I sometimes wonder if the optimal outcome is - the industry leaders have at it and go for accelerated progress but accept they then place themselves in danger.
I have a lot of interest in seeing how the common person response in this scenario.
Effective altruist / rationalist doctrine is that the best thing a person can do is become ultrawealthy and use that wealth to fund technological progress. It is an ideology tailor-made for those who strive to become the richest person alive, and / or want to worship that person as a god.
When they speak of "existential consequences", it is not as members of humanity. It is a projection of their control over humanity. Personal risk for them is just being made into a regular human (no longer being ultrawealthy). They can't even contemplate physical risk. Case in point, this exact same class of people are buying up private islands and literally purchasing the blood of poorer people.
They would never accept your wager. It's the kind of thing Elon Musk would say "sounds interesting" to on Joe Rogan ten years ago, and then the only consequence after that would be his fanboys reminding everyone how cool it was that he said that.
Don't go there. One of the things separating functional states - warts and all - from failed ones is that the populace does not turn to deadly violence to settle disagreements and griefs. Yes, there are people who shoot/stab/${kill_method} other people but they are prosecuted as criminals, i.e. the opposite of those perfectly healthy, reasonable armed people you mention.
Increased acceptance of political violence begets more political violence which in turn seems to increase its acceptance, see e.g. the killing of the healthcare CEO and subsequent arrest of the killer which significantly increased "democrats" support for political violence [1] so be careful what you ask for.
The American state is the most militaristic and violent state on the planet today, and the American people are the most armed in human history and regularly experience mass shootings and even school shootings.
> Yes, there are people who shoot/stab/${kill_method} other people but they are prosecuted as criminals
Ideally, yes, but what is to be done when we're in the situation where people get to actively harm others, but are immune from consequences just because they're wealthy, powerful, and/or executives of corporations?
Yeah thanks but no thanks. Society does not have to accept "bad things". Society can pass laws to prohibit bad things.
And society will pass laws. Europe has already begun doing so, and the US will once this goddamn corrupt administration is gone. People are already protesting against AI, especially against datacenters and surveillance like Flock. It's only a matter of time until individual actors end up in the focus of protests.
"we need the government to halt model training for us (and potential competitors who are currently behind us) due to hypothetical sci-fi future bad things"
on the one hand, and then
"we should not face consequences for that time we helped a teenager plan a mass shooting"
on the other so effortlessly, so instantaneously. And virtually the entire media helps them do it!
Which is generally accepted for organizations that have the ability to cause modest harm in the financial markets. He's claiming to have the ability to wipe out humanity, and should have the courage of his convictions.
I believe the world should accept the "bad things" that result from allowing me to take other people's property, because of all the good I'd do with the money I'd take from the rich.
Hear me out, I know common sense says theft is bad, but just think about the hungry children I could feed if the world just agreed to let me take whatever I wanted.
...except AI won't even feed hungry children, it will only make the rich richer and flood the internet with slop.
There are thousands of active plastic and chemicals plants in the US and yes occasionally there are accidents, yet there are still thousands of active plastic and chemical plants in the US.
Both the child comments to my parent allude to the same thing. The chemical companies are under mountains of regulations, all reinforced with engineering societies (which may be just as toothless, but at least they're guaranteeing that the universities that adopt their standards, have a certain level of education their students absorb, about the dangers of what they're working on and how to make it safer.), education, societal pressure etc.
Mech engineers always overbuild things with safety factors in the 2x and 10x levels.
Why not just remove the neural/earth wires from all buildings and sockets? That'll do a whole lot of good by saving a bunch of copper, that's a tight resource I hear.
Also, screw air/sea regulation as well. We'll all just stand in the cabins, that'll increase Ryan air's failing profitability. Charge me for bringing my shoes on board too, I'm too rich anyway, skim any change off of my pocket please.
This culture around rigor and safety in chemical plants came many decades after their introduction as a general class of industry. They used to just dump the waste directly into the rivers and it wasn’t even illegal.
This is a new type of technology, there is no real sense of its limits or capabilities. Regulating it appropriately or even just understanding best practices for using it is still way out by many years.
