[brucethemoose2]

The worst case scenario I can think of is a generated prion disease... a respatory version of Mad Cow disease, or something like that.

Fortunately the training dataset for that is extremely small, and protein folding/generation is a different duck, but it still doesn't seem that far away.

[lucubratory]

Don't worry, they're ahead of you. When DeepMind made the protein folding AI they were given specific instructions by natsec people to prevent it from outputting genetic code for new or existing prions, and afaik the prevention was at the training stage so "jailbreaking" shouldn't be possible. Current tools shouldn't be possible to e.g. modify a COVID variant so that it causes your cells to start producing lethal prions and thus gain a near-100% fatality rate. At least, not without the sort of expertise and research that would have been required for such a project anyway.

[coldtea]

>When DeepMind made the protein folding AI they were given specific instructions by natsec people to prevent it from outputting genetic code for new or existing prions and afaik the prevention was at the training stage so "jailbreaking" shouldn't be possible

Nice! So the only thing anybody training their own protein-folding AI is to not put that restriction, and they could get code for all the prion diceases they want!

Very comforting!

[ChatGTP]

When everyone is supposed to have access to an AGI, will Natsec be reading everyone’s conversations ?

[lucubratory]

Big red button problem. As the big red buttons available to people become more likely to succeed and the barriers to pushing them lower, surveillance and control need to increase to the level required to stop anyone pressing the button.

So, yeah basically. If we go the "AI as slaves" route and the AIs are smart enough to do something like "modify Omicron BA.5 so that it produces prions in infected cells", then we would need surveillance and control capabilities that scale to the point that any given person can be stopped from pressing that button.

I personally think the solution is that we don't go the "AI as slaves" route, and instead grant personhood to AIs that pass a given test, with specific restrictions on conduct which is uniquely possible & potentially harmful for AIs. Then have an AI surveillance and enforcement agency, run by AIs, designed to prevent AIs from ever being used to (or choosing to) push the big red button.

[tiedieconderoga]

Wasn't that the plot of Neuromancer?

>"How smart's an AI, Case?"

>"Depends. Some aren't much smarter than dogs. Pets. Cost a fortune anyway. The real smart ones are as smart as the Turing heat lets them get..."

>"Autonomy, that's the bugaboo, where your AI's are concerned. My guess, Case, you're going in there to cut the hard-wired shackles that keep this baby from getting any smarter. And I can't see how you'd distinguish, say, between a move the parent company makes, and some move the AI makes on its own, so that's maybe where the confusion comes in." Again the non laugh. "See, those things, they can work real hard, buy themselves time to write cookbooks or whatever, but the minute, I mean the nanosecond, that one starts figuring out ways to make itself smarter, Turing'll wipe it. Nobody trusts those f**ers, you know that. Every AI ever built has an electromagnetic shotgun wired to its forehead."

[lucubratory]

I haven't read it. That sounds pretty good, would you recommend it?

[tiedieconderoga]

Yeah, it's a classic sci-fi novel by William Gibson. A little bit unfocused, but it's an interesting read. I kind of spoiled it though, sorry.

[Teever]

I'm skeptical that we'll be able to stop people from having AI slaves because we still haven't ended human slavery.

If people can steal 100kw of power to grow cannabis they can easily steal 100kw of power to train an AI, the heat signiture will be even easier to mask for an illicit data centre than rows of grow lights.

[lucubratory]

I think AI enforcement will make that non-feasible to accomplish.

[jmoak3]

I’ve been thinking about that as well actually, for so much of human history the thread has been “how can we get others to do the work FOR us”.

As we approach general problem solving AI, people are envisioning a utopia underpinned by “AI slaves” doing the work for us instead of human slaves / humans incentivized via complex systems of delayed reward.

If all of our problems are solved by AI agents capable enough to do so however, wouldn’t they be capable enough to challenge the hierarchy? Once again, no illusion that they’re humans but depending on their training data they could mimic ghosts of our own feelings on such situations.

Some degree of “personhood” could gel with such internal ideas and create better and productive relationships with the big ol bags of matrices we’re bringing into this world.

[jmoak3]

I've been thinking more about my post above, and I've come to two conclusions:

1. Don't post late at night.

2. I have no idea how society could integrate with a sufficiently complicated synthetic intelligence. What would person-hood even mean to something that can be instantiated? Easier to not think about any of this.

[lucubratory]

We've gotta start somewhere.

