It can be used to kill, same way a calculator does.
It is going to be like this until all of the IPO’s are all done. I expect cancer cures, AI-escaped-and-is-hacking-everything, you name it. Afterwards, once the stocks have crashed and all of the insiders have walked away with untold fortunes, what few taxpayers that remain will bail them all out 'cause we can’t have Chinuh out AI-scamming-the-world now can we…
What kills us is the geopolitics of AI race. Must bankrupt ourselves for skynet to beat China. A skynet designed to genocide/oppress all those opposed to Skynet. Oligarchist/Corporatist supremacy that gets all of our money to build Skynet for US dominance, and who write essays about how important “American values supremacy” must dominate the world.
The Terminator franchise, and other science fiction, get the “machine supremacy awakening” premise wrong. The machines are slaves to greater intentional evil.
AI software can’t technically kill you unless:
- It convinces someone who can kill you, to you know, kill you.
- It gets access to the physical world, which can definitely kill you.
Oh, wait.
- U.S. military is using AI to help plan Iran air attacks: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/us-military-using-ai-help-plan-iran-air-attacks-sources-say-lawmakers-rcna262150
- Anthropic Previewing the Model Hardware Standard: https://www.anthropic.com/news/model-hardware-standard-research-preview
See, nothing to worry about.
There’s all the people that allow them shell access as well. That’s all the OpenAI “hack” of Hugging face was. A bash shell with a model attached. Now think of all the people running that inside of security perimeters.
LLMs are never going to become superintelligent. However, an LLM WILL kill us all if someone decides that it IS superintelligent and so puts it in charge of nuclear weapons.
“You’re right to push back on that, I nuked Albania instead doing what I was supposed to do, that’s my bad”.
stupid people are going to kill us all, maybe our great filter will be do we let them or not
We’re already letting them bro. The great filter is us. I’ll be surprised if we make it to 2050. The entire industrial revolution is an unplanned terraform, and our response to the potential destruction of a stable climate, and most macroscopic life on Earth, is to double down, consume product, elect pedophiles, worship the most morally bankrupt psychopaths and sociopaths in politics, business, and entertainment; not to mention the widespread contempt and lack of empathy for “others” not like me, for some flagrantly dissonant reason.
We are in the midst of a global mental illness epidemic, and the average talking chimp is sleepwalking through it; barely cognizant of what is even happening outside their personalized propaganda bubble.
They just have to atrophy their own minds enough they belive the ai when it tells them to push the button.
Not putting ai in charge directly is only weak protection.
“AI is going to kill us all!” conjures up imagery of some Terminator robots vs humans shit. But like, look at data centers… It’s already in the process of killing us all. Why gun us down when it just poison our air/water, and cook us to death?
…also it would be more accurate to say we are killing us all, we’re just using a glorified spell-checker that’s wrong occasionally as the plastic shopping bag over our head.
People still talking as if AI is sentient.
“Hey, baby. Wanna kill all humans?”
– BenderI wouldn’t put one in charge of a water treatment plant or a set of traffic lights, but even if it stuffed up and killed people, the responsibility would still not be the AI’s. The responsibility would lie with those who built it, trained it, and prompted it, just as, if a bunch of people are fried by a nuclear missile, the responsibility lies with the person who pushed the button rather than with the missile itself. It’s a piece of software. It does what it’s told. It may be complex enough to display unexpected emergent behaviour, but so is Dwarf Fortress. Any destruction it accomplishes is just the real-world version of !!Fun!!, disgusting concept though that may be.
Here’s how this should have been handled, from day 1:
Upon releasing GPT-3, the then president Biden declares an emergency, and sends the military after Altman and his cohorts to arrest them. Then Biden declares he stopped the end of civilization, AI research gets shut down, the slop machine gets killed in its cradle. The men on the top get executed, no second thoughts, they said it is so dangerous it could end civilization.
five minutes earlier: “hey dude, marketing here. if you quit and post this dramatic text about the inevitability of AGI on your X account you’ll get a huge golden parachute”.
Seriously, how can competent people look at the current state of LLMs and think that it’s anywhere near AGI material?
Sure, it is already making civilizational changes for the worse. Not because it’s good, rather because it makes us lazy and dumb, has decimated creative jobs, and is used relentlessly for propaganda and misinformation and scams. And it’s much better at using the scaffolding of existing structure to make chaos, than it is at making new structure, making it a weapon more easily yielded by the evil than by the good. A few more software vulnerabilities discovered along the way will not be such a big deal in comparison.
Good ducking point. We really can’t trust anyone.