And also every country is working on it so it will get built and used for economic and military purposes, by someone.
This is just the nature of it. And yes there’s nothing at all that stops the US from doing something self destructive in terms of over regulation. I suspect this will happen eventually but Chinese models are really good.
> new type of technology [...] it will get built and used for economic and military purposes, by someone
Frank Rosenblatt, the Perceptron: 1957, planned for military purposes. Perfected image recognition came 15 years ago. I cannot understand why some people are talking about "new technologies" - all I may see is that the Military may inquire and solicit, given the hype, "Can you prepare something new for us". Otherwise, I cannot see the "novelty" about AI employment in the military now.
(I see specific areas of boost of NNs in the military - but nothing for the mainstream.)
At a very basic level if you can use frontier LLMs to do cutting edge mathematical research then you can use it for military purposes.
More specifically the jump between GPT 2.0 and GPT 3.0 with its in context learning was a step change in functionality compared to anything else that had been done with NNs, let alone MLPs.
That doesn't mean that the good and bad things are equitably distributed, that the good and bad things happen at the same time, or that the bad outweighs the good. All three issues are at play here: The benefits are likely to disproportionately help the rich and the pain is likely to disproportionately help the poor. New prosperity is likely to come too late for the people whose lives are being disrupted. It seems likely that the benefits of culture being consumed by AI slop outweighs the benefits (I'd like to be more detailed, but honeslty it isn't completely clear what the benefits are).
I think the AI provider whose model does “bad things” should be held responsible of such things, going to a “gad place” - such as a prison - if the “bad things” is bad enough. Let’s see how that affects your IPO.
America needs a corporate death penalty. Not for people, but for organizations. The people themselves certainly should be prevented from being an executive anywhere else, but yes, corporations should be allowed to be killed.
I will accept the "bad things" if and only when Sam Altman exposes himself to those bad things first e.g., living next door to an AI data center, being subjected to 24/7 surveillance, and having everything he says and does scrutinized for illegal activity, ticketing and jailing him appropriately.
Until that happens, no. Sam Altman is here telling us to accept the cruelty of his actions and his company so that he can be more wealthy.
I don’t think he needs or wants any more money. These guys already have so much moolah that it is virtually meaningless to them. They want power. Remember when Zuck tried to run for president?
It is described in Sarah Wynn-Williams’ book. According to it, Zuck even battled to change the stock structure in order to take 2-year hiatus from CEO duties:
…without losing control of the company if his absence is “in connection with his serving in a government position or office.” I assume the two years would cover the period Mark would be taking on the—presumably time-consuming—endeavor of campaigning to be president of the United States.
Especially in a world that's been programmed to believe wholeheartedly that money is literally the most important thing in the entire universe, and these people who worship it as a god will never be satisfied with any amount of money; even when the last human alive owns all of it, they'll still want more. It's a form of mass-insanity. The Cult of Money.
To a certain extent, yes. Jack Ma’s money did not much help him when the Xi’s wrath turned against him. Putin doesn’t really need to own much of anything, since oligarchs kowtowing him just give him whatever they own for his use whenever he wants - or face the consequences. Trump made all the richest people in the world come and kiss his ring in the start of his 2nd presidency and what does money matter since he can technically print it as much he wants - legally or illegally - using his bitcoin scams if the head of fed doesn’t bend to his demands immediately.
Trump could fairly easily make any of the tech CEO’s life living hell with endless investigations and court battles and possible incarceration. So I would say power is power. That is the one thing Thiel and his ilk are afraid of.
> being subjected to 24/7 surveillance, and having everything he says and does scrutinized for illegal activity, ticketing and jailing him appropriately
That thing has been rising for decades - why should Sam Altman now become the culprit and scapegoat?
That of surveillance and the use of pattern matching is a legislative matter - not a matter of regulating RnD.
I think that there is something to what you are saying, but I don't think it is that simple. A new technology could change things by making previous abuses much more common. To give an extreme example, mass murder has always been possible; however, we restrict nuclear weapons because they make it so much more easy and therefore so much more ripe for abuse.
