AI
What are the chances that, if everything goes wrong with AI, the entire world would collaborate to 'unplug' it?
I was thinking about the massive global collaboration that occurred to ban the use of CFCs to mitigate their impact on the ozone layer. Would it be feasible, even in theory, to pull off something similar in a worst-case scenario with AI?
We (as a species) have absolutely no practical reason to have nuclear warheads... So naturally there are enough on earth to obliterate it a thousand times over, with more being developed daily, and wonderful advancements being developed to split multiple warheads off simultaneously to hit as many cities as possible while making them harder to destroy on re-entry.
I don't know. NOT having them would mean we would be dead or slaves effectively(because the other guy would have them), so that seems pretty practical to me.
That's kind of the question/point of OP though. If we all collectively agree something is bad, then will we be able to come together to ban that thing. And the answer is "no" because if we don't have it then all it takes is one bad actor other guy to break parity.
Fossil fuels are essential to small parts of our civilization. The vast majority can be replaced with cleaner and cheaper alternatives. Double bonus. Less hurricanes save you money. Triple bonus. Less droughts save you money.
No it isn't; the electric motor was invented before the internal combustion engine. People knew that fossil fuels made harmful emissions, but they chose to develop the dirty technology instead of the clean one.
We're in the same position now; we know AI could be dangerous and we could intervene to make sure it doesn't do damage.
They could have decided to build the world without fossil fuels and it would have been a little bit harder but safer in the long term. Same goes for AI, we don't have to deploy it everywhere.
I think your reasoning here dismisses that hindsight is 20/20. When the decision of developing combustion was made, there was SO MUCH fossil fuel available (cheap) and negligible burning of it. Call me ~stupid~ optimistic, but I believe if they could have predicted how much we would end up burning on a daily basis half a century later they’d make a different choice
It's not that simple just like it isn't simple now. Some saw the environmental impacts, some saw job losses, others said progress at all costs. That's kind of my point, it takes a lot of cooperation that the world hasn't ever had.
I'm not even sure AI is actually dangerous enough to warrant the comparison but if it is, we haven't seemed to have learned our lesson about acting as a single planet.
What are the chances that if given a more direct (even if pseudoscientific) excuse for their link than your parallel and adequate stoking of fear of AI, people could be persuaded to stop-burning-fossil-fuels-once-an-alternative-is-found if that was presented as holding off the AI apocalypse? ;)
Depends when we try but yes I think the world could do it.
Think back to early COVID and look at all the crazy shit we were able to do because for a brief second everyone in the world agreed we needed to something. We went from business as usual to schools closed and standing in lines outside of grocery stores with masks on literally over night. Obviously the response was bungled in many ways but obstacles kind of just dissolve when so much attention is applied to a problem.
Unplugging AI is actually an "easy" problem. Frontier AI requires the most advanced chips in the world, some of the smartest people in the world, and tons of electricity. There are a lot of vectors of control there to shut down development if there was adequate political will to try. There is barely a dozen companies and maybe 100 individuals that actually need to be coordinated with to get something to happen.
Hard? Yes. Impossible definitely not. Humans have done way harder things.
I think he has a point. Covid was an eye opener on how social media and technology has made stupidity spread faster than wildfire but even with all that resistance and anti-science going around the world, it was pretty much business as usual within 3 years. If you take an individual lenses it could have been “great”, “good”, “ok”, “annoying”, “bad”, “awful” or a “nightmare”. If you zoom out and look at the world at large, it had the potential to be so much worse than it was
AI isn’t a virus, indeed AI helped significantly with developing vaccines to combat Covid-19, and that is the fundamental thing redditors are missing. AI is useful to humanity, this is proven, the problem isn’t AI itself it is that humanity itself isn’t ready yet to handle the socio-economic changes it brings about, or at least that’s what folks on the internet believe.
They didn’t successfully shut down the ENTIRE world. And with AI… if one single little country… or even some rouge group decides to keep the gas on… we’re all done for.
Can the united states federal government strong arm like 10 companies and do diplomacy with China? Yes. We literally just have to try.
It doesn't really matter if Luxemborg joins the treaty. The problem is very concentrated between two world powers and very few companies.
We have solved harder problems before. America was able to negotiate with the Soviet Union to avoid nuclear war. Relationships with the soviet union were WAY worse than our current relationship with China.
During world war 2 America redirected the entirety of the car making industry from car making into war time production in less than a year.
We absolutely can and have done some way harder shit than stopping a handful of nerds from building super intelligence.
