I can probably offer one, if I understand what aspect you're skeptical of. Are you skeptical that an AI would ever be smart enough to come up with a plan to cause harm? That it would ever try to come up with a plan to cause harm? That it could execute such a plan, without arms and legs and a body? Or that, after coming up with a plan to cause harm, it wouldn't be trivial for humans to stop by simply unplugging the computer?
Second of all, it is not even nearly powerful enough to convince anyone to do anything, or anything like that. If it was 100 times more powerful, then maybe.
I can see current problems being flooding spam/misinformation/propaganda on internet forums. But that has been happening for a while and this will make people more skeptical of what they read (hopefully)
But finally, if it does cause harm (don’t think it will. great tool). Then who cares? Why try to stop it. You can’t stop it, nobody can. Why whinge and moan like the luddites? I don’t get it.
Why cause harm? Basically, by accident. If you try to solve a problem really hard, and you're really good at it, and you aren't also trying very hard to preserve a bunch of things that are important to humans, you're very likely to destroy a lot of things that are important to humans in the process.
100 times the computational power may be... 2 years out, at the rate we're going. GPT-4 has about 500 times as many parameters as GPT-3, and that was released 3 years ago. The amount of power people are dedicating to these is following an exponential track.
It's not about it causing harm -- I think most people have accepted that. It's that we may make an AI that's so smart, so good at everything, that trying to control it is like me playing chess against Stockfish. If it gets to that point, and it happens to have learned a goal / set of goals that aren't 100% friendly to humanity (which seems like an inevitability based on our current abilities at AI alignment) then it will optimize those goals so hard that we all die in the process. We'll end up with a planet with all silicon turned into solar panels and computing power, and probably all other elements put to the use of the AI as well.
OK, so to be clear, I don't think this AI will harm us, not in its current configuration. The author of the article says the same. The concern is about a future AI, one which is capable of the sort of reasoning that humans can do. The main danger with today's AI is that they will be so commercially successful that it will drive enough investment into AI research that a more powerful AI is constructed.
Sure, I get that. But this has been worked on for decades in the background and only achievable now. It’s amazing and new to so many people, but this “sparks of agi” etc is all hype and honestly i think more damaging to people than ai possibly could be. You could suppose the earth would implode if we kept walking on it too, but nobody is going to stay sitting.
Maybe it's just a matter of perspective. I agree that this is something that's been worked on for decades; however, it's also the case that progress seems to be getting faster. The AI field now has a problem where AIs are improving faster than benchmarks can measure them, and new benchmarks get saturated almost as soon as they're introduced. [1]
The human mind is a mystery, we don't know how it works. But it works somehow. There are some algorithms it's using under the hood, as mysterious as they may be. We might be searching blindly in the dark, grabbing hold of anything that feels promising, and we're probably still far away from the "right way" of doing it, of getting a computer to think the way humans think. And I'm sure we won't find the whole thing at once; maybe we'll have reverse-engineered the visual cortex, but not the vestibular system, which perhaps works completely differently. But if we were getting closer to stumbling on the right solution, that rapid saturation of benchmarks is the kind of behaviour I would expect to see.
Comments
I haven’t heard a single realistic argument on how this AI will harm us.
I can probably offer one, if I understand what aspect you're skeptical of. Are you skeptical that an AI would ever be smart enough to come up with a plan to cause harm? That it would ever try to come up with a plan to cause harm? That it could execute such a plan, without arms and legs and a body? Or that, after coming up with a plan to cause harm, it wouldn't be trivial for humans to stop by simply unplugging the computer?
Why would it try to cause harm first of all?
Second of all, it is not even nearly powerful enough to convince anyone to do anything, or anything like that. If it was 100 times more powerful, then maybe.
I can see current problems being flooding spam/misinformation/propaganda on internet forums. But that has been happening for a while and this will make people more skeptical of what they read (hopefully)
But finally, if it does cause harm (don’t think it will. great tool). Then who cares? Why try to stop it. You can’t stop it, nobody can. Why whinge and moan like the luddites? I don’t get it.
Why cause harm? Basically, by accident. If you try to solve a problem really hard, and you're really good at it, and you aren't also trying very hard to preserve a bunch of things that are important to humans, you're very likely to destroy a lot of things that are important to humans in the process.
100 times the computational power may be... 2 years out, at the rate we're going. GPT-4 has about 500 times as many parameters as GPT-3, and that was released 3 years ago. The amount of power people are dedicating to these is following an exponential track.
It's not about it causing harm -- I think most people have accepted that. It's that we may make an AI that's so smart, so good at everything, that trying to control it is like me playing chess against Stockfish. If it gets to that point, and it happens to have learned a goal / set of goals that aren't 100% friendly to humanity (which seems like an inevitability based on our current abilities at AI alignment) then it will optimize those goals so hard that we all die in the process. We'll end up with a planet with all silicon turned into solar panels and computing power, and probably all other elements put to the use of the AI as well.
OK, so to be clear, I don't think this AI will harm us, not in its current configuration. The author of the article says the same. The concern is about a future AI, one which is capable of the sort of reasoning that humans can do. The main danger with today's AI is that they will be so commercially successful that it will drive enough investment into AI research that a more powerful AI is constructed.
Sure, I get that. But this has been worked on for decades in the background and only achievable now. It’s amazing and new to so many people, but this “sparks of agi” etc is all hype and honestly i think more damaging to people than ai possibly could be. You could suppose the earth would implode if we kept walking on it too, but nobody is going to stay sitting.
Maybe it's just a matter of perspective. I agree that this is something that's been worked on for decades; however, it's also the case that progress seems to be getting faster. The AI field now has a problem where AIs are improving faster than benchmarks can measure them, and new benchmarks get saturated almost as soon as they're introduced. [1]
The human mind is a mystery, we don't know how it works. But it works somehow. There are some algorithms it's using under the hood, as mysterious as they may be. We might be searching blindly in the dark, grabbing hold of anything that feels promising, and we're probably still far away from the "right way" of doing it, of getting a computer to think the way humans think. And I'm sure we won't find the whole thing at once; maybe we'll have reverse-engineered the visual cortex, but not the vestibular system, which perhaps works completely differently. But if we were getting closer to stumbling on the right solution, that rapid saturation of benchmarks is the kind of behaviour I would expect to see.
[1]: "Foundation models and the next era of AI", Microsoft Research, https://youtu.be/HQI6O5DlyFc?t=958