Comment by actionfromafar
3 years ago
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.
climate change is a risk to millions of people but it's not an existential risk. Just sadly a big one with the people worst affected having little say in anything. That kind of threat also for AI I think is worth worrying about. I fully expect autonomous weapons to be a concern, showing up in the worst and poorest warzones first probably.
However this is different from the largely fantastical genuinely existential AI risk scenarios. The appropriate comparison here is nuclear weaponry and we literally have global controls with not a single company or even a rogue actor having ever used one.
4 replies →
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.
The economic and strategic benefits of developing AGI are... not comparable to those for human cloning.
I’m not even talking about AGI. We can be in deep trouble long before that. And then where do you draw the line?
Human cloning is a distinct and clear line. Ever more clever AI agents is not.
1 reply →