Comment by civilized
3 years ago
That's true and relevant, but doesn't prove much. What's the big plan, what's the next step in the plan?
Maciej's larger point is that the AI faces tons of very difficult problems in escaping its physical constraints. It's simplistic to wave hands and say "the AI is super duper smart and will have no difficulty hacking all computer systems, inventing and manufacturing swarms of unbeatable nanobots, etc. without being detected or resisted".
It seems to me that the core conceit of AI doomerism is that sufficient intelligence can overcome all barriers with some plan that is so smart, people would never think of it. This is much less plausible than believers take it to be. In mathematics alone, it is very easy to come up with a problem that the collective mathematical ingenuity of the entire human race is helpless before for decades, centuries, or longer.
Can we detect companies doing bad things, today? Yes, and we still have a hard time containing them and their externalities.
AI will just mean more of the same. It will make companies even more efficient at what they already do. It will be detected, it will be resisted, but will it help?
That's the big question IMHO.
>Yes, and we still have a hard times containing them
Only because we're most of the time not properly motivated because there's no urgency. When a real threat, like a war or a virus say, comes around suddenly we can organize things pretty effectively.
It resembles the Bill Clinton quote about controlling the internet being like nailing jell-O to a wall. Yet autocratic governments have done that, and not just that but turned it into quite scary systems of control, with little difficulty. Just like 90s cypherpunk fantasies about digital anarchy these AI scenarios are nerd revenge fantasies. The intelligent guy outsmarting the big guy, but in reality physical power always wins.
Only… what? I don’t understand what you are arguing here.
Climate change is already an existential threat to millions of people. Yet companies do what they do best - optimise for their paper clip production.
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I find this to be a much more plausible area of concern than standard horror-story AI doomerism. But the more we shift our focus from fantasy to reality, the more we have to acknowledge reality, as Maciej does in this talk. It isn't plausible to prevent all the great powers from developing AI. We don't have that level of cooperation in the world today. We are going to need to adapt to this by keeping up with our adversaries, whether they be hostile nations, corporations, or mad scientists.
Standard rebuttal to this is if we banned human cloning we can ban AGI.
Also China stands to gain from a ban on AGI. Anything that the CCP thinks it can't control it doesn't like.
Also China gets the vast amount of its AI capabilities from the West because of tech's "move fast and break things" culture, which means security is not prioritized and tech leaks common.
If the US bans AGI, the other powers don't have a choice. Their domestic capabilities are not up to the task without snooping on US research labs and AI tech startups. The biggest boon to foreign AGI research is the US.
The argument to not regulate AGI used to be:
"AGI is impossible or very far away, AGI can't ever be dangerous enough to worry about, AGI R&D cannot be stopped and is inevitable"
Then it became
"AGI can't ever be dangerous enough to worry about, AGI R&D cannot be stopped and is inevitable"
Nowadays all I hear is simply:
"AGI R&D cannot be stopped and is inevitable"
Yes it can be stopped, same as human cloning. Coordinating to regulate its development isn't some magical unreachable goal.
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>Maciej's larger point is that the AI faces tons of very difficult problems in escaping its physical constraints.
Why is it difficult? We are already putting AIs in every electronic device. Someone has probably already put an LLM in a robot somewhere. And you don't think Boston Dynamics is thinking about putting an LLM in one of their robots to test? And surely the military is building AI fighting robots.
And then there's the thought that a super intelligent AI can easily hack its way into any machine it wants.
Heck, the super intelligent AI doesn't even have to convince humans. In the future, it can just convince dumber AIs that are already in robots.
This is like saying "sure, that site is susceptible to a sql injection, but that doesn't mean the whole thing is insecure."
If you have an intelligent adversary and the stakes of them succeeding are high, it is the defenders job to prove the system secure. Systems don't start off secure and become vulnerable - they start off vulnerable until proven secure.
So yes, its okay to say "the things we're doing to 'contain' ais are almost certainly inadequate" until shown otherwise.
This analogy assumes that there exists some relatively straightforward, secure, practical defense against superintelligence that I am arguing against, like protecting a website against SQL injection. I do not argue against such a defense if it exists - by all means research and present proposals. My comment is about the plausibility of AI domination. I don't think it is that plausible, so I have different views than others on how important it is that we restrict the development of AI.
100% agree.
However, seeing how excited Palantir is with their war assistant LLM , the US testing autonomous fighter jets a few months ago, etc. I think there's a decent chance that AI won't even have to break out of its constraints. It's pretty much guaranteed people are going to do the obviously dumb thing and give it capabilities it shouldn't have or is not equipped to deal with safely.