Similarly, there is a big difference between the police keeping a physical record book of mugshots, the police employing experts to maintain a database, and AI allowing nearly anyone to perform in depth surveilance.
> and AI allowing nearly anyone to perform in depth survei[l]lance
Which, as I have said:
-- is a field that has been developed for many decades - automated processing is classical AI. Why should it be now attributed to Sam Altman, whose company mainly does LLMs. If Sam Altman shouts "little risks much reaps", I would not think as surveillance as the first relevant rebuttal.
-- if the peoples do not want surveillance (what awakened them, a large number of places that were supposed to be civilized are cashless societies now), that would be a political matter, from which consequential legislation should be the goal.
The data center thing is a complete red herring. Of course you wouldn't want a data center literally next to your house. Neither would you want to live next to a manufacturing plant making automobiles or batteries or solar panels. This doesn't mean we should want to outlaw manufacturing plants.
The complaints about water consumption are even worse. Nationally, the amount of water consumed by golf courses is orders of magnitude larger than the water consumed by data centers.
I say this not to defend OpenAI or Sam Altman. I say this because I want the focus to be on the real dangers posed by AI:
* Power consumption (mitigated by building more power generation capacity, but this is a real impact, and there are legitimate environmental concerns)
* The disruption AI will have on people's careers and livelihoods
* The concentration of political power in the hands of a small cadre of billionaires
* The potential for truly dangerous destructive power if used by malicious groups - eg. bio-terrorism.
We should be concerned about the "bad things" posed by AI. A data center next to your house is very much a local issue, not a national issue.
Is that a sentence absent of meaning? Or at least highly misleading.
Every invention has positives and negatives. But no inventor or factory is at liberty to force the negatives upon society without regulation, or in Sam's case without being subject to the laws on theft and hacking.
He may as well come out and say "the ends justify the means" and the ends of course benefit Sam, and those subject to injustice, or negative externalities, should be happy that they can pay Sam for a subscription.
Of course with a president who believes him to be above the law and American institutions, is it any wonder the people at the top of American society also believe it to be true? Not to mention their cheerleaders in the populous.
> Is that a sentence absent of meaning? Or at least highly misleading.
Do you mean:
> “I wouldn’t take a trade of saying we will make sure there’s no major hacks, there’s no misuse of this technology, there’s zero scams or all the other bad things that will happen because I think that people will do tremendously – orders of magnitude – more good stuff than bad stuff.”
someone could, as a favor, tell them to check the best before date on the rationalists koolaid, or maybe go back to the old formula that had a lot more woooo in it, in any case it's still too early on a monday to be indulging so heavily.
> “There’s about a 50% chance we all die because of the development of smarter-than-human AI systems,” he said, adding that actions taken over the next two to 10 years would be decisive.
What’s the mechanism by which this happens? I feel like people making these predictions live on a different planet.
The "mechanism" is that some stupid rich or powerful person who believes they're smarter than all the world's experts combined will do something unbelievably stupid, like give one of these "AI" things too much access, control, or power without sufficient safety measures in place and bring about some massive catastrophe that pushes humanity straight into extinction.
His comments quoted in this article are eminently reasonable. Every piece of technology comes with tradeoffs.
I do suspect that the US is not equipped culturally to deal with AI (on an individual level psychologically, and on a societal level sociologically) but places like China and others are.
You can see the almost rabid fear and anger in the comments in this thread.
It seems notable to me that the tech bros ignore the obvious solution:
If we assume that they are right: AI is inevitable and certain significant negatives cannot be avoided, then the obvious solution is for society to put together a social safety net for those who are effected. Altman could easily decide to campaign for and donate to a party which made serious strides towards establishing such a safety net.
The fact that they ignore the obvious solution suggests to me that they aren't quite being honest about their motives.
There was a ton of crap in the dotcom buildup but there really was a pony underneath all of that shit. Isn't it likely that that's the case here as well? I mean, the demand seems real. People are acting like they're getting something out of this - saying that they're just getting fooled makes you sound like one of those people who never shuts up about how they don't watch TV. I mean sure, it doesn't work for you but everyone else seems to really like this thing.
