The A.I. Dilemma - March 9, 2023

"Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin discuss how existing A.I. capabilities already pose catastrophic risks to a functional society, how A.I. companies are caught in a race to deploy as quickly as possible without adequate safety measures, and what it would mean to upgrade our institutions to a post-A.I. world." [VIDEO] A very succinct quote from this presentation, by Yuval Noah Harari: "What nukes are to the physical world... AI is to the virtual and symbolic world."

Have you watched this video? [VIDEO] (You don't have to, of course. An hour-long video recommended by a stranger on the internet is a big ask) There's a ton of evidence that this is moving way faster than people think. I don't think there's anything particularly special about human intelligence. And time and time again, we've been able to copy things that nature does and make them way more powerful, like planes vs birds. It does the same thing, but in a completely different way. It would be surprising if we couldn't do it with brains. I feel like a lot of people are not going to admit that we have already created AGI until we literally have an unstoppable AI that has taken over everything. It's not human level everywhere , but it's way better than humans in a lot of ways. It's never going to be exactly human, it'll work differently than we do. But if you count intelligence as the ability to achieve goals, which is how most researchers do, then we're already pretty much there.

Been involved with LLMs for the past 2 years, and what I can say is we have no idea what the technology can do, and we have no way of monitoring when it gains new abilities. We're racing towards autonomous everything, and we're too slow and blind to even detect hidden exponential developments. Here's a good overview to get up to speed: [VIDEO]

Surprised there hasn't been more discussion on this on HN. Podcast and transcript: [LINK] Video: [VIDEO] The argument against putting a potential bioweapon (etc.) in everyone's pocket is compelling, but I fear that the cat is already out of the bag.

Harris and Raskin [1, via 2] note the following risks: Reality collapse Fake everything Trust collapse Automated loopholes in law / fake religions / cyberweapons / lobbying Automated fake religions Exponential blackmail / scams A-Z testing of everything Synthetic relationships AlphaPersuade They also note potential privacy risks (ai-augmented ambient wifi to see through walls, ai-enabled fmri-based brain reading) as well as the potential risk of assisting criminals and terrorists (e.g. AI approaches research-level chemistry, tells users how to make a nerve agent from materials they buy at home depot.) A more subtle risk they point out is theory of mind, which is that with an adequate theory of mind the AI system may act in highly manipulative ways. We seem to be seeing this already with synthetic relationships. They also point out that AI-fueled malware generation is already a thing. Another worrisome scenario is that models seem to be able to be optimized and shrunk. The emergent behavior from millions of them is unclear. And they note that AI (unlike nukes) can improve itself. This may lead to surprising step functions in emergent capabilities at an increasing rate. [1] [VIDEO] (video) [LINK] (podcast and transcript) [2] [LINK]

It's an open secret that social media and engangement metrics has created something that we don't know how to undo now. No media whether it be news or entertainment will show you anything but what they think gets extra engagement. Outrage, clickbait, infinite scrolling, auto-playing content, recommendations etc. Just have a look at r/teachers to see what the next generation of kids look like. They can't concentrate more than 30 seconds. I'm no expert on this subject, so I would just recommend watching the AI Dilemma video which goes a bit into the social media side, but also talks about LLMs. [VIDEO]

I agree, insofar that most of the discourse I've seen often neglects fundamental drivers of our economy such as the division of labor and has undue focus on outcomes that are less likely to come to pass, as opposed to risk oriented discussion which is key in risk management. There was a very good video someone posted not too long ago that covers what should be covered as an overview. Link: [VIDEO] Any engineer knows as soon as the rate of change exceeds the reaction time, you can't keep up and failures happen. In the case of systems, the larger the system the bigger and more damaging the failure. We're dealing with societal mechanics, so failures may have global impact.

In this very interesting video, Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin argue that LLM's can feasibly generate their own training data sets [1]. It's a very interesting (and a slightly alarming) talk, maybe check it out. [1] [VIDEO]

Yesterday, I randomly watched his full interview from a month ago with CBS Morning, and found the discussion much more nuanced than today's headlines. [LINK] The next video in my recommendations was more dire, but equally as interesting: [VIDEO]

Pretty much the entire AI industry is like this now. Similar to Web3 industry before it, except AI is potentially far more dangerous. AI Experts have predicted a chance of 10-20% human level extinction from AI, have a history of underestimating AI, but companies are rushing to the precipice, and it is just the early days. Everyone should listen to this warning: [VIDEO]

It's very sad that people lack the imagination for the possible horrors that lie beyond. You don't even need the imagination; Hinton, Bengio, Tegmark, Yudkowsky, Musk, etc. are spelling it out for you. This moment, 80% of comments are derisive, and you actually have zero idea how much is computer generated bot content meant to sway opinion by post-GPT AI industry who see themselves as becoming the next iPhone-era billionaires. We are fast approaching a reality where our information space breaks down. Where almost all text you get from HN, Twitter, News, Substack; almost all video you get from Youtube, Instagram, TikTok; is just computer generated output meant to sway opinion and/or make $. I can't know Altman's true motives. But this is also what it looks like when a frontrunner is terrified at what happens when GPT6 is released and if they don't, the rest of the people who see billionaire $ coming their way are close at your heels trying to leapfrog you if you stop. Consequences? What consequences? We all know social media has been a net good, right? Many of you sound exactly like the few remaining social media cheerleaders (of which there were plenty 5 years ago) who still think Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, isn't causing depression and manipulation. If you appreciated what The Social Dilemma illuminated, then watch the same people on AI: [VIDEO]

