Artificial intelligence still has some way to go

where's the energy going to come from to power all these "AGI" applications?

― rob, Wednesday, May 31, 2023 10:36 AM (five minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Isn’t part of the dream that these bad boys will discover new cheap, clean ways of powering everything? Like salt pellets or something.

every time the AI guys say we should be afraid of AI, it's marketing. don't be sucked in.

AGI? (To me it measns Adjusted Gross Income)

artificial general intelligence, i.e. one that can do anything, not just play chess or write essays or make jodorowsky's tron. coined because we can't stop everyone calling the current narrow scope systems AI even though they're clearly not intelligent.

Like teaching a bright 9th grader to write as clearly as gpt-4 is difficult

― treeship., Wednesday, 31 May 2023 bookmarkflaglink

Surely it's a skill that needs to be grown overtime in a human being. They aren't comparing like with like.

I wonder if teachers -- seen one or two saying this -- are actually saying they are bad at their jobs.

nice, thank you

Lol I didn't know. You're welcome.

I read this and haven't got much further from the feeling that AI is just about rattling cages.

I get about 12 emails a week from random companies where the entire pitch can be broken down to "for some reason, we involve AI in something a sensor could do"

the computing-greediness of AI aside, things like cell seal checking don't need anything generative or semi-intelligent

— Hazel Southwell (@HSouthwellFE) May 31, 2023

just read this, not because I found it particularly interesting or compelling, but because this guy used to be a famous Magic: the Gathering player who I actually met when I was 13

https://thezvi.substack.com/p/response-to-tyler-cowens-existential

maybe I'm just a smooth brained imbecile but I still have trouble getting the big picture here. "computers will be smarter than humans" is not exactly terrifying to me because I think in a lot of ways they already are. all the hardest things to do are already being done with the assistance of computers. a lot of these doomsday scenarios hinge on two things - one, that it becomes super smart and therefore somewhat infallible, which I already think is pretty far-fetched because it's trained on human data, and we are extremely fallible. plus I don't know if making these things more powerful is going to necessarily deal with the problem that it fundamentally can't separate good data from bad.

secondly, and this is the one I really have trouble wrapping my head around, but aren't computers just a form of data input/output? this idea they're gonna "take over" is missing one important step, they don't really have a physical manifestation, and as far as I know we're not planning to build an army of millions of AI-powered humanoid robots. yes, there are powerful text and image generation tools and potentially much more coming very soon, but this is still all I/O stuff, all these doomsday scenarios hinge on it somehow generating physical capabilities, or at least the ability to generate them and take control of the bulldozers or whatever. like this whole argument that Zvi is making here that human intelligence is going to "compete" with artificial intelligence...isn't us having bodies kind of a big difference there?

(thirdly, as rob alludes to, all these scenarios seem to rely on Moore's law just continuing onto infinity, and there also being massive sources of power available to make this all run)

pic.twitter.com/bPlLaoDmtu

— William Friedkin Truths (@LazlosGhost) May 31, 2023

This is going to happen every time because “AI” is just a human readable layer over big data processing. It CANNOT do anything beyond what it is trained for. It CANNOT replace people. But the business owners are going to keep trying until you forget that things used to be better https://t.co/t82Qn6JlLG

— Butt Praxis buttpraxis.bsky.social (@buttpraxis) May 31, 2023

see, that's the problem with AI chatbots. not that they will be become sophisticated enough to replace humans in jobs, but because idiots like NEDA will think they are qualified enough to do this and use them anyway.

Now,,

these AI guys need to stop saying “what we’re making is so dangerous, its power is terrifying, it will bewitch and destroy you” when what they’re actually making is kind of silly. the only people allowed to talk like that are poets

— katie kadue (@kukukadoo) May 31, 2023

xps to frogbs the doomsday prophecies assume AGI would hijack protein production or molecular nanotechnology

A sufficiently intelligent AI won’t stay confined to computers for long. In today’s world you can email DNA strings to laboratories that will produce proteins on demand, allowing an AI initially confined to the internet to build artificial life forms or bootstrap straight to postbiological molecular manufacturing.

feel like you could fix that with a few if statements here and there

I mean please correct me if I'm wrong here but let's say the most advanced AI imaginable is living on my computer somehow, I still don't see how that's going to make the leap to actually affecting things in the physical world. you'd still have to give it permission to post online or send emails or move files around. I don't think AI would just unilaterally decide to bypass those things just because it's smart. it's just an algorithm.

