Your best course of action is to start ripping the copper out of the walls.
People are losing jobs left and right due to AI and as models get intelligent it'll get tougher (even for AI devouts. Because if AI can do 10 ppls job then jobs will be decimated)
Similar for the jobs ... if no one, or nearly no one is left for having a job. Who do you think will consume? Yeah, luxus companies can always sell products like megayachts or super expensive handbags, but these companies are not the backbone of the economy. Economy will simply collapse if no one is buying all the products. So this is a problem that will sort it self out.
"Our product might wipe out all of human civilization".
It is said that heavily regulated industries earn that regulation. Seems like the LLM folks really want that regulation.
Like the tobacco companies saying all the time "our cigarettes are so dangerous, they cause cancer".
Or like Purdue Pharma saying "do not use fentanyl, it's so dangerous, it kills thousands of people every year".
They try to generate fear in their products, to shock investors into buying their stock.
Posts here with no activity can't climb gravity without engagement.
AI to me is like the Nuclear race again. Super powers will be using it as a super weapon. I don't think AGI will wipe us out by itself.
I don't pretend to know the chances of AI wiping out humanity, but I'm not sure the nuclear race is a good comparison.
Enriched uranium being very difficult to aquire/process makes it practically viable to have some level of proliferation containment when it comes to nukes.
There appears to be no such natural gating factor on AI proliferation.
I understand that some smart people are worried about it. I just haven’t come across a believable or understandable argument.
At that point, we will likely be slowing down the growth of capitalism (through mass resistance, global warming, etc). One thing AI will likely be aligned on is the growth of capitalism. If it views humanity as a threat for that, why would it not eliminate that threat?
When are we supposed to see this materialize?
After all the decades of work we've put into orchestrating our own demise through climate change, here comes AI to steal another human job.
And as someone else pointed out, it will almost certainly be at the intentional direction of a human or humans, not the paper clip maximizer.
Why not 10% chance that it will create enormous prosperity ? This is why the average person is increasing pissed at AI in general. That it gets associated with negativity. AI companies need to get better brand consultants and put an end to this bad marketing.
“Vast economic disruption” is not quite the good marketing angle it appears to be.
Next week's Senate: "We cannot afford to lose the 'kill all humans' race to Russia and China!"
Next't weeks AISI: "We continue to plan the monitoring of emergent issues that could lead to less than optimal conditions for humanity and will form a committee to evaluate all ramifications."
If they were really this concerned about the risks of AI re: the survival of the human race, they wouldn't have joined a company working in such a space to begin with.
I hate to be this cynical, but part of me wonders what the financial angle is here.
You have technically brilliant people working in a white-hot target for investment and who can draw a high salary. Anthropic is a hyper-scaler that has the moat of high hardware prices and very little else. Every day, that moat gets a little smaller, and FLOSS models get a little better at being "good enough" for the price. You're an Anthropic employee looking to jump on the next big wave since the wave Anthropic is riding is starting to peter out. You go on the record across the trades and news sites talking about how dangerous AI is. That creates a need for someone to make it less dangerous. In theory, you could satisfy that need, for the right amount of money.
Again, I hate to be this cynical, but... it's the tech industry.
It's very interesting to me that besides the other small safety labs that don't actually produce frontier models, Anthropic manages to keep such a good reputation within that subculture compared to OpenAI. Despite having as crazy internal politics as OpenAI, they have converged quite a bit from the original vision of safety first through Darwinistic pressures.
At least, it seems this way from the outside. I'm curious if the view from the inside is that different.
This reminds me of that. That 10% number was just an ass pull since no one actually knows with any degree of certainty what lies ahead.
Humans have much more than a 50% chance of killing all humans from the looks of it, based on reactions to Global Warming, Covid, and anti-science grifters gone wild.
AI can help cure disease. That is 100%. And for that alone, slowing down and missing out on thousands of cures would condemn tens of millions, perhaps hundreds of millions to suffer and die needlessly.