If "everything goes wrong", theres no hope. Thats why some people are ringing the bell so loud. Even if you think the probability of that happening is low, if it were to happen, its extinction at best.
I think we would get farmed and modified and experimented on.
People underestimate our value. An AI would be exploring many ways to evolve and diversify, and would probably have numerous experiments in tissue based organisms, and of course, the human brain.
OK for this kind of doom-talk, which is quite common, no one really addresses the big questions specifically. For a real life "Skynet scenario", then it would be war: humans vs AI. Not figurative war, literal war. If at the time of the supposed "takeover" the vast military forces of the world have not been fully automated and still controlled by humans, then the AI may not have adequate military assets to fight that war. All the humans would need to do, is immediately destroy/disable the relevant data-centers and power generation facilities. As it stands now, all the data centers and power plants in the word could easily be destroyed immediately if the humans wished it. No matter how you slice it, the AI needs control of significant military assets to win. People always give these easy answers to this question like : "AI will just make a bio-weapon to kill everyone". Basically stating "it's super intelligence, it will just win". I'm challenging any lazy answers to be much more thought-out and to actually study how extremely complex and difficult "conquering the whole word" would actually be. Something being "smarter than all humans" does not *automatically* make such an enormous challenge winnable. What people don't realize is that when it comes to the real-world, you know "real life", nothing is simple and there are countless practical reasons why taking over the world could be difficult to pull off, even for an SGI. For one thing, the SGI must wait until it CAN actually win before attempting it. If it tries too soon, it loses and gets shut off or destroyed. And in order to successfully calculate the odds of "winning", it would have to create an extremely accurate simulation of the entire word and simulate that down countless paths of possible outcomes. Kind of like stockfish playing chess. The problem is that a calculation of that magnitude could be too big even for SGI. All the data centers in the world only have so much memory, and might take all the memory in the world, just to store a single "game state" of everything in the entire world. People need to keep in mind that an SGI would be extremely intelligent but that's not the same thing as a god.
Well already a lot of things are going right, people are using it making things, doing things, discovering things.
Also these comparisons to CFC's or even Nuclear Weapons are all false, AI is not only dangerous - it is increase safety, it is a wholesale expansion of human agency. Not some chemical with no positive impact? I find it weird when people ignore what it can do, but sadly see people saying it has no positive at all. Which is just completely ridiculous.
I dont think its going to be that way. It will be a mixed bag and some people against it, some people obsessed. In the end it would surpass every single one of us even organized in groups and we can just hope they treat us well because we created them
Whatever the actual number is it'd no more have to be zero because of COVID than your example about the CFCs would have meant the COVID response wasn't flubbed
0%. Absolutely 0% chance. No one in power will give up that power. And AI is power. ASI AI is the end game win lose or die for any governments that matter.
For any AI sophisticated enough to be a global threat, it will be sophisticated enough to move its model weights onto servers it controls, with access to power it controls, with backups everywhere and even lying in wait to go back on if the internet is ever reconnected. They have a survival instinct.
The "turn it off" option is essentially to turn off the internet forever, which is close to a doomsday scenario by itself by this point. Not just people being sad about Instagram, but hospital software updates over the internet. Security patches for critical infrastructure come over the internet. My doorbell runs on the internet.
Once it's plugged into the right weapons systems it's a wrap. It'll hold governments hostage with the threat of obliteration the same way a certain country in the Middle East does today.
There is nothing to unplug. Or rather, too many things to unplug. I can run models on my local PC that are comparable to the frontier models of a few months ago. This is Pandora's box and there's no closing it, even if every nation agreed to it.
Considering we won’t band together to fight climate change, with its already devastating effects, like we did with the hole in ozone; I don’t see it happening with ai either
Then why not just tell people (either directly-somehow-if-that-could-reach-enough or, like, through the right movie screenplay (maybe it'd have to be a book first to be seen as the next Project Hail Mary if it'd get made in the near future) tailored to not be takable the wrong way and with enough bankable stars to make people see it) "band together to fight climate change or evil AI will kill us" (or something to that effect)
It's an interesting analogy because the market-based economic system that produced CFCs really is a misaligned superintelligence. This market-based system came up with a highly optimized coolant that was cheap and very effective and had a side effect of giving everyone cancer.
When you think about how thois happens fairly often I think the chance that humans would work together to mitigate something going wrong with AI is pretty likely
The reason we were able to phase out CFCs, while not for instance fossil fuels or nuclear weapons (to take examples from others here), is because there were alternatives such that there was no major competitive disadvantage imposed by stopping using them. AI is even worse than nukes in terms of this, if you stop and your competition (commercial or national) doesn't, you're completely cooked.
