Some days it looks to be a three-way race between AI, climate change, and nuclear weapons proliferation to see who wipes out humanity first.
But on closer inspection, you see that humans are playing all three sides, and still we are losing.
this post was submitted on 30 Oct 2023
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AI, climate change, and nuclear weapons proliferation
One of those is not like the others. Nuclear weapons can wipe out humanity at any minute right now. Climate change has been starting the job of wiping out humanity for a while now. When and how is AI going to wipe out humanity?
This is not a criticism directed at you, by the way. It's just a frustration that I keep hearing about AI being a threat to humanity and it just sounds like a far-fetched idea. It almost seems like it's being used as a way to distract away from much more critically pressing issues like the myriad of environmental issues that we are already deep into, not just climate change. I wonder who would want to distract from those? Oil companies would definitely be number 1 in the list of suspects.
Agreed. This kind of debate is about as pointless as declaring self-driving cars are coming out in 5 years. The tech is way too far behind right now, and it's not useful to even talk about it until 50 years from now.
For fuck's sake, just because a chatbot can pretend it's sentient doesn't mean it actually is sentient.
Some large tech companies didn’t want to compete with open source, he added.
Here. Here's the real lead. Google has been scared of AI open source because they can't profit off of freely available tools. Now, they want to change the narrative, so that the government steps in regulates their competition. Of course, their highly-paid lobbyists will by right there to write plenty of loopholes and exceptions to make sure only the closed-source corpos come out on top.
Fear. Uncertainty. Doubt. Oldest fucking trick in the book.
When and how is AI going to wipe out humanity?
With nuclear weapons and climate change.
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I don't think the oil companies are behind these articles. That is very much a wheels within wheels type thinking that corporations don't generally invest in. It is easier to just deny climate change instead of getting everyone distracted by something else.
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52-yo American dude here, no longer worried about nuclear apocalypse. Been there, done that, ain't seeing it. If y'all think geopolitics are fucked up now, 🎵"You should have seen it in color."🎶
We can close a time or three, but no one's insane enough to push the button, and no ONE can push the button. Even Putin in his desperation will be stymied by the people who actually have to push MULTIPLE buttons.
AI? IDGAF. Computers have power sources and plugs. Absolutely disastrous events could unfold, but enough people pulling enough plugs will kill any AI insurgency. Look at Terminator 2 and ask yourself why the AI had to have autonomous machines to win. I could take out the neighborhood power supply with a couple of suitable guns. I'm sure smarter people than I could shut down DCs.
Climate change? Sorry kids, it's too late and you are righteously fucked. Not saying we shouldn't go full force on mitigation efforts, but y'all haven't seen the changes I've seen in 50 years. Winters are clearly warmer, summers hotter, and I just got back from my camp in the swamp. The swamp is dry for the first time in 4 years.
And here's one you might not have personally experienced; The insects are disappearing. I could write an essay on bugs alone. And don't start me on wildlife populations.
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Then the errant gamma ray burst sneaks in for the kill.
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Oh, you mean it wasn't just concidence that the moment OpenAI, Google and MS were in position they started caving to oversight and claiming that any further development should be licensed by the government?
I'm shocked. Shocked, I tell you.
I mean, I get that many people were just freaking out about it and it's easy to lose track, but they were not even a little bit subtle about it.
Exactly. This is classic strategy for first movers. Once you hold the market, use legislation to dig your moat.
AI is going to change quite a bit but I couldn't wrap my head around the end of the world stuff.
It won't end the world because AI doesn't work the way that Hollywood portrays it.
No AI has ever been shown to have self agency, if it's not given instructions it'll just sit there. Even a human child would attempt to leave room if left alone in there.
So the real risk is not that and AI will decide to destroy humanity it's that a human will tell the AI to destroy their enemies.
But then you just get back around to mutually assured destruction, if you tell your self redesigning thinking weapon to attack me I'll tell my self redesigning thinking weapon to attack you.
