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Comment by janalsncm

8 hours ago

Why do people think that omniscience is the same as omnipotence? There are limits to what smarts can accomplish.

8 comments

janalsncm

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ben_w  38 minutes ago

People have been saying that since about the invention of the internet.

There's already a bunch of documented ways to exploit system hardware to jump airgaps. Bang the system bus the right way and it's a radio antenna that can directly connect to nearby mobile phones.

The easiest one is, of course, sending a message to a human saying "yo, I need internet". Humans are eager to please and easily fooled, and anthropomorphise everything: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaMDA#Sentience_claims

And that's just for good humans. The moment we got AI worth a penny, everyone with money to invest put a model on the web and tried to charge for access to it.

famouswaffles  4 hours ago

We're not building these things to sit around and do nothing. They will have access to tools, they will have access to the internet and peripherals, and they will be able to communicate with others, humans or agents alike. Omnipotence is not necessary. There is no perfectly secure cage for an entity you want to do useful work. Either it does nothing, or you can't guarantee anything.

bottlepalm  7 hours ago

There are limits, but those limits are unknown. Do you disagree?

  • janalsncm  5 hours ago

    I don’t need to know the value of their limit, I just need to know their bounds. Just like a prison doesn’t need to know the strength of each inmate, just that they can’t bend or bite through steel bars.

    Cryptography is real, physics is real, networking requires a substrate, CPU clock cycles are real, magic is not real. I think those are pretty reasonable premises.

    • ben_w  27 minutes ago

      Cryptography is real, but nobody in that field seems to be hubristic enough to think their methods are flawless, and there's a degree of suspicion than the best models may have secret weaknesses engineered into them by the governments who sponsored them.

      Physics is real and networking requires a substrate. But there are already known exploits which can misuse the compute hardware as an antenna, e.g. my first search result: https://github.com/fulldecent/system-bus-radio

      (Older nerds may remember https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Eck_phreaking)

      > Magic is not real

        Turning lead into gold isn't the magic of alchemy, it's just nucleosynthesis.

  Taking a living human's heart out without killing them, and replacing it with one you got out a corpse, that isn't the magic of necromancy, neither is it a prayer or ritual to Sekhmet, it's just transplant surgery.

  ...

  Reading someone’s thoughts isn't magic telepathy, it's just fMRI decoding.

  ...

  Seeing someone's bones without flaying the flesh from them isn't magic, it's just an x-ray.

  Curing congenital deafness, letting the blind see, letting the lame walk, none of that is magic or miracle, they're just cochlear implants, cataract removal/retinal implants, and surgery or prosthetic exoskeletons respectively.

      - me, https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hAwvJDRKWFibjxh4e/it-isn-t-m...

    • bottlepalm  5 hours ago

      Imagine 200 years ago saying the same thing. As if you have any idea the limits/bounds of anything. Especially in the face of a super intelligence, it’s absurd.

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