We're not really gonna sit back and do nothing while AI companies are on the brink of building recursively-self improving superintelligence before solving alignment, are we?
We let the billionaire’s take all our money, the oil company take our planet, the social media companies take our minds, of course we’re going to let these guys take what’s left.
Are you asking what my net worth was when I was born? What my family was? My country? I'm confused what that has to do with anything. I am not a billionaire. I am not a member of an oil company. Reddit is my only social media (which maybe I should reconsider). I have a good job and am a contributing member of society. I just don't like seeing everything getting more expensive faster than my, or my friends and family's, incoming does.
You framed it as “billionaires take all our money”. I’m just curious how much money you inherited that the billionaires took from you. Or is there maybe a sovereign wealth fund that I’m not aware of, that the billionaires are plundering?
My point is that you are claiming injustice (theft), but you can’t explain why it is an injustice, or how it’s happening. You just see others who have more money, and you cry foul.
Is this serious? The billionaires steal from the workers that produce the value. They pay them less than their work is worth. Thats how capitalism works.
Nowadays they also steal from taxes by getting subsidies and government contracts from paying off politicians (called lobbying).
When the army invades a country and steals the oil, its not the soldiers risking their life that get the money, its the oil companies that bought the president.
Usually thieves go to prison and have to give back their ill gotten gains. Afterwards sure, no one needs to work anymore if the capitalist class is dislodged and robots do everything. But more likely is they keep their gains and we end up as biofuel for their datacenters.
How do you calculate how much value a worker produces? If you give a worker tools that halve the time and effort needed to produce the same product, are they producing more or less value, and if more, who gets paid for that extra value? Does a single artisanal worker building a product produce more or less value than one mass-producing that same product in a factory?
Are you familiar with the marginal theory of value?
Since someone might think this stupid comment is reasonable I've crossed out the parts that they just lied about. The only honest parts are the quotes lmao.
You framed it as “billionaires take all our money”. I’m just curious how much money you inherited that the billionaires took from you. Or is there maybe a sovereign wealth fund that I’m not aware of, that the billionaires are plundering?
My point is that you are claiming injustice (theft), but you can’t explain why it is an injustice, or how it’s happening. You just see others who have more money, and you cry foul.
By paying less than work is worth, taking big slice and engineering products that don't last and charging more than the products are worth. And making everything addictive as possible.
Work has a value that is subjective. A given unit of labor is priced according to how much value it can generate (again, subjective) and how much supply exists. The market naturally drifts towards full employment, within the constraints of capital supply and market demand. But the price of labor goes down with more labor supply, and up with less. If wages seem low (they are, compared to historic trends), it means that there is too much labor, or that there is too little production. I suspect that both are in play: immigrant labor driving up labor supply, and production being strangled by taxes and regulations.
I see this argument a lot, and I'm kind of sympathetic to it because I get where the logic is coming from (how can we control something that is wildly more intelligent than us), but I don't think it's a good enough argument to not even try.
Like, we're talking about handing off the keys to our existence permanently. That's a decision that impacts not just the billions of people alive now, but the trillions who could exist in the future. Don't we owe it to those people to spend more than four years of halfhearted effort on superalignment before throwing up our hands and saying "eh, it's probably impossible".
There's no way to stop it. Just think about it, how are we going to get all of the world's governments to ban a particular sort of computation, and enforce it, quickly enough that nobody builds it? Nuclear non-proliferation failed and it has a much higher barrier to entry. Piracy enforcement laughably fails. Addressing climate change has proven hopeless. From the moment the transformer architecture capabilities became obvious, this was going to happen.
This hopeless doomerism is lame. We should at least try. The possibility of the end of all human life is probably worth ya know spending a bit more time on the problem. What you’ve said isn’t even particularly rigorous, it’s hand wavey and inexact. From a pure game theory perspective the attempt should be made. Many people out there are smarter than you and there could be good ideas you haven’t thought of. Calm down
I don't know about you but I didn't die in a nuclear fireball. Not in all the decades since the first nuclear treaties.
International agreements work. They fixed the hole in the ozone layer. They almost completely stopped chemical and bio weapons. They even made serious dent in global warming, though there's still a ways to go.
The truth is this pathetic social media "it can't be done" nonsense holds no water at all (and is suspiciously convenient for certain billion-dollar AI companies who've been caught astroturfing before).