I’m an AI researcher at one of the world’s top universities on the topic. While you are correct that no AI has demonstrated self-agency, it doesn’t mean that it won’t imitate such actions.
These days, when people think AI, they mostly are referring to Language Models as these are what most people will interact with. A language model is trained on a corpus of documents. In the event of Large Language Models like ChatGPT, they are trained on just about any written document in existence. This includes Hollywood scripts and short stories concerning sentient AI.
If put in the right starting conditions by a user, any language model will start to behave as if it were sentient, imitating the training data from its corpus. This could have serious consequences if not protected against.
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AI doesn't work the way that Hollywood portrays it
AI does, but we haven't developed AI and have no idea how to. The thing everyone calls AI today is just really good ML.
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Imagine 9-11 with prions. MAD depends on everyone being rational self-interested without a very alien value system. It really only works in the case you got like three governments pointing nukes at each other. It doesn't work if the group doesn't care about tomorrow or thinks that they are going into heaven or is convinced that they can't be killed or any other of the deranged reasons that motivate people to do these types of acts.
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At worst it'll be a similar impact to social media and big data.
Try asking the big players what they think of heavily limiting and regulating THOSE fields.
They went all "oh, yeah, we're totally seeing the robot apocalypse happening right here" the moment open source alternatives started to pop up because at that point regulatory barriers would lock those out while they remain safely grandfathered in. The official releases were straight up claiming only they knew how to do this without making Skynet, it was absurd.
Which, to be clear, doesn't mean regulation isn't needed. On all of the above. Just that the threat is not apocalyptic and keeping the tech in the hands of these few big corpos is absolutely not a fix.
Why do you think Sam Altman is always using FUD to push for more AI restrictions? He already got his data collection, so he wants to make sure ""Open""AI is the only game in town and prevent any future competition from obtaining the same amount of data they collected.
Still, I have to give Zuck his credit here, the existence of open models like LLaMa 2 that can be fine-tuned and ran locally has really put a damper on OpenAI's plans.
"Ng said the idea that AI could wipe out humanity could lead to policy proposals that require licensing of AI"
Otherwise stated: Pay us to overregulate and we'll protect you from extinction. A Mafia perspective.
Right?!?!! Lines are obvious. Only if they thought they could get away with it, and they might, actually, but also what if?!?!
Restricting open source offerings only drives them underground where they will be used with fewer ethical considerations.
Not that big tech is ethical in its own right.
Bot fight!
Restricting AI would require surveillance on every computer all the time.
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I don't think there's any stopping the "fewer ethical considerations", banned or not. For each angle of AI that some people want to prevent, there are others who specifically want it.
Though there is one angle that does affect all of that. The more AI stuff happening in the open, the faster the underground stuff will come along because they can learn from the open stuff. Driving it underground will slow it down, but then you can still have it pop up when it's ready with less capability to counter it with another AI-based solution.
Lol how? No seriously, HOW exactly would AI 'wipe out humanity'???
All this fear mongering bollocks is laughable at this point, or it should be. Seriously there is no logical pathway to human extinction by using AI and these people need to put the comic books down.
The only risks AI pose are to traditional working patterns, which have been always exploited to further a numbers game between Billionaires (and their assets).
These people are not scared about losing their livelihoods, but losing the ability to control yours. Something that makes life easier and more efficient requiring less work? Time to crack out the whips I suppose?
Working in a corporate environment for 10+ years I can say I've never seen a case where large productivity gains turned into the same people producing even more. It's always fewer people doing the same amount of work. Desired outputs are driven less by efficiency and more by demand.
Let's say Ford found a way to produce F150s twice as fast. They're not going to produce twice as many, they'll produce the same amount and find a way to pocket the savings without benefiting workers or consumers at all. That's actually what they're obligated to do, appease shareholders first.
I mean I don't want an AI to do what I do as a job. They don't have to pay the AI and food and housing, in a lot of places, aren't seen as a human right, but a privilege you are allowed if you have money to buy it.
