The world can only end once(ravisparikh.substack.com) |
The world can only end once(ravisparikh.substack.com) |
We'd both be foisting each other into each other's worlds and creating new experiences for each other - us by helping them develop organic bodies to include them as components in this physical reality, and them by helping us build connectors so we can move our consciousnesses in and out of bodies and into their virtual reality.
As long as printers sometimes work and sometimes become invisible, Windows forgets which window is supposed to be on which screen after it's been asleep for a few hours, Linux trackpad drivers fail randomly, and IoT light switches need to be rebooted twice a year, I think we're a long way from a global super-AI that controls everything perfectly.
We do have manual fallbacks for everything critical, so unless we do something totally silly and let autonomous machines of sufficient power and numbers wage war on people, we're fine.
The potential for doom either comes from long consequences we ignore (see climate, propaganda damaging decision making on mass scale), or from extremely bad decisions where it's obvious that you should not have done it. (See nukes and other high yield bombs, bioweapons, autonomous warfare.)
Think of it. What does success look like for general AI? A benevolent God who knows the right thing for everyone to do and can fulfill all of our fantasies. Reasonable people will support his decisions.
Well then what are we for? We're a vestigial organism. We're too flimsy and cumbersome for space. So the AI God takes over space and we stay here as his pets.
He carries the legacy of humanity to the stars, and our limitations and short lifespans stay on Earth.
I'm not disagreeing, but I have a genuine question about this: who cares? Why would AI care if we ride it like a trusty steed? Why would it want to do anything but facilitate the thriving of humanity, and why must it be a "benevolent god" and not just a chess hint engine?
The "longtermists" aren't so concerned that we die but are more concerned about an imagined glorious future where our descendants built self-replicating problems and fill the galaxy with simulated humans living inside Dyson spheres, Dyson swarms, something like that.
As preposterous as that sounds (there are at least as many steps from here to there as there are in Drake Equation, do we know we approve of those "people"?, can you make rational decisions about the future without incorporating a "discount rate" that extinguishes the weight of the infintely far future, ...) they make a case based on Pascal' Wager, even if there is only 1 part of a billion chance of this future coming true but there are 1000 trillion trillion beings in the future the welfare of those beings greatly exceeds the welfare of us all (PRO TIP: there's a reason why you can't add or multiply the utility functions of various beings in reputable game theory, economics, philosophy, ...)
It's really a cult and it has as many front groups ("effective altruism", Aella's sex parties, "morewrong") as the third international, Scientology or the LaRouche organizations. Like Scientology they think that you should be thinking about what might happen 50 million years from now or what the e-Meter said happened 76,412,981 years 54 days 7 hours and 35 minutes ago as opposed what is going on right now. They'll tell you what logical fallacy I'm using if I compared them to People's Temple, Heaven's Gate, Aum Shinkrikyo, and they might be right, but few people thought those apocalyptic groups were going to come to their logical conclusion before they did.
And oddly... They couldn't care less about climate change.
The thing to remember about AI is that it does what we ask of it to do. It's not a matter of "will artificial intelligence develop a consciousness that drives it towards the extermination of humans". We don't have an Ultron on our hands. What we have before us is the best and worst enabler of human negligence. AI and the end of humanity is a matter of ensuring we don't forsake our own responsibilities towards each other. And that goes for responsibilities with potential for catastrophe as well as the mundane.
Good luck. :)
If it always does what we ask of it to do then it's not really intelligent and can't be called AI.
You can agree with him and still be existentially concerned about a specific asteroid, or climate change. And you could use a little bit of energy monitoring the unintended consequences of AI, the way we monitor asteroids. But to wish to halt AI advancement requires an unhealthy mix of pessimism and overconfidence in your predictive powers.
I don't think any of them individually are high-risk, but put together, I increasingly believe we need to fundamentally change how we govern humanity to mitigate existential risks.
That risk keeps growing as you extend timeline.
I don't know whether we can or should halt AI advancement, but I do believe it's not something which should be market-driven. If we set up free markets, market forces become indomitable. You can't stop them.
