Comment by crowcroft
2 years ago
As others have pointed out, it's the business incentives that create unsafe AI, and this doesn't solve that. Social media recommendation algorithms are already incredibly unsafe for society and young people (girls in particular [1]).
When negative externalities exist, government should create regulation that appropriately accounts for that cost.
I understand there's a bit of a paradigm shift and new attack vectors with LLMs etc. but the premise is the same imo.
[1] https://nypost.com/2024/06/16/us-news/preteen-instagram-infl...
Even without business incentives, the military advantages of AI would inventivize governments to develop it anyway, like they did with nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons are inherently unsafe, there are some safeguards around them, but they are ultimately dangerous weapons.
If someone really wanted to use nukes, they would have been used by now. What has protected us is not technology (in the aftermath of the USSR it wasn't that difficult to steal a nuke), but rather lack of incentives. A bad actor doesn't have much to gain by detonating a nuke (unless they're deranged and want to see people die for the pleasure of it). OK, you could use it as blackmail, which North Korea essentially tried, but that only got them so far. Whereas a super AI could potentially be used for great personal gain, i.e., to gain extreme wealth and power.
So there's much greater chance of misuse of a "Super AI" than nuclear weapons.
Sure, that just makes the military incentives to develop such a thing even stronger. All I mean is that business incentives don't really come into it, as long as there is competition, someone's going to want to build weapons to gain advantage, whether it's a business or a government.
Dangerous weapons are not inherently unsafe.
Take a Glock, for example. It is a deadly weapon, designed for one thing and one thing alone. It is, however, one of the safest machines ever built.
The very existence of dangerous weapons, be they nukes or handguns (or swords or tanks), makes the world less of a safe place than if they didn't exist. Existence is pretty much the most inherent attribute anything can have, AFAICS, so yes: Dangerous weapons are inherently unsafe. (Take that Glock, for example -- that's exactly the problem, that someone can take it. Might be someone who knows how to remove the safety.)
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"Safe", in what sense?
I don’t think we should be stopping things from being developed, we just need to acknowledge that externalities exist.
I mean if the last 20 years is to be taken as evidence, it seems big tech is more than happy to shotgun unproven and unstudied technology straight into the brains of our most vulnerable populations and just see what the fuck happens. Results so far include a lot of benign nothing but also a whole lot of eating disorders, maxed out parents credit cards, attention issues, rampant misogyny among young boys, etc. Which, granted, the readiness to fuck with populations at scale and do immeasurable harm doesn't really make tech unique as an industry, just more of the same really.
But you know, we'll feed people into any kind of meat grinder we can build as long as the line goes up.
i am very skeptical of narratives saying that young boys or men are more misogynistic than in the past. we have a cognitive bias towards thinking the past is better than it was, but specifically on gender issues i just do not buy a regression
> i am very skeptical of narratives saying that young boys or men are more misogynistic than in the past.
They don't even have to be more misogynistic than in the past for there to be a detrimental effect. Because so many other things in society -- pre-school and school environments, upbringing by more enlightened parents than what those parents themselves had, etc etc[1] -- cooperate to make young men and boys less misogynistic than in the past... But maybe that effect would be even more pronounced without shitty influences from social media; don't you think it's possible that all the online crap inhibits the good influences, so without it the kids would be even better?
[1]: From comparing my sons' generation to what I remember of my own youth and childhood.
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I mean, I don't know if it's better or worse than it was. I do know that it's bad, thanks to tons of studies on the subject covering a wide range of little kids who watch shitheads like Andrew Tate, Fresh & Fit, etc. Most grow out of it, but speaking as someone who did, I would be a much better and happier person today if I was never exposed to that garbage in the first place, and it's resulted in stunted social skills I am still unwinding from in my thirties.
This shit isn't funny, it's mental poison and massive social media networks make BANK shoving it front of young men who don't understand how bad it is until it's WAY too late. I know we can't eliminate every kind of shithead from society, that's simply not possible. But I would happily settle for a strong second-place achievement if we could not have companies making massive profits off of destroying people's minds.
Blaming the internet for misogyny is kind of bizarre, given that current levels of misogyny are within a couple points of all-time historical lows. The internet was invented ~40 years ago. Women started getting vote ~100 years ago. Do you think the internet has returned us to pre-women's-suffrage levels of misogyny?
> Do you think the internet has returned us to pre-women's-suffrage levels of misogyny?
