Comment by Barrin92
3 years ago
>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.
Climate change is not an existential risk to humanity, it may be an existential risk to modern human societies, it is definitely an existential risk to millions of people.
> The appropriate comparison here is nuclear weapons
Then complete the comparison. Nuclear weapons require specific materials and technology that can be controlled and the testing of any developed weaponry is fairly easy to detect. Despite these advantages, there are several countries that have them.
If nuclear weapon proliferation is your comparison, then it sure looks like we will fail to prevent or stamp out the development of superintellegent AI.
It we did succeed, what would it look like? We'd need to impose strict controls on computing capacity and it's usage. We'd need inspection regimes for every server farm, etc. It would require massive effort and fundemental changes to our society.
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