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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   31308 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 15, 2023

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with things like Claude-100K Context and StarCoder we're steadily progressing towards more useful coding and paperwork assistants at the moment, and not doing much in way of AGI

This is a big reason I'm uncomfortable using "AI" to describe LLMs and the main applications I envision are basically extremely useful and efficient virtual personal assistants. They're obviously a huge productivity boon but they also don't feel that qualitatively different?

Big Yud likes to cite hypotheticals involving a malicious actor trying to cause as much damage as possible by leveraging LLMs to create a new deadly pathogen or the like. This is essentially the same archetype as mass shooters or terrorists, and the closest parallels are basically 100x versions of the Anarchist Cookbook, bump stock AR-15s from a hotel room, or cargo trucks. I acknowledge these risks are real but the other obvious application for LLMs is that mass government surveillance will get dramatically cheaper and more pervasive. It doesn't seem obvious to me that the boost towards a bad actor's capacity for destruction will outstrip the government's surveillance boon. Has anyone written about this?

Look into ChatGPT plug-ins, tool-using AIs are already here and it's a matter of years before they're able to replace ~every mid-skill labor job, if not necessarily cost-effectively at first

It doesn't seem obvious to me that the boost towards a bad actor's capacity for destruction will outstrip the government's surveillance boon.

If the threat model that governments are concerned about is terrorists using AI to help them build a superweapon that can cause megadeaths (or worse), then the government agencies have to win every time, while the terrorists only have to win once. Anything less than omniscience and omnipotence isn't good enough.

I concede your point. The remaining question is how much do LLMs (and the like) improve a terrorist's capacity to cause megadeaths.

I'm assuming most wouldn't even work, but there's a chance there might be some low-hanging-fruit that's surprisingly easy to produce.

This is most likely true but even so my assumption would be that governments are already ahead of the curve here. They have the capacity and interest to generate entire libraries worth of theoretical chemical weapons and also would have access to the relevant expertise to sort through the churn. The state already has a method for regulating broadly available dangerous compounds, like ammonium nitrate.

I acknowledge these risks are real but the other obvious application for LLMs is that mass government surveillance will get dramatically cheaper and more pervasive. It doesn't seem obvious to me that the boost towards a bad actor's capacity for destruction will outstrip the government's surveillance boon.

Should it? Do we want to live in a world where government capacity decisively outstrips that of individuals, where the authorities really can make people shut up and do as they're told?

If not, how badly do we wish to prevent such a world? If such a world seems to be what we're heading toward, but the balance of power still lies with the public, should the public take steps to forestall the formation of an unrivaled government?

I find it very, very difficult to believe that a future where the government has perfected truly effective, effectively inescapable surveillance is one that I want to live in. There is no plausible route I can imagine where this sort of power doesn't result in mountain-ranges of skulls.

In any case, your 100x multiplier is difficult to assess, mainly because most people aren't thinking about the problem from the right angle. I'm convinced the base threat is significantly underappreciated, and the second- and third-order effects are largely being ignored.

My post was descriptive, not prescriptive.

I absolutely do not endorse increased government surveillance but all that is careening towards inevitability. Around the time of the Snowden leaks, one of the comforting refrains from those worried about surveillance was to note that at least the government lacked the gargantuan computing resources required to monitor everyone (newly minted Utah data center notwithstanding). That coping mechanism seems so quaint in retrospect given the technological strides since.

Despite my aversion to government surveillance, I nevertheless must acknowledge that governments maintain a zeal towards prosecuting acts of terrorism and mass violence which likely serves as some kind of deterrent. A good illustration of this retributive zeal occurs with acts of violence where the perpetrator is too dead to be punished, so the state goes after tangential "accomplices" in its hunt for a scapegoat. This happened with the prosecution (and acquittal) of the Pulse nightclub shooter's wife, the prosecution of the friend who made a straw purchase for the 2019 Dayton shooting (The idiot invited the FBI into his home with weed in plain view and readily admitted to lying on the 4473 form. Also, the shooter had no record that would've barred firearm purchases, so the straw purchase made no difference.), and the ammunition dealer who got 13 months in federal prison after his fingerprints were discovered on unfired rounds from the 2017 Las Vegas shooting.

