AI ethics as a whole has become a bit of a joke.
Any highly motivated group without much to do will seek out things to make themselves seem important and necessary.
Any highly motivated group without much to do will seek out things to make themselves seem important and necessary.
These systems aren't really lowering the barrier of entry on still-photography fake porn when previously anyone with Gimp & a few hours of video tutorials could churn out much the same thing.
I think text-prompt generated deep fakes (not just of porn) will present a significantly larger challenge for society, but I don't see that same scope of problem on still images.
On the other hand, everybody's been saying Pandora's warehouse was over there for a while -- it isn't really that they are to blame for showing us the way in or anything, I just don't understand what they were trying to accomplish.
if anything, OpenAI has made me more cynical about "AI safety" messaging because it looks like an excuse to take a cut and keep things proprietary.
This technique of pitting two AI against each other (a generator and a detector/discriminator) is called a generative adversarial network, and it's used a lot for unsupervised training.
I honestly think most of them are window dressing and aren’t allowed to have real influence though. They’re there for the PR, not to actually change things, but they honestly just make me really scared or big tech controlling AI.
Assume: - AGI wants to stay alive - Humans can create more AIs - Other AIs would compete for the same resources
Then: Easiest way to make sure that they would get no more competitors would be...
Anytime you see “creating an AI will obviously kill you” try reading it as “having children will obviously kill you” and see if it still makes sense.
Rather, it seems like evidence that singularitarianism is actually a religion (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millenarianism) which is why it believes things with magic powers will suddenly appear.
In particular, exponential growth doesn't exist in nature and always turns into an S-curve… of course it's a problem if it doesn't level out until it's too late.
I'd bet a ton that we're nowhere near the top: evolution almost never comes up with the optimal solution for any problem, almost by definition it stops at "meh, good enough to reproduce". And you don't need a ton of intelligence to reproduce.
Evolution's sub-optimality is actually one of the strongest arguments against intelligent design, so I'm really hesitant to agree that it requires any sort of leap to estimate that with some actual design it won't be very difficult to blow way past human intelligence once we can get there.
Well, define "intelligence". People seem to use it in a vague way here - it might be what you call a motte and bailey. The motte (specific definition) is something like "can do math problems really fast" and the bailey is like "high executive function, is always right about everything, can predict the future".
For the first one I don't think humans are near a limit, mostly because of the bottleneck in how we get born limiting our head sizes. But it is pretty good if you consider the costs of being alive - food requirements, heat dissipation, being bipedal, surviving being hit on the head, risk of brain cancer, etc, it's done well so far.
Similarly an AI is going to have maintenance costs - the more RTX 3090s it runs on, the more calculations it might be able to do, but it's going to have to pay for them and their power bill, and they'll fail or give wrong answers eventually. And where's it getting the money anyway?
As for the second kind I don't think you can be exponentially better at it than a human. At least if you are, it's not through intelligence, but it might be through access to more private information, or being rich enough to survive mistakes. As an example, you can't beat the stock market reliably with smarts, but you can by never being forced to sell.
The real mystery to me is why people say "AI could recursively improve their own hardware and software in short time spans". I mean, that's clearly a made up concept since none of humans, computers or existing AI do it. But the closest thing I can think of is collective intelligence - humans individually haven't improved in the last 10k years, but we got a lot more humans and conquered everyone else that way. But we're also all individuals competing with each other and paying for our own individual food/maintenance/etc, which makes it different from nodes in an ever-growing AI.
That's a relatively easy thing to do architecturally once you have a model that can match human intelligence at all. TBH if we could rearchitect the brain in code we could probably easily figure out how to do it in ourselves within a few years, but our wetware does not support patches or bugfixes.
We can't improve ourselves, but that's only because we're meat, not code. And of course no AI has done it yet, because we haven't actually made intelligent AI yet. The question is what happens when we do, not whether the weak-ass statistical crap that we call AI today is capable of self-improvement. Nuclear reactions under the self-sustaining threshold are not dangerous at all, but that was not a good reason to think that no nuclear reaction could ever go exponential and be devastating.
Doesn't seem like computers can improve themselves either. Mainly because they're made of silicon, not code. "AI can read and write its own code" doesn't exist right now, but even if it did, why is that also implying "AI can read its CPU Verilog and invent new process nodes at TSMC"?
(Also, humans constantly break things when they try changing code - the safest way to not regress yourself would be to not try improving.)
If we ever get them there, then it's likely that the usual resourcing considerations will come into play, and refactoring/optimization/redesign will be viable if you throw hours at them. But unlike with human optimization, every hour spent there will increase the effectiveness of future optimizations.
- children won't be smarter than any living human.
- children have a human brain which makes them predictable (constrained in behavior by current laws, institutions, and most likely a conscience).
A better analogy is to ask what happens when a species branches off and evolves into a smarter species, but the dumber ancestor species still exists.
I really don't understand the perspective that people in your position take. Is it that you don't think we'll arrive at super intelligent AI, and therefore there's little risk? Or that we will be able to control it? If you think we can control it, why? Like we're not that much smarter than our monkey ancestors and what hope did they ever have of stopping our absolute domination over them? And then all of you call this opinion a "religion" without even explaining why it's wrong?
You're right on the spot regarding the problem of having two different smart species on the same planet. We killed everything between us and chimps. Given enough time, the smarter species can be assumed to always take over.
Homo sapiens is still expanding even: https://dna-explained.com/2012/11/16/the-new-root-haplogroup...
That's why it seems to be a religion - it thinks intelligence gives you unlimited powers and makes your plans always work, it posits unseen entities with infinite amounts of it, and it tells you to move to Berkeley and dedicate your life to stopping them. Specifically, it's a kind called rationalist eternalism (https://meaningness.com/eternalist-systems).
For a specific example of undangerous superintelligence see Culture Minds, who only influence anything because of special programming to make them less of a general intelligence. The unbound ones immediately get bored with the real world, leave it and just play games in their head instead.
Also, I don't think any individual human has absolute dominion over monkeys? Human society as a whole yes, but society doesn't behave like a generally intelligent agent. A monkey is better than you at doing the things monkeys care about though.
I do think unintelligent machines are pretty dangerous. There's extremely dangerous machines called "cars" that have already taken over society and constantly kill people! And we buy their gas for them too.
> Also, it would have to get a job to pay its AWS bill.
Inference power costs are low now on agents that are better than humans at Chess and Go. It isn't going to be an issue after another 20-100 years of further R&D and optimizations. Nothing about the history of computing should tell us that this will be a big limiting factor.
Humans need shelter and jobs too. If you got an AI down to the energy requirements of a human that's not enough to avoid needing one. Especially if it's influencing the real world - entropy exists and all real world things cost money.