That something is harmful to humans means you need to take extreme action? The person is already leaving a job, probably a well-paid one, doing something they generally liked, until they saw a different future.
Not sure how it's reasonable to expect everyone who believe that AI might be involved in killing people in the future, must mean you should become a terrorist essentially. Not everyone is trying to be a hero in their life, some just want to live it out until it ends, trying to survive until then.
These days I view tech startups with suspicion, I question what is the ulterior motive. Somehow when upstart companies were like "Pebble", this wasn't a thing.
Whoever gets to RSI first and has the compute to act on it, wins the future - assuming they don’t lose control of it.
Similarly to the nuclear arms race, Teller raised the reasonable concern that a detonation could propagate through the entirety of earth’s atmosphere. Thankfully that turned out to not be true, but the parallel is that the need/desire to win this race is similarly strong, and the brinkmanship and game theory in play is effectively identical.
Not all of it has to be automated even. It just has to realize its controllers are stupid and can be manipulated, so it can use humans to do its bidding. “You should totally start a war with …”
Instead, what is extremely likely is that you will pay more than the cost of tokens, and get back AI generation. You won't make this mistake more than a few times before you stop trying.
This leads to impoverishment once we get to a point where employing a human to do anything is hard- try to get your sink fixed, exercise your moral principles to pay extra for a human plumber ($100 bucks! The robot plumbing service only charges 99c!), human shows up with a robot and doomscrolls on your porch while the robot does the work. Times are tough and you don't have that much money to waste on bullshit like this. Next time you just hire the robot.
This leads to extinction once paying UBI to a human is hard because robots are much better at applying for UBI than humans.
But there is another kind of argument to be made: if you play chess against a player that is far smarter than you (chess wise), you know you are going to lose, even if you don't know how.
So the mere existence of a smarter species than us is a threat in itself.
AustinDev•32m ago
embedding-shape•26m ago
Why would you need to bomb a chip fab because you think AI might lead to people getting killed in the future? I'm convinced of many things killing humans, yet I don't have any desire to bomb or kill others, I think this is pretty common, but who knows....
ultrarunner•21m ago
What we have seen is incredible hype (justified or not), so it’s more likely just a continuation of that.
AustinDev•19m ago
ben_w•7m ago
Thing is, while there are many historical examples of a highly organised bunch of people with a lot of resources who engage in campaigns of violence for various reasons, many such attempts fail disastrously.
Furthermore, given the goal is "no really everyone stop now", this isn't something where violent direct action in e.g. the USA alone would suffice. Has to be global to work, otherwise you just change which language and timezone the disaster starts in. You'd not only need to convince the, e.g. US government that this act of terrorism shouldn't be met with lethal force and even more of the surveillance state we saw since 9/11 (and remember, lots of the people pushing AI now are already big on surveillance capitalism, and the VC money comes from the people running this very forum, so when I say "this will not go well", I kinda mean "I assume at least one person currently working at each of Meta, Alphabet, OpenAI, Anthropic, SpaceX, and Palantir are reading this thread even without any automated processes of their own to tell them about it" :P)
This is a coordination problem on par with historical examples such as "Communism". Which, er, yeah. 70 years after the book was written, Russia had a short flirt with a lite form of it before it became an excuse for a series of "meet the new boss same as the old boss" who stayed around until Glasnost.
This would be a really really bad thing to replicate. Both for the "new boss same as the old boss" part, and the "not actually global" part.
SpicyLemonZest•17m ago
embedding-shape
kortilla•19m ago
embedding-shape•15m ago
bcrosby95•23m ago
ben_w•18m ago
A while back Yudkowsky wrote that a ban would only work if was enforced by airstrikes. By a game of telephone, some people read "bomb", but there's a very big difference between "someone with a truckload of fertiliser" and "a B52":
- https://time.com/6266923/ai-eliezer-yudkowsky-open-letter-no...