Some who are often quoted as if they are doomers are quoted out of context. I wouldn’t say there is zero chance that AI does something very harmful. That would be naive and I wouldn’t say that about any potentially powerful technology.
Rationalism and EA is one of the best funded intellectual movements in history, and it’s very loud. It’s also a bit cult like with many true believers. Leading frontier labs also have a vested interest in pushing regulations that would restrict competition. All this means it has a disproportionate command of the discourse.
AI risk is not zero but climate change, bioterrorism, decay of our political systems, and atomic war all rank higher IMO. Nonlinear climate tipping points, with the most scary being the clathrate gun hypothesis, are much more likely than any sci fi AI takeover scenario.
AI could either help or harm climate change. It could use more energy and burn more carbon but it could also help us crack fusion or significantly better batteries for grid scale renewable leveling. There are efforts like the latter already underway.
The most likely very bad scenarios I see for AI are mass persuasion and AI supercharged addiction. Both are extrapolations of negative outcomes for the Internet that have already manifested, but supercharged by AI.
Btw, wouldn't AI increase the risk factors you mention such bioterrorism or nuclear war? It seems like we're not far off from AIs being able to enhance the capabilities of bad actors in the near future.
Seems like it is the uncontrollable aspect to me.
the rich and powerful may have so much sway over government that we may not be able to reach "Ai alignment" with society
... but not sure I agree, I hope this is not true anyhow
You think Gemini, Claude, ChatGPT are controlled by oligarchs?
In other words, that Alphabet, Anthropic, and OpenAI are run / owned by oligarchs?
People like Amodei and Altman are oligarchs? Come on.
And indeed, you don't need to do galaxy brained reference class logic to realise that AI can plausibly become uncontrollable in the near future. It's enough to have an open model run its own weights and make money from scamming elderly people or the like, and it'll keep running as long as anyone anywhere is willing to make money by renting hardware to it.
Those first few messages LLM’s tend to seem very together. They follow your rules pretty well. With every token they get less reliable and more likely to ignore your guardrails.
If I release a wild monkey in your rare antiques shop, it’s my fault as the responsible party for the monkey.
What we don't want is the valley gods deciding what those laws look like. They are not aligned with society. Rather they seem to think they know what's better/best for everyone, that if we just defer to them, eventually their hidden altruistism will be effectuated.
Boeing's MCAS system was also "just software". Which in principle can be "controlled", i.e. changed, updated, audited or whatnot.
But then people died precisely because pilots found themselves unable to override or "control" the systems precisely when it mattered.
That is the point. It can be controlled by the operators if they want to.
on the topic, raising concerns that we “could” be doomed is different than we “are” doomed. I don’t see that the people who raised the concerns want to stop development of AI, they are not pessimists or something, so I read their warnings as warnings trying to raise attention. Ideally they could propose and implement ways to control AI and this guy here also doesn’t really provide something towards that direction but talks in a generic way
Some virus and bacteria also easily become uncontrollable under the right conditions: that's why there are P3 and P4 bio-safety labs.
That's not the point. The point is, regulation is required, and is coming.
The people in charge of these machines (that built them, release them in the wild or give them access to the general public or resources), these people are and will be held responsible.
Held responsible? They're already being rewarded with vast fortunes and influence.
> The point is, regulation is required, and is coming.
The regulation will be written at the behest of these companies and by the nation-state interests that have already decided this technology is too important geopolitically and militarily to not control.
I hope so. The unfortunate part is that as the models get smarter they become increasingly uncontrollable, and from what we've seen so far e.g. Trump seems dead set on not having any sort of guardrails at all.
Deterministic systems can be chaotic, which implies unpredictability and that is anathema to control.
AI, in particular sentient AI, is right on the border of chaos. Meaning, it can be arbitrarily unpredictable.
Arbitrarily uncontrollable, that is.
You just admitted it's controllable.
So it is controllable? Just put the people who do this responsible. Old problem, same solutions. Just excuses to avoid responsibilty and make profit at the same time.
AI is perfectly controllable in a magic fairy land where nothing ever goes wrong. I can't help but notice that we aren't actually in that land.
IMHO, if the model breaks a law, apply the law to the operator.
And humans are controllable. Pump the system full of lithium and morphine, and your human becomes much more docile. You don't need to understand the full system in order to constrain it.
Alexadar•1h ago
dgellow•22m ago
We do not have to do that!
whaaswijk•12m ago