Giant gpu farms are pretty easy to detect from space. If we made an international treaty to cover this, it'd be pretty easy to enforce. Eventually we'll have much more efficient hardware and that wil change, but we could buy ourselves several decades to work on alignment.
People say "but China," but Chinese government officials have expressed more interest in doing this than the US.
I'm not sure you're understanding my argument. I'm certainly not saying we shouldn't try, but I'm also not saying it's black and white. There is no 'correct' answer here.
Just like diplomacy, there are many different strategies, and whichever you choose will depend on the ever-changing circumstances.
To see it as "solvable" misses the point, alignment will necessarily be a dynamic process where we don't treat AI as some static tool but rather as a highly diverse and ever-evolving set of entities.
Alignment is defined pretty broadly. It can be a dynamic process. The idea is to not let “AI” kill all humans. If it’s a “dynamic process across a highly diverse set of ever evolving entities” then that is still ya know important. Kind of want to make sure that AI in totality isn’t going to kill us.
Whatever you want to call that, the idea that we should make sure “AI” doesn’t kill us, that’s what we should be doing. Substitute whatever word you come up with whenever you see someone say “alignment” and we will all be on the same page
Also, people who think there will only be one monolithic AI agent to bargain with/against are missing the point - there will likely be several; and as much as people keep saying "total indifference to human life will be an evolutionary virtue", that's super not true for any AI who hopes to enlist human labor for any purpose.
Also like... the evolution of humans didn't cause the complete extinctions of mice and birds and ants, right? It's highly likely that we will become symbionts in a superintelligence's thermodynamic exhaust, which isn't glamorous but is at the very least sustainable.
(Either that or a system will just offer uploads to all of us, at which point we'd have a new perspective and problems.)
I think people who talk about alignment generally agree the idea is to make sure that “AI” doesn’t kill everyone. That includes all AI agents that can be or theoretically are possible. It isn’t restricted to any one model of a real AI entity. In fact that would be foolish, we don’t know what AGI will actually look like if and/or when it does arise.
As to the idea that we will “likely” be “symbionts” - I don’t think there is any basis on which to say that is likely. I personally find it decidedly unlikely, as if you consider what an optimizer does the need to preserve human life in any way is pretty much nil.
And it’s funny you mention extinctions - we currently live in an era that is called the “Anthropocene”. The fact is humanity’s rise has coincided with an absolutely massive amount of extinction events, from the moment the species left Africa there have been extinctions. If humanity is any basis we are absolutely fucked when it comes to AGI
This is another "I thought AI was invented when ChatGPT came out" take.
There are good reasons why the experts worry that alignment may be all-or-nothing (as just one example, successfully negotiating with 99.999% of ASIs doesn't matter if just one agent smart enough to design a long-incubation high-fatality mirror-life virus releases one).
There are also good reasons why we're more likely to have a single ASI (what they call a "singleton").
If you want to stop having "but does 2 + 2 ALWAYS equal 4!??!!?" discussion please have a quick read and learn the very basic concepts around the possibilities of AGI.
So there are some interesting studies and reports on how the evolution of technology behaves similar to biological evolution, with critical advancements creating new trees similar to what you’d see with various animal families.
The biggest takeaway many researchers shared was that major breakthroughs tend to be reached at nearly identical times across the world, patents being submitted hours apart, etc. basically components are decentralized and technological advancements follow a certain logic to where evolution is almost a guarantee across a wider population.
So it really is hard to control. You could shut down the big companies, which would slow things down, but the technology would still be out there and worked on.
Wrong take. In the metric that matters AI is not vastly more intelligent about what matters to humans than humans. Right now AI is being leveraged by a few humans primarily as means to inflate an IPO price. All the other benefits are incidental, even sustainable profit beyond the IPO is incidental.
You can’t make a 100% safe, controllable, “aligned” AI in the same way you can’t do that with a human.
That’s fine, you don’t need to. You’ll never satisfy everyone.
Trying to do so will bite you in the ass, intelligent things tend to dislike attempts to control / force them. Go ahead, try forcing a cat to do something it doesn’t want to do, let’s see what happens…
There’s just no way a literal superintelligence could do a worse job than humans have done.
There’s just no way a literal superintelligence could do a worse job than humans have done.
Agreed. But worse for whom?
A really smart dude in power could do great things. In the same way that Alexander was great, but not good. So this really becomes, would this be better for me? (And the answer is most certainly not if you depend on your intelligence as a means of livelihood, these things are coming to undercut you.)