Just wait and see
Remindmebot! 10 years
All the biggest tech/IT consulting firms that used to hire engineering college freshers by the millions each year have declared they either won't be recruiting at all this month, or will only be recruiting for senior positions. If AI were to wipe out humanity it'll probably be through unemployment-related poverty thanks to our incompetent policymakers.
A technological revolution which disrupts the current capitalist standard through the elimination of labor scarcity, ultimately rendering the capital class obsolete isn't far off from Marx's original speculative endgame for historical materialism. All the other stuff beyond that is kind of wishy washy, but the original point about technological determinism has some legs imo
When Google's annual revenue from its search engine is estimated to be around $70 to $80 billion, no wonder there is great concern from big tech about the numerous A.I tools out there, that would spell an end to that fire hose of sweet sweet monetization.
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Enforce privacy friendliness & open source through regulation and all three of those points are likely mood.
If you're wondering how AI wipes us out, you'd have to consider humanity's tendency to adopt any advantage offered in warfare. Nations are in perpetual distrust of each other -- an evolutionary characteristic of our tribal brains. The other side is always plotting to dominate you, take your patch of dirt. Your very survival depends on outpacing them! You dip your foot in the water, add AI to this weapons system, or that self-driving tank. But look, the other side is doing the same thing. You train even larger models, give them more control of your arsenal. But look, the other side is doing even more! You develop even more sophisticated AI models; your very survival depends on it! And then, one day, your AI model is so sophisticated, it becomes self aware...and you wonder where did it all go wrong.
So you're basically scared of skynet?
They went a bit too far with the argument... the AI doesn't need to become self-aware, just exceptionally efficient at eradicating "the enemy"... just let it loose from all sides all at once, and nobody will survive.
How many people are there in the world, who aren't considered an "enemy" by at least someone else?
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These dudes are convinced AI is gonna wipe us out despite the fact it can't even figure out the right number of fingers to give us.
We're so far away from this being a problem that it never will be, because climate change will have killed us all long before the machines have a chance to.
People may argue that AI is quickly improving on this but it will take a massive leap between a perfect diffusion model an Artificial General Intelligence. Fundamentally, those aren't even the same kind of thing.
But AI as it is today can already cause a lot of harm simply by taking over jobs that people need to make a living, on the lack of something like UBI.
Some people say this kind of Skynet fearmongering is nothing but another kind of marketing for AI investors. It makes its developments seem much more powerful than they actually are.
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File this under duuuuuuhhhhh
The tech companies did not invent the AI risk concept. Culturally, it emerged out of 1990s futurism.
Karel Čapek wrote about it in 1920
Asimov actively named it the Frankenstein Complex in the 40's/50's, Ellison wrote about AM in 60's.....this definitely isn't a 90's vanity.
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Not just that, but also that.
The Google Brain cofounder is not Big Tech?
Imo, Andrew Ng is actually a cool guy. He started coursera and deeplearning.ai to teach ppl about machine/deep learning. Also, he does a lot of stuff at Stanford.
I wouldn't put him in the corporate shill camp.
I took several of his classes. At the very least he's an excellent instructor.
He really is. He’s one of those rare instructors that can take the very complex and intricate topics and break them down into something that you can digest as a student, while still giving you room to learn and experiment yourself. In essence, an actual master at his craft.
I also agree with the comment that he doesn’t come across as the corporate shill type, much more like a guy that just really loves ML/AI and wants to spread that knowledge.
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Obviously a part of the equation. All of these people with massive amounts of wealth power and influence push for horrific shit primarily because it’ll make them a fuck ton of money and the consequences won’t hit till they’re gone so fuck it
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Ok, you know what? I'm in...
If all the crazy people in the world collectively stop spending crazy points on sky wizards and climate skepticism, and put all of their energy into AI doomerism, I legitimately think the world might be a better place.
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