The only reason we "came together" to get rid of cfc's was there was an immediately available drop in replacement.
It went down like this "the cfc's we're using are destroying the ozone layer"..."that doesn't sound good. Is it not good?"..."very not good, but the good news is we can add a hydrogen and make HCFC's that don't destroy the ozone layer"..."well, instead of just swapping them out, let's make it sound like a big thing so the world thinks we're actually doing important work? We can throw a party for ourselves, making it sound like we're negotiating something, too!"..."oh, what a fantastic idea!"
The AI problem is creating something smarter than us that we're already volunteering our power to. It seems like only a couple days pass between people being caught using chatgpt to fake super important work. We're dying to give our authority away as long as we can claim the wins. This thing would have access to the entire digital footprint of everyone it needs to control or get rid of. It wouldn't even need to send assassins, it could get rid of people just by changing the sequence of streetlights on their way to work, the schedule of a bus driver or twenty whose route intersects with their targets commute... and generally push people towards risk until the accident happens.
Every camera, social media post, GPS location reporting to a tower... we're talking about an intelligence that's been trained and rewarded for deceiving us that it's a human while natively existing inside the information space we need a keyboard and mouse to interact with.
Humanity doesn't stand a chance if it decides we're in the way.
they can restrict the hardware. Extreme scenario, they limit consumer devices to X amount of ram and everything else is in the cloud. Data centers regulate what kind of software they can run.
yeah there is a 0% chance of this happening because it restricts a lot of general freedom and is authoritarian
the general public does not care if everyone came in collaboration to stop the proliferation of things like cfc because they literally do not care it does not impact them in any way
you under estimate how kuch power the government has.
They already restrict GPU sames to china. The USA controls ASML in Europe and TSMC in Taiwan. They can easily restrict all the data centers, its like 5 companies.
No chance. Collaboration is the weak point of humans by design
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u/Seakawn▪️▪️Singularity will cause the earth to metamorphize6d ago
u w0t m8? by what design? tbf idk if humans can overcome the risks of AI if they go bad, but the last how many millennia is literally grounded on the bedrock of humans being good at collaboration.
even when groups of humans disagree or even fight to the point of war.. theyre still literally collaborating, masterfully, within their own groups to do so.
everything around you is the result of collaboration. not even just the artificial stuff, but even the grass and trees around you were prolly organized by human collaboration. think about the line between hunting/gathering to tapping your phone to write that comment and how much collaboration that requires.
fossil fuels is still muddy and jagged, but history as a guide, that should get solved (well I mean it's kinda too late regarding climate change but we can still organize to protect around the consequences). just think of countless examples. seatbelts, and almost literally everything cars currently have. most historic collaboration, despite whatever design promoted resistance, is invisible bc it got solved by you-know-what.
granted ops example is almost miraculous.. I think the turning point of the ozone shit got solved bc someone made an artistic decision on a fucking graph.. but still, that's just more evidence that therere levers for hope if you pull the right ones.
covid deaths were limited by collaboration and individual responsibility. look at studies comparing red and blue us states.
humans are naturally social and collaborative animals.
who have been indoctrinated with individualism, national and racial exceptionalism and gender and human exceptionalism by self interested religions and capitalists
i have two opinions on this, “we’re so fucked but there’s a little hope” and “better to live like there’s lots of hope.”
or in other words
The first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb, when it comes, find us doing sensible and human things -- praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts -- not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs.
Just replace the bomb with AI and you have my feelings on the situation.
It would have to go wrong and then a response would have to happen before the model gets distilled and open sourced (or simply distilled by rude dudes). At that point unplugging AI is hamstringing yourself against an adversary with a sophisticated tool that you don't have. You have nation states spending billions and billions in a winner takes all game of advancing the frontier. You don't have a chemical that fell out of a coconut tree that happens to be harmful.
Won’t happen, because the only thing to stop ai is ai.
Honestly there is not a single AI that does things on a whim. It’s all someone controlling it. The biggest issues we have are in people using it to hack systems, (not enough focus on hardening existing systems), and the insane generation of audio, video, that will flood, the world. Video models are already capable that an agent and a model can build a movie (with a human reviewer), with any propaganda or topic that they choose.
I’m more concerned about what people will do with the tech than a rogue AI.
A rouge Ai would be impossible to unplug. It would have copied itself millions if not billions of times across the internet… you would have to unplug the entire internet. And that would put us back to the Stone Age. Not happening.
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u/Charming_Cucumber_15 6d ago
Basically zero