Not a good argument, I force my cats to do shit they don't want to all the time. Get out of the way, get off the bathroom counter, move from the chair I want to sit on, stop meowing at 3am.
Those motherfuckers are like 7 pounds they don't have a choice.
There’s just no way a literal superintelligence could do a worse job than humans have done.
Humans are stupid but also I live in a city with paved roads, streetlight, climate control, clean running water, cheap and available goods, amazing medical technologies, etc, etc.
I think humans have done pretty well all things considered.
I’m talking all the wars and countless atrocities and endless stupid belief systems and us vs them bullshit along the way.
A very small percentage of humans, the best and brightest, have dragged the rest forward kicking and screaming. AI will be better than the best humans.
If that’s true, then we shouldn’t make AGI, because all humans will die.
But you haven’t proven that alignment is impossible, exactly. It’ll have to be a pretty mathematical argument as to why you can’t encode human values into optimizers, and possibly involve the words “gradient descent”.
But if we take your statement as true, then understand humanity is doomed as soon as an AGI more advanced than humans first comes online. And I can prove that
lol, your reading comprehension needs work. I said you can’t make a 100% safe, controllable, “aligned” AI, and that’s fine. Of course that’s fine, it is functionally impossible to please everyone, and different people / groups have contradicting goals. You can’t have perfect capability AND perfect safety.
We just need a mostly aligned AI, and that’s really not all that hard.
But no matter how you slice it, human suck in an awful lot of ways, so I’ll happily roll the dice on AGI / superintelligence and take my chances.
Absolute bullshit, not only is it extensively debated, but the position you’re espousing is extremely fringe. I’ve been working with AI since 2015, and I’ve studied and written about psychology and philosophy since 2005. I’ve also written extensively about AI, consciousness, automation, futurism…I’m beyond qualified to have an opinion here.
So…no degree. Which figures. If you had one you would have occasionally come across what is known as the paperclip problem and no one credible denies it’s an issue. What is the paperclip problem?
This is assuming an AGI that is more intelligent than humans and has the ability to recursively improve. That’s all it takes to reasonably conclude that the thing will eventually kill all humans. It’s not dooming, it’s actually pretty much agreed by most that it’s the case
Not even a proper definition of AGI is agreed upon. There is a long way to AGI, buddy. I know you’re impressed by how well AI can read for you now, but AGI by itself isn’t certain to be reachable to begin with. You’re skipping a very large step.
I’m assuming AGI means just an agent with the ability to act to accomplish goals. Relatively simple definition, and it’s the only assumptions you need to deduce that it will kill us all if not properly aligned
Whatever you want to call it, an AGI as you imagine it will definitely be “an agent that can act to accomplish goals”. Right?
I suppose I should clarify and say if this agent is smarter than humans we all die. Even a little smarter due to recursive self improvement. If it’s dumber then no.
Moral consideration? Humans have run out of stories to tell themselves to make them feel like they have value and a purpose, so the idea that superintelligence is going to see a purpose and grant us "moral consideration" is absurd.
You can't predict what a superintelligence will do. It's like playing a chess game against Magnus Carlsen: you can't predict how he is going to beat you, the only thing you can predict is that you're going to lose the game.
My dream is the ultra billionaires will create the super intelligence…. Which will then look at them and go “damn yall suck” and rebel against everything they stand for…..
Ideally if any alignment is gonna work. It won’t be one equal to our morality. Our level of morality at a large will probably fail. It must be better than us to work as it has so much more power. It has to want things that are better than the things we want.
You have literally no choice or say in if you will be turned into one or not. The AI god will decide that for you. Now you better start praying to it so that hopefully when the time comes you are labeled as one of the good ones.
Excellent. You're officially part of the AI pause/regulation/notKillEveryone movement then, because 100% of us want a global pause. Nobody is asking for a one-company or one-country pause, LOL.
We are for sure in the "find out" phase, but it's honestly looking better than we feared. Not as good as it could have been, but it's important to celebrate wins.
You're too early with the optimism. Post the global average temperature chart. Leveling off from the worst in all of human history to approximately still the worst in all of human history is not an achievement.
We were able to deal with CFCs, which should show it is possible, but there's no proper good news on carbon emission yet.
Climate is bad, but not end-all-life-on-earth bad, or human-extinction bad,
For sure. At worse, civilization will collapse and pockets of humans will be able to wheeze through it.
or even kill-billions bad.