I'm not saying that I endorse this modern variant of collective punishment, but it is good indicator of how much retributive energy animates the government's actions in these circumstances. Obviously governments have an interest in leveraging increased surveillance into suffocating population control, and this interest would only magnify as costs drop. But even as an anarchist I would be lying if I claimed that the state's only motivation for surveillance is control. However clouded and selectively applied it might be, there's clearly a genuine interest from the state in punishing and preventing bad acts.

My post was descriptive, not prescriptive.

No, I get that. My question is whether we should be rooting for the Authorities or the Chaos, in the final analysis. Faced with that choice, my own bias is heavily in favor of the Chaos, but I try to be aware of it and compensate proportionally. This becomes harder when people argue persuasively that the road we're on clearly leads to the iron chains of long-term dystopia. Some people argue that terrible things are coming, but there's nothing to be done about it. Other people argue that there's things we can do to alter the future, but we shouldn't be in a hurry to do so because intervening would be worse. And it has to be one or the other, doesn't it? Either the coming future is worse, or the things needed to forestall it are worse. One must prefer one or the other, must one not?

However clouded and selectively applied it might be, there's clearly a genuine interest from the state in punishing and preventing bad acts.

The question is, is it in our interest to tolerate the continued existence of the current state?

Ok fair, I apologize for misinterpreting your post. The initial hypothetical is about LLMs empowering bad actors' ability to cause immeasurable destruction, and my response to that hypothetical was to consider that in such a world LLMs would also empower governments to establish immeasurable surveillance and policing. Whether or not we "should" do anything to stop that massive accumulation of power is impossible to decisively answer because we're already buried under an avalanche of hypothetical layers. It depends in part whether you agree that LLM-equipped terrorists are a risk worth worrying about in the first place.

I guess the way I'd put it is that it seems a lot more plausible that LLMs or similar can allow an effective panopticon than that they can allow mega-death terrorism, and so the assurance that Mega-death terrorism would probably be prevented by a government panopticon leaves me more worried on balance, not less. What saves us from the government panopticon?

There was an old woman who swallowed a fly...

I find it hard to believe that the federal government is capable of building a perfect panopticon in any reasonable timeframe. There are just too many leaky gaps in how info is collected. I imagine that criminals long since abandoned cellphones and facebook for sending business communications, and even chat gpt doesnt know what criminals are up to. What i think will be interesting is when we will see a sort of parallel construction of evidence using AI- the feds could feed their mega cache of comms data into a gpt-esque thing and ask who the likely ne'er do wells are and then go and start busting doors. Presumably, if the input data is solid and the AI isn't seeing rainbows, you could get some hits even if they are mixed in with some misses. Presumably some agency or PD will eventually try this, and presumably at some point it will become a point of evidence in trial that this is happening.

Parallel construction is super illegal. would using an AI be a loophole until further noted? who knows but ultimately its probably a bad decade to be starting up a scarface type situation.

Interestingly, i bet gpt would also be super amazing at figuring out who is dodging taxes, but what with the IRS having only 2 rusty pennies to rub together i doubt this will happen either.

I imagine that criminals long since abandoned cellphones and facebook for sending business communications,

The smart ones have but we mostly catch the dumb ones. I recall one instance where they did a drug deal under a live CCTV camera. Other times, they all switch their phones off at the same time when going out to do some crime. There are also occasional sting programs where they import phones that are supposed to be secured but the game was rigged from the start.

I find it hard to believe that the federal government is capable of building a perfect panopticon in any reasonable timeframe.

It doesn't have to be perfect to be almost unimaginably harmful. Removing the bottleneck of human labor in surveillance and analysis is a serious threat to the idea of limited or even responsive government.

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