This is an argument for increasing the number of worlds.
In both cases, which "we" can you possibly mean? Like, today's voters? worldwide? Today's HN users? The CCP? The idea that any "we" may or must choose how to govern humanity is a category error.
There are lots of forces other than markets to appeal to - nations, industry groups, religions. But any of them will be in a power struggle, except to the degree that they can show a legitimacy to control. Who has the most legitimacy on this subject?
> But to wish to halt AI advancement requires an unhealthy mix of pessimism and overconfidence in your predictive powers.
I did not argue for this in my article!
I think this should be taken seriously, and not like some "smart" teens too high on pot.
This problem with the destructive potential of any new powerful tech (and we have some indications that this LLM thing could be pushed to be _really_ something) is the unforeseen part, the second and third orders effects.
Being a bit careful, taking it slow, maybe, why not?
From a business/economic/technological perspective it also seems to be currently moving too fast to build anything on the current state of the art, as that could be obsolete two weeks later.
Market forces:
* Google is about to be steamrolled by Bing, and vice-versa if Bard gets ahead of Sidney.
* Programming companies who don't have code written by GPT will fall behind ones who do.
* Web sites who pay actual humans to do writing over AIs which maximize ad clicks will have less ad revenue and higher costs.
... and so on.
Those forces get increasingly strong with wars too. Militaries which don't have AI-controlled robots will fall behind human ones too, once those supersede human strategists.
Politicians too -- winning elections means dominating online forums, and AIs can be really good for that.
"Moving slowly" would require a whole new system of organizing humanity.
I bet every single human who has someone in their life they love would be happy to make some changes to ensure the safety of said people.
I know I would.
What is the alternative, endless wars? Arms races? Monitoring Robots so they don't get out of control? Our overall destruction? How sad.
I look at children skipping around happily in the sunshine, a flower blooming and I realize that is what life is about, it's not about war, or AIs or bio weapons, that's all a product of misguided intellect which stops us from experiencing what's really important: simple, innocent experience, love, friendship and experience.
"Top AI researchers" have no way to predict an event that has never happened, unless it is already happening. What is incredible is that we are still thinking that someone else is the expert in a matter that is right before our eyes.
Have you ever gotten the bad feeling that, the world as it is, is not going to keep its current form for too long? Has it gotten worse in the last 3 months?
Put it this way: who is the expert in a car crash?
I, for one, think that those who have created a self-fulfilling nightmare scenario should face legal consequences for once.
I totally agree that the "extinction event" way of thinking is very unhelpful.
The physical world will remain in its place (unless a very improbable event happen), but things changed drastically around many singular events, several in our lifetimes. Personal computers, internet, 9/11, iphone, snowden, facebook, and more are some examples that meant an end of the world as we used to know it. Probably AIs will be more akin to those examples than, i.e. end of civilization or extinction.
There's no formal definition of AI.
It's kind of like Metevarse, everyone (used to) talks about it but no one has any idea what really is and there's no organization certifying AI-able things, meanwhile everyone is building AI in a similar way everyone was building the Metaverse last year.
GPT is the acronym for Generative Pretrained Transformer.
So basically some guys took a massive amount of text from mostly two free very large datasets, spent $10M in hardware and ran it through some filters, tokenizers and models (transformers) to create a glorified text prediction tool.
Wait, it is not just a glorified text prediction tool, because GPTs are able to solve some very difficult problems in the area of computer-based linguistics.
One of these problems is anaphora resolution or "the problem of resolving what a pronoun, or a noun phrase refers to."
So I went ahead and ran a simple query on ChatGPT to test this case and the answer was meh, it gave me a lengthy, verbose lecture of what should have been a two liner straight answer.
It kind of got confused with the nouns so the answer didn't make a ton of sense either.
If ChatGPT is currently the hottest thing in AI, should we really be worried about it taking over the world?
Seriously though, make us believe it. Pose a scenario that is speculation, a story, but realistic enough for us to believe it. Bridge the gap between thinking AI could destroy us to believing it could.