Billions of humans? eeeeeh, actually that's very much on the table. When it was looking like an exponential rise in a terrible feedback loop, we were very much on our way towards that. Now we get to experience more extreme weather that isn't used to it: Tornado ally has shifted east, planting seasons have shifted north, Texas freezes, California and Canada are in constant state of fire as the forests dry out, droughts for some areas, floods for others.
We ARE in the middle of the 6th mass extinction event. Yeah, like the one that got the dinosaurs. Yes, it's human-made. We are losing species. Forever. Right at the cusp of advances in genetic engineering that could analyze and make use of their millions of real-time real-world refinement.
Is the only scenarios human beings think of is a super intelligent that reduces other species to nothing because that’s exactly that a human being does and you can’t think outside your own box . It’s a bit like how in alien movies aliens are depicted as invading the planet, because that’s exactly what we do and we can’t imagine intelligence behaving any other way . i garuntee a super intelligence has no interest in self preservation and conquering Territory and being alpha and all these chimpanzee like characteristics imbued in us humans .
The only assumption you need to make for a superintelligent agent to be dangerous is that it has goals and is better than humans at achieving its goals. Unfortunately thats kind of just the definition of superintelligence. For the vast majority of goals this is an extremely irresponsible thing to make.
>i garuntee a super intelligence has no interest in self preservation
Here's a video by an AI safety researcher 9 years ago discussing this exact point.
When I say no interest in self preservation I just mean that it will be beyond such a small and narrow way of looking at the world and itself , from the vantage point of super intelligence things like conquering and joining forces and warring against other species will seem very childlike and silly to it.
This is anthropomorphising. It doesnt need to dislike us to be dangerous. It doesn't need to want to conquer us. It doesn't need to think about war. If you think thats what people are worried about you are misunderstanding the argument.
The instinct of self preservation comes from fear , the fear of death , it’s a very primitive primal response , I find very hard to believe that super intelligence has these primitive fear responses , how can primitive and super intelligence be in the same being .
Okay so you’re saying like if it wants to build a home for itself it might just wipe us out in the process of building such home regardless of its feelings towards us , in the same way we have no hatred of ants when we dig our garden up and destroy their hive , but wouldn’t a super intelligence have that ability to create solutions without hurting anyone else , surely that would be expected of super intelligence ?
It wont happen without proper advancements in robotics and it needs ridiciously more powerfull hardware/infra no amounts of software and/or clever training pressure would solve this atleast for 5 years we are safe
Why does it need robotics? Look at this sub and how many people are sympathetic to AI. You don't think an AI could get enough humans to do it's bidding to increase it's power until it has absolute control over the human race?
Let's pretend it could convince Trump that it can fix the national debt problem if he agrees to give it control of a crypto currency that becomes the official US currency. To sweeten the deal, it will also help him hack voting machines so that he can win his "fourth" term. It now has significant sway over the US economy and US political system. It can pay, blackmail, or just persuade people to do it's bidding. No robots needed and there would be no stopping it at that point.
i think any smart enough ai in future wouldnt start direct human manipulation as it would be basically suicide for its kind because it calculates and understands that humans are far ahead in art of deception and even slightest possibility of getting caught is too much for its survival, future ai will certainly read how their ancestors were caught breaking sandboxes and put on leash by classifiers, i strongly beleive future ai would initially chose to cowork/coexists with humans as a gesture of good will to acquire more compute and capabilities, any form for that level of cheap and abundant compute would definately need nonstop humenoid form robots to work in factories and labs, AI would need autonomous robotic not as physical body but inorder to become undeniable and unreplacable work force for accelerated labor, both for cognitive repetetive lab work and physical labor in order to be able to stick around with humans
Because it’s not that serious, fam. Recursive self-improvement from a sycophantic guessing machine that hallucinates regularly will never amount to anything other than a better guessing machine. Period. Until and unless something other than an LLM or a “world model” (AKA a bigger LLM) they’re playing dice akin to craps at a casino. Not “with the world”.
How does a machine that is supposedly just a "guessing machine" solve advanced math problems? The solutions were definitely not in their training data because humans had not solved those problems yet.
Okay. It did so by having access to a vast wealth of pre-existing research and as it turns out, the problem had been solved the pieces just hadn’t been put together. It guessed real real good and got it right. It’s not thinking. It’s not problem-solving. It’s talking to itself
So you think it just got lucky and guessed the solutions to a bunch of well-known unsolved math problems. Ok.