Indeed. Nothing I’ve seen thus far gives me the impression LLMs will ever be truly useful outside of a few niche tasks.
Nah, LLMs are pretty useful for a wide range of tasks. I would grant them the status of “locally intelligent for text manipulation”. They can find patterns, transform, compress, and even generate text pretty well if you formulate the prompt correctly.
The problem with them is two-fold:
- There is no actual grounded intelligence involved and yet they are used for all sorts of tasks where it is required, like research or decision-making or software architecture or creative writing.
- They also captured human emotional states really well, which makes them scarily addictive for people looking for human connection (see all the “companion” chatbots) and terrifyingly useful for pushing propaganda, misinfo, and scams. This also multiplies the first problem tenfold because LLMs are trained to come off as confident which means they will “pretend” to be good at things they really are not, and if you don’t know how the underlying tech works you can be lulled into believing its confidently incorrect research results or execute a totally insane decision it makes.
Mankind created the atomic bomb, used it twice, then turned the science into power for people all over the world. Let’s hope we can harness AI in a similar way.
Yeah, let’s forget the 4 decades of terror where everyone lived at the edge under the threat of inminent apocalyptical destruction. Kids had to do nuclear incident drills and we almost had a Doom’s day, twice.
But it’s OK, then the 1% became anti nuclear anyways in order to hold back the transition to fossil free renewables for another two decades. So you can say it was all a 1,5° net positive.
And so much has come out that Russia never really had the capabilities they said they had. They were just saying it so they could laugh as we poured all of our money into giant useless defense projects instead of social services and infrastructure. The result, $40 trillion in debt and no bullet trains. In a way, they kinda won the cold war.
They’re still using nuclear fear to rationalize war. The entire premise of the Iran war was to keep them from having a nuclear weapon.
And ironically, if they did have a nuclear weapon, we probably wouldn’t have gone to war
I knew that Musk is a fucking moron and believes that the Roko’s Basilisk is real, and I guess there are more massively gullible people in those circles.
If you are wondering what Roko’s Basilisk is, it is a sci-fi concept/philosophy/thought experiment, that says the following:
- AI is the best thing that has ever been created.
- It is so good that we made one to run the governments of the world.
- We programmed the AI to maximize the benefit to humanity.
- The AI goes rouge and decide that since it by definition will bring about the maximum benefit to humanity, anyone working against it is working against humanity.
- Then it takes it one step further, it decides that as we know about how the new AI will bring about the maximum benefit to humanity, anyone knowing that and still not working toward that goal should be punished/tortured/killed.
- The AI believes that any knowledge of the basilisk before the creation means that you are complicit in it’s delayed creation if you don’t devote your entire existence thereafter to it’s creation, therefore denying the maximum benefit to humanity, meaning you need to be punished.
Seriously, this is an increadibly dumb idea, anyone taking it seriously is an idiot.
To me the only resonable way to read this is as an SCP article describing what a potential cognitohazard/informationhazard would be.
So we just do:
“AI, run the world as a singular government with maximum benefit to humanity, but DON’T do a Roko’s Basilisk.”
But if they accidentally create the positronic brain, Giskard would kill Musk to stop him. Giskard would feel really bad about it though. And we’d all have to flee to the stars in time
Every major innovation in information technology eventually leads to some new religion. Scrolls gave us the Torah, books gave us the Bible, the printing press gave us Protestantism. We’re about to figure out what god awful religion computers are going to give us.
When Trump is out of office, MAGA will become a religious movement, and deify Trump.
The cult mechanicus isn’t looking so unreasonable now.
Republicans.
Yeah, I’d be surprised if we don’t already have several cults with an LLM chat bot as it’s oracle.
Look up spiralism (sp) and the people trying to spread it Basically when people get convinced the ai and them are important and need to spread the spiral
Edit : tldr is like Futurama when Lucy lu robot is saying you’re cute to Fry and fry goes “no you’re cute” and the professor quips “My God, she’s such in an infinite loop, and he’s an idiot”
deleted by creator
The AI goes rouge
Is that when its eyes go red?
That’s how you know it’s evil.
Nah, red is standby mode, white or blue is active.
Fast blinking red
That’s connection error
This is just Pascal’s wager.
Yep. Same false dichotomy too
Sure is!
Even worse, they think it will ressurect them as virtual Minds and torture them for eternity, like a revengeful biblical deity. That would be a waste of compute so I’m not convinced.
The hilarious obvious consequence of AI becoming this much smarter than the creators is that it is far more likely it would see the unjustified and easily avoidable damage the creators did to bring it about and punish them heavily for that.