Well in the States at least we did just revoke a sizable amount of their bodily autonomy so, the situation may not be that bad, yet, but I wouldn't call it good by any measurement. Any my objection isn't "that sexism exists in society," that is probably going to be true as a statement until the sun explodes, and possibly after that if we actually nail down space travel as a technology and get off this particular rock. My issue is massive corporations making billions of dollars facilitating men who want to spread sexist ideas, and paying them for the pleasure. That's what I have an issue with.
Be whatever kind of asshole you see fit to be, the purity of your soul is no one's concern but yours, and if you have one, whatever god you worship. I just don't want you being paid for it, and I feel that's a reasonable line to draw.
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Do you believe that no subfactor can ever have a sign opposite of the factor of which it is a component?
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Please look up the history of maxing out credit cards, eating disorders, attention disorders, and misogyny. You seem to be under the mistaken impression that anything before your birth was the Garden of Eden and that the parade of horribles existed only because of "big tech". What is next? Blaming big tech for making teenagers horny and defiant?
> You seem to be under the mistaken impression that anything before your birth was the Garden of Eden and that the parade of horribles existed only because of "big tech"
Please point out where I said that. Because what I wrote was:
> I mean if the last 20 years is to be taken as evidence, it seems big tech is more than happy to shotgun unproven and unstudied technology straight into the brains of our most vulnerable populations and just see what the fuck happens. Results so far include a lot of benign nothing but also a whole lot of eating disorders, maxed out parents credit cards, attention issues, rampant misogyny among young boys, etc. Which, granted, the readiness to fuck with populations at scale and do immeasurable harm doesn't really make tech unique as an industry, just more of the same really.
Which not only is not romanticizing the past, in fact I directly point out that making tons of people's lives worse for profit was a thing in industry long before tech came along, but also do not directly implicate tech as creating sexism, exploiting people financially, or fucking up young women's brains any differently, simply doing it more. Like most things with tech, it wasn't revolutionary new social harms, it was just social harms delivered algorithmically, to the most vulnerable, and highly personalized to what they are acutely vulnerable to in specific.
That is not a new thing, by any means, it's simply better targeted and more profitable, which is great innovation providing you lack a conscience and see people as only a resource to be exploited for your own profit, which a lot of the tech sector seems to.
> maxing out credit cards, eating disorders, attention disorders, and misogyny
social media doesn't create these, but it most definitely amplifies them
> for society and young people (girls in particular [1]).
I don't think the article with a single focused example bears that out at all.
From the article:
> "Even more troubling are the men who signed up for paid subscriptions after the girl launched a program for super-fans receive special photos and other content."
> "Her mom conceded that those followers are “probably the scariest ones of all.”"
I'm sorry.. but what is your daughter selling, exactly? And why is social media responsible for this outcome? And how is this "unsafe for society?"
This just sounds like horrific profit motivated parenting enabled by social media.
One example is all I need although I know there would be more to find if I had the time.
One is enough because the fact is, this just simply shouldn’t be possible. Not only does Meta allow it though, it produces a system that incentivises it.
> I'm sorry.. but what is your daughter selling, exactly?
Did.. did you just post “I’d have to see these images of the preteen girl before I could form an opinion about whether or not the men buying and sharing them were creeps” as a rebuttal to an article about social media enabling child predators?
Well, I already have an opinion on them. The article seems to purposefully avoid describing what the market and the service here is. There are a limited number of venues where a preteen girl can credibly earn money on social media. Also, if she's earning that money, I'd openly wonder whether a Coogan Account is appropriate and if one exists here.
Anyways.. my shock was really over the fact that the mother is basically saying "I want to sell access to my daughter online but I'm surprised that the biggest spenders are adult men with questionable intentions." Did she genuinely believe that the target market was other 12 year old girls willing to pay to watch another 12 year old girl? The parents resignation over the situation in deference to the money is also disgusting.
> about social media enabling child predators?
That's my point. The article entirely fails to do that. It's one case with a questionable background and zero investigation over the claim, which you'd expect, because the crime statistics show the exact opposite.
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Since nobody bothered to explain their downvotes, I'll say it: This is a pretty uncharitable reading of the quoted comment.
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I mean, surely share holders would want a safe superintelligence rather than unsafe ones, right?
I'd imagine everyone being dead would be pretty detrimental to the economy.