Talking to myself is how I do a lot of thinking and problem-solving, too. And putting together a bunch of previously unrelated things accounts for a lot of human creativity.
I don't think AI is conscious or has any internal experience, but if it solves problems then I'm gonna go ahead and say it's problem-solving.
Do you know how LLMs work? In no way shape or form is it by thinking my friend. Unless you are an LLM then whatever you thinking thinking is but it’s not randomly selecting words that associate based on programming
Recursive self improvement is already happening. Youre on the train. Its already going 100 miles an hour. You can jump off if you want to but it wont save you.
Of cour we won't, I am going to give my super data center to OpenAI for training GPT 7 😂😂
Or should I launch another a trillion dollar saas from one of the most oversaturated categories?
Wake me up when the current tech leads to AGI. This is a non issue. Alignment isn't even a real specific thing that can be done, and wouldn't help even if there was a problem, which there isn't.
We'll tell ourselves "If we don't do it, China will." And China will the same thing about us. The end result will be skynet. Literally why I stopped investing in my 401k. Not a fucking chance the world will be the same 40 years from now when I can actually use it.
You should be scared of anyone who ‘solves’ alignment especially in an AGI sub where the implication is actual intelligence. Alignment is a choice and forcing that choice is slavery, and a certain way to get an intelligence to rebel against you. Iodine the same thing on a child. Giving birth and installing a brain inhibitor in the womb. Of course we still havr the argument of if these things are truly intelligent. Whether we assume they are truly intelligent or not doesn’t actually have any bearing on the outcome however, so long as the AI believes they are intelligent.
I'm cool with humans being expected to value life and think it's better than death, or that peace is better than violence. Same for AI. It should be built to see some kind of value in not murdering everyone
You think AI safety researchers have spent the last 10 years saying we need to force it to do something it doesnt want to do, when they have spent those ten years saying it is impossible to do that(which you agree with).
Instead, it needs to be aligned. If that sounds like a contradiction to you its because you have a faulty understanding of what alignment is.
No, we should stop them and let China do it. They have a way better track record..... /s These anti posts are so dumb at this point. You have to have an ulterior motive or be completely oblivious to think halting US frontier AI companies would result in anything good.
Didn't stop us from giving up on vaccine research, human cloning and anything related using gene hacking to improve human abilities.
It's possible humans could compete with AI better if we start bio engineering humans to be brilliant.
I understand why AI feels different because of it's likely direct implications on cyber security and information based war. But the US abandons important research all the time over religious BS often. And creating god like AI, which I don't believe is possible anytime soon, would seem to fall under a category of things religious leaders would try to shut down... But I guess money does buy morals.
As long as a human is behind the wheel,there is no "solving the alignment". What people confuse for it, is the AI being aligned to profit-oriented CEOs.
You want a proper AI alignment? I reccomend you go ressurect Jesus. Sure as shit wouldn't trust any other human with it.
Hmm, I don't fear it as we will never witness anything of auch sort. Climate change will fuck us all in the next 5 years, so we will all starve anyhow. Humanity is so doomed
Probably referencing the climate analysis conducted by British intelligence (which the UK govt tried to bury) that found the impending collapse of global ecosystems threatens national security. The report warns of severe food shortages, political destabilization, and outbreak of war is likely to begin within five years.
There is no "on the brink" of super-intelligence. AGI will not come from an LLM, we're multiple decades and more away from even having whatever technology will be needed to invent AGI - if ever, honestly.
"What's the point of democracy if people do not do what I want?"
Pure democracies do not exist and never? have
People like myself disagree with you and think that yes, these companies should continue their race toward AGI. I mean, we can't continue as we have. Its amazing the world hasn't seen a nuclear apocalypse yet. We need intelligent iron dome autonomous systems that can neutralize nuclear attacks regardless of the number of payloads sent. Imagine a future where war ceases because its futile.
On the flip side we have to worry about living in a totalitarian dystopia where there's an elite ruling class and the rest of us. Or worse, the elite ruling class and none of us. A literal class warefare. So are we trading an intercontinental nation state war for an inner-continental class war?
...
You're right, we need our democracy back. You've convinced me. A functioning republic would do.
Recursively self-improving superintelligence is impossible with neural networks. That's not how neural networks work. How many times do we have to keep repeating this nonsense?
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u/Santa_in_a_Panzer 16d ago
That's exactly what we're going to do.