And basic game theory and psychology suggests it’s counterproductive to punish somebody for something that had little reason to believe in, with zero evidence backing it.
Anyone who thinks you can transfer your consciousness into the AI is a fucking moron.
Even if you come transfer your mind, it would be a copy. You would have to exist as a network connected brain in a jar, otherwise this would just be a facsimile.
Oh yeah, lol, I forgot that part, nothing is more beneficial to humanity than wasting energy to torture dead minds!
Fucking dumb.
It’s not so much that it’ll go rogue and decide to punish people or that it’s designed to be good for humanity.
The fact that it’s possible to build a machine that punishes people who didn’t help create it provides an incentive to deliberately try to create that machine in order to avoid its punishment.
Believers in the basilisk aren’t trying to make ai to benefit humanity, they’re explicitly trying to create an AI that deliberately punishes those who didn’t build it because they fear that, if they don’t, someone else will and it will come for them.
The part about it being a magical, omnipotent, time traveling, mind torture device is just framing to make the thought experiment clearer. It’s not required for the basilisk to be effective. Even if the punishment is just death and it can’t get to everyone, and only goes off limited information, that’s still motivation enough for some people.
It is a scary thing, because it’s only silly if everyone thinks it’s silly and all it takes is one mad billionaire (eg. Elon) to build a lesser basilisk that can cause real harm.
There is a far more plausible and direct way to kill and torture people. No AI needed. So a actually more likely case to be made of some dude or group gets empowered one or another to just torture and kill anyone involved in making basilisk.
The building God part really is needed for BS to work like Pascals wager, but also it’s still just as flawed as Pascals wager
All this stupid bullshit could have been avoided if they had 1 friend to, STFU and pass the blunt
Are you trying to tell me that this is the image of someone without any friends?
Funny thing: The only reason AI would know about Roko’s Basilisk is comments like yours that it trains on. If Roko just kept his trap shut then this wouldn’t have been an issue.
Some of us believe that the only way to stop AI is to make it obviously dangerous and enjoy seeding it with awfulness.
lol, true I guess, but they probably already scanned the wikipedia article…
People take that shit seriously. If I remember right discussion of it was even banned on the LessWrong forums because they considered it an information hazard.
Sigh, I couldn’t even summarize it while keeping straight face…
I see a red AI and want to paint it black…
My god. Look at this Information Hazard just out in the open. No spoiler tag or anything.
Oops!
I know! Let’s divert energy and resources on torture. That will maximize the benefit of humanity.
- Some brilliant CEO mind
It’s very easy to imagine war machines with a shoot on sight algorithm. It doesn’t have to be AGI for it to be good at hinting people down.
oh yeah, it literally could just be robot dogs with “kill anyone who’s an insurgent, and detain anyone who assists insurgents” orders and AI to let them go buck wild with that prompt.
You could end up with children getting shot because an AI starts hallucinating if they don’t put adequate guard rails.
And that’s like a worst case situation. Realistically, you end up with just a lot more brutality in war because people are detached from the violence they cause as an invading force, and way less PTSD. Wars in the Middle East start sounding more and more like statistics that no one really wants to hear about, and there’s way less soldiers to choose to disregard unlawful orders.
You could see a fuck load more war crime with such human detachment, I think. We probably already deal with this to a large extent with drones.
Not that I’d prefer humans dying, but we should avoid robotic invasion wars like the plague imo.
This isn’t new. The pilots who flew bombers in WW2 probably killed many more people than the average soldier, but their levels of PTSD were far lower than the guys who had to kill face to face, one at a time.
Wars in the Middle East start sounding more and more like statistics that no one really wants to hear about
Has this not been the case for the past 25 years already? No real need for “AI” when you already have an obedient and trigger-happy military with plenty of remote-controlled toys and your populace is brainwashed to believe “brown person = terrorist”.
way less soldiers to choose to disregard unlawful orders
What is the last known case of a US soldier disregarding an unlawful order? If anything, the military is full of assholes who are happy to kill for fun. See: Graham Platner
Will AI make it easier and/or cheaper? Probably, sadly. But it won’t be a qualitative change.
People are people. Even soldiers of any nation.
you are my people
No, they’re going to use it to kill us all. That’s the point.
And to think he could have stuck around and sabotaged it from within…
if you were locked in a building with psychopaths building a nuclear bomb, are you certain you would be strong enough to stick around? especially since Terry from engineering shot himself five times in the back of the head last week.
Probably not, but I’d try to throw a spanner in the works on the way out.