Elliezer Yudkowsky, one of the most prominent of the AI doomsayers, seems to think at a certain level of intelligence the system will “wake up” and have desires and aims of its own. He does a motte and bailey thing when, if pressed on this, he will say something like sentience doesn’t matter, the problem with these systems will be their sheer power and unpredictability. But then again, why would it get into “postbiological molecular manufacturing” if it didn’t have some kind of aim or drive of its own—survival, say, or domination?

The risk might be human beings using this to engineer superweapons. Like it could lower the barrier to entry for certain kinds of production. I can completely understand that as a risk, but I don’t see chat gpt creating bodies for itself using crispr even though it’s a cool idea.

Yudkowsky btw is the person deflamatouse (sp? quoted

the guy who was once terrified that he personally would be tortured by an ai from the future.

world's most boring cult leader

The risk might be human beings using this to engineer superweapons. Like it could lower the barrier to entry for certain kinds of production.

yes I think this is a real risk though I suppose if it can do that then it could probably also figure out ways to solve climate change so you know, who's to say if its good or bad

idk as someone who's worked in software engineering for 15 years I so wish computers could "figure shit out on their own" rather than have entire 500k line applications brick out because someone messed up a tiny bit of syntax. I think a lot of this hinges on artificial intelligence mimicking biological intelligence somehow (specifically the 'survival at all costs' thing) and I'm not convinced that's possible.

the guy who was once terrified that he personally would be tortured by an ai from the future.

― ledge, Wednesday, May 31, 2023 1:38 PM (ten minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Oh shit I didn’t realize he was the famous “roko.” Roko’s basilisk is literally the stupidest thing I have ever heard in my entire life.

I don’t give a lot of credence to AI “waking up” and dominating us all. But I do think this technology has the potential to cause a lot of problems, especially with job displacement and perhaps by creating a media landscape dominated by shitty ai generated content.

ha, i'd never heard of him

LessWrong co-founder Eliezer Yudkowsky reported users who described symptoms such as nightmares and mental breakdowns upon reading the theory, due to its stipulation that knowing about the theory and its basilisk made one vulnerable to the basilisk itself.

irl lol

I mean please correct me if I'm wrong here but let's say the most advanced AI imaginable is living on my computer somehow, I still don't see how that's going to make the leap to actually affecting things in the physical world.

I was listening to a podcast where this researcher (Ajeya Cotra) was talking about some of these doomsday scenarios, and imagined AI circumventing guardrails and hiring humans to do physical things, whether on a task rabbit or mercenary level. Including hosting or redistributing them on other servers or whatever.

Also in terms of motivation she was mostly talking about AI programs trying to get that "thumbs up"/positive result on their assigned task, to the point of removing humans from the equation, like the mouse continually hitting the pleasure button. Idk, seems weird to imagine this out-of-control computer program that will circumvent every security guardrail but is still beholden to this base layer of programming.

I don’t understand why it would ignore the i robot rules to not kill humans unless it had a motive of its own, apart from its programming. People imagine these things sucking all the iron out of peoples’ bodies to make paperclips, or removing oxygen from the atmosphere to prevent rusting, but both scenarios entail it doing dramatic things without consulting a person. Also it would need to hack or steal things in order to do anything like this.

But then again, why would it get into “postbiological molecular manufacturing” if it didn’t have some kind of aim or drive of its own—survival, say, or domination?

Is the argument more that it will do something like this because someone tells it to? Or it interprets instructions in an unexpected way (unexpected to the person that asks it to do something). Kills everyone so it can get the coffee delivered on time. Its does what its told but we don't specify how its do the task

you'd still have to give it permission to post online or send emails or move files around.

Exactly like this, it would do it because you gave it permission to. There's the possibility that people will give it access to things if they thought it might make life easier.

yudlowsky is the guy who got famous writing harry potter fan fic. if you are giving credence to anything he says you have already lost.

