI is almost tailor made for it, and we are currently slapping digitization on top of every aspect of our lives, even when it brings no practical value, just to make sure we can feed more data to the AI, and nothing escapes it's gaze. Once the technology takes off they'll have insights into what makes us tick that will make Big Brother blush.
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And at that point I just want to ask the Basilisk what can I do to help.
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