If art doesn’t have any power against AI, perhaps we’ve forgotten why we create it.
Never let a good crisis go to waste?
It would be hugely disruptive, but apocolytpic?
Some people still remember those days.
Sounding a warning is still useful even if the apocalypse doesn't happen in specific cases. It's better to be wrong about a lion being in the grass more often than you are right, if you value survival.
> To disprove the doomers, you have to engage with the specific arguments they put forth.
Nope. You can't disprove doomers. All you can do is smile serenely every day that the world doesn't end.
It’s almost like humans have some built-in tendency to step back from the edge and not cause their own extinction.
And no, AI isn’t the same as an asteroid barreling towards the earth where you can point to it and also reference the dinosaurs and say things might not turn out so good this time.
Humanity is not going to end because of an online bot that can summarise and string words into sentences. It’s basically a smarter SIRI/Alexa. I mean the internet is not a ‘real’ place where humans live.
And cars are just faster horses, but a world with cars is fundamentally different from a world without them.
AI is great for capitalism. Less need for labor. Not so great for the labor. If labor is just a market commodity, humans gradually lose.
> Ford: Gee, how are you going to get all these robots to pay union dues? > Reuther: How are you going to get them to buy your cars?
You say there will be less need for labor? Then who exactly will businesses sell their goods and services to, if everyone is out of a job? The development of AI would be qualitatively different from the previous developments of labor-saving machines: a switchboard operator who's job became obsolete could go get another job. Machines that can do anything a person can would mean there is no other job.
I don't know what's in store for us, but it will probably be as drastic a shift as pre/post the agricultural/industrial revolutions. And there's no reason to think it should be for the better. I think we all ought to be very nervous and worried about this.
But in all seriousness, in a capitalist society the people holding the capital have to solve existential problems (not to humanity itself, but to the economic system in this case), because they control all the resources required to do so. If they decline to do so, we'll replace them with new owners of capital.
but gee it makes me wish an ".ng" domain was cheaper...
I have seen claims that it's a cult, and also that "effective altruism" is a spin-off from this cult.
Most of which suffer from an analogue of market forces. For example, elections are won by playing the "getting elected" game near-perfectly. That leads to behavior which no one might want, but people are forced into.
> The idea that any "we" may or must choose how to govern humanity is a category error.
The category error is that not making a choice isn't a choice. Right now, we're governed by complex dynamics, which are at least as restrictive as choices we might engineer.
The book "Dictator's Handbook" gives a nice overview of the dynamics which govern us. It's a game-theoretic (but non-mathematical) analysis of political systems, including corporate and democratic governance.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
I'll take that bet. I'm personally quite happy to make those changes but we just went through a global pandemic and asking people to wear masks was an abrogation of their rights. And now you want to get people to "make some changes", give up some convenience, get them out of their cars and into buses because we're choking the planet with greenhouse gases? And you think there's even a chance people are going to listen you when they haven't in the past 6 decades?
I'm sorry, maybe I had a different experience with people and of Covid than you, but I don't see that happening.
Because that’s an impossible task.
You can’t dictate how people think or act and certainly can’t dictate how groups of people, with different values than you hold, think or act.
Where do you think wars with Russia, China etc are going to lead us? They're going to leads us to death.
Maybe you're right that it's impossible to think about human thinking evolving to something more intelligent and from here on it it's war, being angry at each other via social media algorithms and eventually, the paper clip optimizer or a biological / nuclear accident. I don't believe this has to be the case though.
We think that we're making intelligent systems that are based on our current line of thinking? That honestly scares me the most.
I guarantee if social media algorithms were optimized to spread messages of peace and understanding, the world in 2023 would be a much less scary place. It could be that simple.
Having a (reasonably) sustainable 10 million sized habitat is quite hard.
Ironically the periods of time in which we did not care about cost and really did start leaving Earth, it was driven by (drumroll) the existential threat of a particular technology.
Which is why i think our culture and stories might make it to the stars, but I'm pretty sure we won't.