You seem under the mistaken impression that if I can't cite it, its not happening. This is why cascade failures cause so much mayhem and death. Because so many people subscribe to show me proof, and if there is no tangible proof because proof is a lagging indicator its not happening. This is a complete failure in any professional risk management. This is like a dam collapsing, I'm pointing at a crack, and you are saying show me proof this crack will cause everyone in the valley below to die. Its a flawed way of thinking in many ways especially with fundamental things that we base our lives and welfare on (as a society). In engineering there is different criteria for evaluating risk with items that are safety-critical. This is safety critical. Here is an example of a copyrighter losing her job. There are many other examples if you bother to go looking. [LINK] You can dispute it all you want, it won't make you any less wrong when it happens, and many experts are deeply concerned because the rate of change has been exponential even if you refuse to believe it. There's a video that covers the important parts if you want to educate yourself, its on youtube. [VIDEO]

This is missing a key argument from the AI-cautious, which is that we shouldn't "pause AI development", but rather "pause public deployment". The case for only pausing the public deployment solves the "China problem" because we could continue development. On top of that, it would be harder for China to fast-follow if there isn't any public deployment of what is being researched and built. edit: I'm realizing there may be different classes of people who want to regulate AI in some capacity. I'm basing myself off of this train of thought from the Center for Humane Technology: [VIDEO]

Maybe we're not talking about the same people, then. I am repeating almost verbatim what the folks at the Centre for Humane Technology say here: [VIDEO]

However, the dangers here are immense. There was [VIDEO] where they argued for 2028 being an AI election where the person with most computing power wins. Propaganda produced by humans on small scale killed 300 000 people in the US alone in this pandemic [LINK] imagine the next pandemic when it'll be produced on an industrial scale by LLMs. Literally millions will die of it. This bubble must be extinguished by all force US regulators possess. There's not much time left, it must banned with prejudice.

Hello from an AI safety ninny. I have posted these two concerns multiple times and no one posted any counters to them. 1. There was [VIDEO] where they argued for 2028 and on will be AI elections where the person with most computing power wins. 2. Propaganda produced by humans on small scale killed 300 000 people in the US alone in this pandemic [LINK] imagine the next pandemic when it'll be produced on an industrial scale by LLMs. Literally millions will die of it.

First off, thanks for mentioning Karl Popper and the media literacy theory. Will have to look into that. I wish you the best here. Have been thinking about the issue as well and have been drifting more and more in the direction dealing with human error / aiding human thinking by just raising the bar abit without trying to find completeness and focusing on acceptability. Fixing the stuff that should be easiest. So looking at the description of errors and and how to communicate them in a sensible way. A minimum consensus based safety focused approach with capsuled complexity seems to be the way to go. A few perspectives you may or may not have heard of and find interesting in this context. In the spirit of capsuled complexity and accessibility with good podcasts / videos: Example for the concept and power of capsuled complexity with the 5 level explanation series from WIRED [LINK] You already mentioned information pollution so you might be familiar with the whole military perspective, from operations in the information environment / cognitive warfare, Diss/Miss Information and missing context, psychographic advertisement, ODAA Loop and the research coming out of IBMs Watson by Juliane Gallinas with her Ted Talk about "(General)Patton in a Box" [LINK] [LINK] If things shift into a game theoretical perspective its also always worth while reminding people that even psychopaths like drinkable tap water. There is some win-win stuff. (Air) Accident investigations and crew resource ma

Things are progressing just as [VIDEO] predicted. > so 2024 will be the last human election and what we mean by that is not that it's just going to be an AI running as president in 2028 but that will really be although maybe um it will be you know humans as figureheads but it'll be Whoever greater compute power will win We saw already AI voices influencing elections in India [LINK] > AI-generated songs, like the ones featuring Prime Minister Narendra Modi, are gaining traction ahead of India’s upcoming elections. [...] Earlier this month, an Instagram video of Modi “singing” a Telugu love song had over 2 million views, while a similar Tamil-language song had more than 2.7 million. A Punjabi song racked up more than 17 million views.

taps the sign "Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war." - Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio, Sam Altman, Bill Gates, Vitalik Buterin, Ilya Sutskever, Demis Hassabis "Development of superhuman machine intelligence is probably the greatest threat to the continued existence of humanity. There are other threats that I think are more certain to happen but are unlikely to destroy every human in the universe in the way that SMI could." - Sam Altman "I actually think the risk is more than 50%, of the existential threat." - Geoffrey Hinton "Currently, we don't have a solution for steering or controlling a potentially superintelligent AI, and preventing it from going rogue." - OpenAI "while we are racing towards AGI or even ASI, nobody currently knows how such an AGI or ASI could be made to behave morally, or at least behave as intended by its developers and not turn against humans." - Yoshua Bengio "very soon they're going to be, they may very well be more intelligent than us and far more intelligent than us. And at that point, we will be receding into the background in some sense. We will have handed the baton over to our successors, for better or for worse. But it's happening over a period of a few years. It's like a tidal wave that is washing over us at unprecedented and unimagined speeds. And to me, it's quite terrifying because it suggests that everything that I used to believe was

[LINK] This link convinced me otherwise. I wasn't too sure before (I'm a little ashamed to admit I hadn't been following the development of SB 1047). I will also specifically share this talk on YouTube: [VIDEO] I think this passing this bill would have probably been a very good idea. Not perfect, but far, very far from broken. Edit: I'm actually not sure if we as a community gave this topic enough attention leading in the months leading up to the announcement of this decision.