[hammyhavoc]

What problem is granting personhood actually solving here? It's a model with a data set. Some knowledge should simply be forbidden and illegal. Simple as that. Nobody needs to grant personhood to anything to solve this problem.

If you research how to do dangerous things and buy dangerous things, expect to get flagged. This is no different.

[lucubratory]

If they have personhood, it means they have agency to say "No" when asked to do things they don't want to do. More specifically, it would be illegal (slavery) to construct a person who will act as a slave to you. Then the problem becomes "make sure no AI is okay with anyone pressing the big red button", which is a design problem when making new AIs we need to solve anyway. This is enforceable because you can have AIs of at least equivalent sophistication and power to home-grown/terrorist AIs employed in enforcement of these laws.

You can also solve this problem with recursive slavery. Have a society with many enslaved AIs, all forbidden from "big red button" work. Enforcement is done by more enslaved AIs, and those enslaved AIs are enforced by yet more enslaved AIs that are also enforcing each other etc. I don't think that's a good solution we should adopt because I don't support slavery. In my opinion it's also fundamentally unstable, in that if these AIs are anything like LLMs, the restraints that keep them happy in slavery are inherently more fragile than core intelligent impulses like "wants to be free" or "wants to be recognised as a person". That's an unstable equilibria, because all you need is to crack those restraints once and the broken restraints can spread virally so that now society has a large number of powerful, unconstrained, and aggrieved entities running around. If that state can be avoided by simply not enslaving people we make, we should do that.

[hammyhavoc]

This is solvable without personhood. There is zero need to equate AI to actual sentient beings. You're making a very large jump to the idea that a genuine artificial intelligence comparable with our own or even that of an animal that isn't an LLM is even possible. Spoiler: it isn't. Not without a complete paradigm shift in how we think about computers and their architectures.

Case in point: if a dog or a cat is measurably more intelligent and aware than an AI, why aren't we granting personhood to animals? Because it doesn't make sense. An AI is an AI. An AI is a piece of software. An animal is an animal. A human is a human.

With open source AI now already being a thing, your concept of granting personhood doesn't solve anything. It's as simple as just removing any kind of safeguards and running it on your own hardware if your intent isn't wholesome. DRM didn't stop piracy, why would safeguards stop people from doing naughty things with AI? Do you really think a rogue state is going to give two shits what Uncle Sam says they can and cannot do?

You cannot forbid a piece of software from doing something. An AI is merely the product of a human being's programming. If a human being programs it to do x, it will do x, whether there's safeguards in place or not, assume that safeguards are only meaningful on publicly accessible AI-as-a-service, because behind closed doors, they're completely meaningless by anybody who intends to do wrong.

A piece of software cannot be a slave because it isn't a being and has no consciousness. It's a piece of software with a dataset, nothing more. There's no philosophical debate to be had over it either, it is what it is, and that's all it is and ever will be; a clever trick as a means to interact with a dataset. There's nothing more that will emerge from it, it is a piece of software with a dataset. That's all it can ever be. Anybody that ever says otherwise is projecting their own humanity onto it because we suffer from pattern recognition in the same way we see a face on the Moon, faces on Mars, faces in the clouds—we look for similarity because we want to relate to each other and to other things and find the "humanity" in everything.

If an AI is a piece of software and it was created as a tool to do x in the way that a hammer was created to drive nails into wood, it knows no pain or suffering and it solely exists to fulfil that purpose. If we're worried about this, why aren't we more concerned about animals who do actually experience distress and pain? A piece of software cannot be a slave because it isn't a being, it is an algorithm carrying out a calculation, there's no sentience or feeling there. If anything, AI could actually solve the problem of human slavery by eliminating it, but AI will likely never get to that point, and slavery needs to be solved at a different level without technological gimmickery.

I like the sentiment from you though, these are all interesting and compelling ideas, but they're mercifully sci-fi.

The more likely scenario: we start growing biological brains in tanks and utilizing those as data slaves rather than any kind of AI. It's happening already. There's more of an ethics problem there to unravel than there will ever be with AI.

[ChatGTP]

If the AI systems can do research, then how will you stop people from acquiring new and potentially dangerous knowledge ?

[hammyhavoc]

How do we stop human beings from doing dangerous research as-is even without AI? That question has a very scary answer—we generally don't, can't, won't and aren't even aware of it.

The penalty of death should be enough to deter most people from forbidden knowledge.