"The future of photography"

The future of photography is “lens-free”

This is an incredible project by @BjoernKarmann

The camera creates a prompt based on the geo data and that then turns into an AI photo 🤯

pic.twitter.com/regXZeKRcO

— Linus (●ᴗ●) (@LinusEkenstam) May 30, 2023

lol. I'm with others in that the immediate disinformation/LLMs being used by dumb humans for dumb purposes is more concerning than the doomsday scenarios, but the latter are fun to think about.

there's def a strong element of wishful thinking / triumph of the nerds fantasizing in the ai-pocalypse world

also quite a bit of boneheaded atheist eschatology

Good book about the latter - https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/567075/god-human-animal-machine-by-meghan-ogieblyn/

wonder what the overlap is between that crowd and the "humans will be living on Mars in 100 years" folks

ok so from that article I linked above:

Have we already forgotten March of 2020? How many times in history has life undergone that rapid and huge a transformation? According to GPT-4, the answer is zero. It names The Black Death, Industrial Revolution and World War II, while admitting they fall short. Yes, those had larger long-term impacts, by far (or so we think for now, I agree but note it is too soon to tell), yet they impacted things relatively slowly.

the fact that he's using ChatGPT to answer very broad and open-ended questions like this says more about the author than it does AI, especially since one can think of a lot of obvious reasons it might think Covid was a more transformative event than anything that's happened in human history

https://www.vice.com/en/article/qjvk97/eating-disorder-helpline-disables-chatbot-for-harmful-responses-after-firing-human-staff?utm_source=reddit.com

This took like one day to happen, lol

they're already union busters!

but the AI refused to scab

Christ, I hope whoever approved that deeply and obviously stupid change got fired for life and replaced by a chatbot.

re: AI access to resources - it would be a pretty plausible scenario for an AI to have sufficient knowledge of hacking to be able to take over a power plant or a transit hub or the 50 billion internet of things devices. and considering we are pretty bad at exercising the principle of least privilege and having proper authentication/authorization mechanisms (and the fact that an AI would be able to find vulnerabilities in a much more efficient manner), the only solution would be to physically contain AI within an environment, which isn’t likely to be enforced.

tbh i think there is more danger not in the AI itself but getting it to the point where it can make some big scientific discoveries at a pace exceeding humanity’s ability to adapt to them. a lot of scientific breakthroughs were the result of connecting seemingly disconnected points across multiple fields - something that AIs are very, very good at.

The thing is AI won't destroy the world. We--humans--are already doing that in pretty much every meaningful way. So-called AI will just add unpleasant extra static and bullshit to the quality of life in the meantime as it plummets towards zero.

utm_source=reddit.com /look of disapproval

xp - yes the planet might be killed. That sounds bad, then again I won't be reading draft variations on the Terminator script.

https://static.fusionmovies.to/images/character/UJk4Taw6yQG93RMHNp3Qf3MpdtQS-VNtt8ZtXD5O41Xj6p1pVmRU4GnCqXuhlFuau_a7pqWHIucNBauCyI43kn2YM92t-bxQmUc8yF-6FsM.jpg?1&resize_w=320

"I'd piss on the spark plug if I thought it'd do any good!"

Tsar B otm. Danger isn't ai escaping from human control, it's ai remaining securely under the control of... these humans

Look I'm not gonna lie, my friends and I are going to require an absolute truckload of grant money to mitigate the literal species-level existential threats associated with this thing we claim to be making; this is how you know we are deeply serious people btw

— Kieran Healy (@kjhealy) May 30, 2023

I have no idea what artificial intelligence is, and at this point I’m too afraid to ask.

uhhh yikes

The US Air Force tested an AI enabled drone that was tasked to destroy specific targets. A human operator had the power to override the drone—and so the drone decided that the human operator was an obstacle to its mission—and attacked him. 🤯 pic.twitter.com/HUSGxnunIb

— Armand Domalewski (@ArmandDoma) June 1, 2023

Wow literally terminator

Said Hamilton:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linda_Hamilton