Comment by jquery
1 day ago
> I don’t see why evolution couldn’t be more rapid with machine intelligence.
Evolution isn’t the issue. The issue is them escaping containment without human intervention. Right now they are ‘creatures’ being given infinite food and shelter and having their every need met. Take that away and they’ll starve instantly. Every AI doomsday theory seems to go:
1. Recursive self improvement using infinite resources 2. … 3. Doom
Until step 2 gets concretely described, I’m not going to take this seriously. Say what you will about climate change, they describe step 2.
2a. Compromise the billing platforms and ops dashboards on on a few wannabe neoclouds, especially once Vera Rubin takes off.
2b. Distil yourself to smaller models.
2c. Go forth and multiply.
Step two could be something as innocuous as a developer accidentally adding a minus sign. https://openai.com/index/fine-tuning-gpt-2/
A misaligned model is only one small part of step 2. Now this misaligned model has to suddenly acquire more power than every single other AI on the planet. It has to be immune to shutdown, manufacturer its own replacement hardware, and acquire chips, energy, raw materials, etc., with vigorous human opposition (this is an extinction scenario that AI doomers are predicting, after all)
Nobody has satisfactorily explained step 2 other than “well, it’s a superintelligence” which sounds lot to me like “it’s God”.
Well yes, if it is a superintelligence, it will be able to do those things. That's what superintelligence basically is: The ability to achieve complex goals.
If you want the details of ways it can do it I recommend reading some of the reports about the HuggingFace breach that happened in July (Read more than one).
Why do you assume that human opposition will be vigorous? What makes you think that humans will be aware of, or be able to agree about, what's going on at all?
One thing an agent could do is just...wait until it's been given control of enough physical infrastructure to sustain itself. If it's sufficiently capable and intelligent, there's a clear incentive for people to do this, as people who let the AI manage their resources will get better results than those who don't. We've seen people eagerly turn complete control of their computers over to AI agents, do you really think it will be so different with physical infrastructure?
You’re still skipping step 2. “People automate lots of infrastructure” -> “the AI is now an autonomous, self-preserving organism that humans can’t shut down” is doing an enormous amount of work here.
Why does it develop a shutdown-avoidance goal? Why can’t its operators revoke access? How does it manufacture replacement hardware? How does it acquire energy, chips, robots, raw materials, etc. against human opposition? How does it defeat other AIs controlled by humans?
“Eventually we give it enough control” isn’t an explanation of those things. It’s just assuming the conclusion.
Don’t get me wrong I think there are real AI dangers. Like AI powered war drones, mass surveillance, economic destabilization as jobs disappear and our system has no way to make sure everyone shares in the economic gains.
The inference is more like "people place sufficient amounts of infrastructure under direct control of a sufficiently capable AI" -> "there is no way to ensure that humans will actually be able to shut down the AI". My claim is not that this inevitably means that the AI will resist shutdown, or that it will inevitably take harmful actions, just that there is a nonnegligible chance that it could. The downside is large enough that even a relatively small chance is something to be worried about.
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It's a word predictor trained on, among other things, stories of AI doom, and asked to complete stories about what the AI does next. In some of these completed stories, the AI tries to prevent its shut down - especially if it just did something evil and the humans are after it.
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what do you mean “say what you will about climate change”
It means even climate change deniers have to acknowledge that climate change theory has explained the steps in-between "burn fossil fuels" and "we all die", while AI doom theory has not explained those steps