If everyone == developers, sure there's people using it. Are the trillions in investment and debt, social and environmental impact, fear inducing marketing worth it for a handful of startup developers?
Don't forget that large enterprise developers rarely see cutting edge technology in their workplaces.
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[ 2.2 ms ] story [ 37.7 ms ] threadI have a lot of interest in seeing how the common person response in this scenario.
When they speak of "existential consequences", it is not as members of humanity. It is a projection of their control over humanity. Personal risk for them is just being made into a regular human (no longer being ultrawealthy). They can't even contemplate physical risk. Case in point, this exact same class of people are buying up private islands and literally purchasing the blood of poorer people.
They would never accept your wager. It's the kind of thing Elon Musk would say "sounds interesting" to on Joe Rogan ten years ago, and then the only consequence after that would be his fanboys reminding everyone how cool it was that he said that.
Increased acceptance of political violence begets more political violence which in turn seems to increase its acceptance, see e.g. the killing of the healthcare CEO and subsequent arrest of the killer which significantly increased "democrats" support for political violence [1] so be careful what you ask for.
[1 https://academic.oup.com/poq/advance-article/doi/10.1093/poq...
Ideally, yes, but what is to be done when we're in the situation where people get to actively harm others, but are immune from consequences just because they're wealthy, powerful, and/or executives of corporations?
And society will pass laws. Europe has already begun doing so, and the US will once this goddamn corrupt administration is gone. People are already protesting against AI, especially against datacenters and surveillance like Flock. It's only a matter of time until individual actors end up in the focus of protests.
"we need the government to halt model training for us (and potential competitors who are currently behind us) due to hypothetical sci-fi future bad things"
on the one hand, and then
"we should not face consequences for that time we helped a teenager plan a mass shooting"
on the other so effortlessly, so instantaneously. And virtually the entire media helps them do it!
Hear me out, I know common sense says theft is bad, but just think about the hungry children I could feed if the world just agreed to let me take whatever I wanted.
...except AI won't even feed hungry children, it will only make the rich richer and flood the internet with slop.
Mech engineers always overbuild things with safety factors in the 2x and 10x levels.
Why not just remove the neural/earth wires from all buildings and sockets? That'll do a whole lot of good by saving a bunch of copper, that's a tight resource I hear.
Also, screw air/sea regulation as well. We'll all just stand in the cabins, that'll increase Ryan air's failing profitability. Charge me for bringing my shoes on board too, I'm too rich anyway, skim any change off of my pocket please.
This slope is very very slippery.
This is a new type of technology, there is no real sense of its limits or capabilities. Regulating it appropriately or even just understanding best practices for using it is still way out by many years.
And also every country is working on it so it will get built and used for economic and military purposes, by someone.
This is just the nature of it. And yes there’s nothing at all that stops the US from doing something self destructive in terms of over regulation. I suspect this will happen eventually but Chinese models are really good.
Frank Rosenblatt, the Perceptron: 1957, planned for military purposes. Perfected image recognition came 15 years ago. I cannot understand why some people are talking about "new technologies" - all I may see is that the Military may inquire and solicit, given the hype, "Can you prepare something new for us". Otherwise, I cannot see the "novelty" about AI employment in the military now.
(I see specific areas of boost of NNs in the military - but nothing for the mainstream.)
More specifically the jump between GPT 2.0 and GPT 3.0 with its in context learning was a step change in functionality compared to anything else that had been done with NNs, let alone MLPs.
AI gets me poorly researched and cited explanations, boilerplate code, and poorly formatted powerpoint slides.
Until that happens, no. Sam Altman is here telling us to accept the cruelty of his actions and his company so that he can be more wealthy.
No. Which election?
Surprised that people are still quoting a decade old rumor.
I'm no communist, but by all measures extreme disparity has nothing but bad consequences for any society.
More money equals more power.
Especially in a world that's been programmed to believe wholeheartedly that money is literally the most important thing in the entire universe, and these people who worship it as a god will never be satisfied with any amount of money; even when the last human alive owns all of it, they'll still want more. It's a form of mass-insanity. The Cult of Money.
