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- Hacker News
- Yeah I don't get it. Why the maximalist hyperbole? AI is going to kill ALL humans! That's crazy. Why can't they warn about increased likelihood of cyberattacks or scams being easier to perpetrate like normal adults talking in public?by lz400
- Hinton was on the abc radio (Australia) this morning and used far too many unfortunate Anthropomorphisms. He did however acknowledge the unmeasurable theoretical risk of Skymesh was possibly less important than the immediate risk of bad actors.
I find the mental leaps from "in principle could distort BGP based on a closed model of BGP inside the sandbox" to "we meshed an AI into BGP and it instantly distorted global routing and took down all the worlds ambulances and HVAC systems" a bit odd.
Firstly, at least some of the surface of BGP is protected from specious route injections. Secondly, peerings can be dropped and routes blackholed. BGP is under attack from mis-configuration almost constantly. Why is the argument/axiom here that AI is going to instantly corrupt it and "take down the internet" when a large chunk of the Internet (China) is already a virtual island, and runs fine? Does this mean you really wanted to say "Chinese AI will destroy the western Internet" and were too coy about adversarial intent of ... people?
by ggm - In Rationalist circles, it's apparently common to share your p(doom) in casual conversation, with the understanding that it's putting a number on your hunch. Maybe it's not a good idea to post it on Twitter without elaborating?
On the other hand, in bookstores, you might see book titles like "The Uninhabitable Earth," "The Coming Civil War," and "If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies." Doom-mongering is a common part of the culture!
So what makes this particular tweet irresponsible?
Timing, maybe? People are on edge due to the HuggingFace incident.
by skybrian - I tend to believe what people actually do over what that say. If you earnestly believe over 10 percent chance, or say minus 1 billion human lives expected value, well I struggle to understand how they'd rationalize their current course of action of business as usual. Terminator 2's depiction of Sarah Connor comes to mind for what I'd expect, a logical consequence if you seriously believe and internalize the consequences.by rcr-anti
- This piece, like many anti-doom pieces - is grounded in what Ai does today. Doom scenarios are, however, all extrapolations of multiple exponential curves.
It’s hard to think up the exponential. It’s even harder to communicate an inference one is making across multiple exponentials.
We last had this is early 2020, where Doomers were stockpiling food and medicine and the anti-doomers were ridiculing them. Anti-doomers were focusing on the single exponential, whereas doomers were modelling virus evolution, monitoring and sequencing lag and social dynamics against the exponential. The latter was very hard to communicate before the fact as it was a combination of deep intuition and grappling with the exponential.
I am not saying covid is proof that ai doomers are right, I am saying it’s an example of the known property of human cognition - which is that it struggles with exponentials. Covid was 2 exponentials, AI I can rhink of at least 4 relevant ones.
To me - the fact that 3-4 generations from now AI will have superhuman hacking ability and superhuman persuasive ability (for intuition transfer - think of superhuman persuasive ability as superhuman ability to hack human systems) materialises bio risks swiftly. We already have technology to make robotic systems (mini drone swarms) that can kill humans en-masse with no credible defensive vector bar an EMP. Climbing up those exponentials for further 6 years makes me want to stockpile food and medicine.
by Mentlo - Any claim that AI will, or could, destroy humanity reduces to a claim that any sufficiently intelligent being - even a human - could destroy humanity. I find that much of the x-risk thought relies on religious thinking. Take for example: https://x.com/paulg/status/1660404244174782464.
If this line of thinking is taken too literally, we can never falsify it. Any specific hypothesis - nukes, bioweapons, spontaneously convincing us that life isn't worth living - can be deflected with the objection that if we can anticipate it and prevent it, it is not the route for a true ASI extinction event.
by sobellian - This is an excellent piece. Note that he is not saying that AI doesn't pose a risk. He's saying that it's irresponsible to make sensational, maximalist claims without strong evidence. If someone says that there's a 10% chance of human extinction by 2036, you can and should immediately stop taking them seriously.by fasterik
- Like (I assume) most of you, I have been struggling with this. And where I currently come down is that 1) I am very worried, but 2) I am more worried about human actors.
"AI" by itself won't kill us in the next ten years. I think. The reason I think that is that ten years from now, the tech economy won't be completely automated. I say this as a roboticist: as was adequately stated on a post earlier this week, robots are hard. So even a malign rational actor would still need human labor.
On the other hand, even the HuggingFace hack wasn't actually propagated by AI. it was initially started when humans directed the AI to achieve impossible results on a series of tests, and the AIs figured out that cheating was the only way to do that. That was then not caught by humans due to what seems to be a shockingly slack safety culture even for a company not known for its safety standards.
The point being: humans seem to me to be the weak link here. An AI isn't going to (for instance) engineer a bioweapon by itself. It's going to do so at someone's direction, and then significant parts of that thing are going to be assembled with human labor inputs.
I'm not sure what to do about the humans. Of course, we've had the ability to extinct ourselves for decades, and we're either muddled through, been lucky, or both. The problem with AI is that it pushes power down to the individual, not the nation-state or large corporation.
But it's nearly impossible to put odds on how likely that is to result in an extinction-level terrorist attack (which is what this would be). So I sympathize with the various researchers, but I have no idea how they came up with their figures, and I don't think they know either.