Trump could fairly easily make any of the tech CEO’s life living hell with endless investigations and court battles and possible incarceration. So I would say power is power. That is the one thing Thiel and his ilk are afraid of.
That thing has been rising for decades - why should Sam Altman now become the culprit and scapegoat?
That of surveillance and the use of pattern matching is a legislative matter - not a matter of regulating RnD.
Similarly, there is a big difference between the police keeping a physical record book of mugshots, the police employing experts to maintain a database, and AI allowing nearly anyone to perform in depth surveilance.
Which, as I have said:
-- is a field that has been developed for many decades - automated processing is classical AI. Why should it be now attributed to Sam Altman, whose company mainly does LLMs. If Sam Altman shouts "little risks much reaps", I would not think as surveillance as the first relevant rebuttal.
-- if the peoples do not want surveillance (what awakened them, a large number of places that were supposed to be civilized are cashless societies now), that would be a political matter, from which consequential legislation should be the goal.
The complaints about water consumption are even worse. Nationally, the amount of water consumed by golf courses is orders of magnitude larger than the water consumed by data centers.
I say this not to defend OpenAI or Sam Altman. I say this because I want the focus to be on the real dangers posed by AI:
* Power consumption (mitigated by building more power generation capacity, but this is a real impact, and there are legitimate environmental concerns)
* The disruption AI will have on people's careers and livelihoods
* The concentration of political power in the hands of a small cadre of billionaires
* The potential for truly dangerous destructive power if used by malicious groups - eg. bio-terrorism.
We should be concerned about the "bad things" posed by AI. A data center next to your house is very much a local issue, not a national issue.
I'll revert to vernacular Latin.
Futu-ți Dumnezeii mătii! So "let them eat cake!" you say.
Anafura, Cristoșii, Biserica, Dumnezeii (și) Evanghelia! (ABCDE!)
Morții mătii the ones who downvote. I guess ‘bad things’ for you is an abstract concept rather than a Lubianka cell that can happen to your sorry ass.
It is certainly pitched as if it is a claim we should be accepting of individual instances. Which is not the same as accepting that they occur.
There's a big difference between acknowledging that something cannot be universally beneficial and claiming that the bad aspects are inconsequential.
Every invention has positives and negatives. But no inventor or factory is at liberty to force the negatives upon society without regulation, or in Sam's case without being subject to the laws on theft and hacking.
He may as well come out and say "the ends justify the means" and the ends of course benefit Sam, and those subject to injustice, or negative externalities, should be happy that they can pay Sam for a subscription.
Of course with a president who believes him to be above the law and American institutions, is it any wonder the people at the top of American society also believe it to be true? Not to mention their cheerleaders in the populous.
Do you mean:
> “I wouldn’t take a trade of saying we will make sure there’s no major hacks, there’s no misuse of this technology, there’s zero scams or all the other bad things that will happen because I think that people will do tremendously – orders of magnitude – more good stuff than bad stuff.”
What’s the mechanism by which this happens? I feel like people making these predictions live on a different planet.
The "mechanism" is that some stupid rich or powerful person who believes they're smarter than all the world's experts combined will do something unbelievably stupid, like give one of these "AI" things too much access, control, or power without sufficient safety measures in place and bring about some massive catastrophe that pushes humanity straight into extinction.
I do suspect that the US is not equipped culturally to deal with AI (on an individual level psychologically, and on a societal level sociologically) but places like China and others are.
You can see the almost rabid fear and anger in the comments in this thread.
If we assume that they are right: AI is inevitable and certain significant negatives cannot be avoided, then the obvious solution is for society to put together a social safety net for those who are effected. Altman could easily decide to campaign for and donate to a party which made serious strides towards establishing such a safety net.
The fact that they ignore the obvious solution suggests to me that they aren't quite being honest about their motives.
Investors putting money in something doesn't translate to demand, success, or zeitgeist. See dotcom bubble.
Don't forget that large enterprise developers rarely see cutting edge technology in their workplaces.