Can someone outline how AI could actually harm us directly? I don’t believe for a second sci-fi novel nonsense about self-replicating robots that we can’t unplug. My Roomba can’t even do its very simple task without getting caught on the rug. I don’t know of any complicated computing cluster or machine that exists that wouldn’t implode without human intervention on an almost daily level.
If we are talking about AI stoking human fears and weaknesses to make them do awful things, then ok I can see that and am afraid we have been there for some time with our algorithms and AI journalism.
> Can someone outline how AI could actually harm us directly?
at best, maybe it adds a new level of sophistication to phishing attacks. That's all i can think of. Terminators walking the streets murdering grandma? I just don't see it.
what I think is most likely is a handful of companies trying to sell enterprise on ML which has been going on since forever. YouTubers making even funnier "Presidents discuss anime" vids and 4chan doing what 4chan does but faster.
You start by saying “show me examples of” and finish by saying yeah “this is as already a problem.” Not sure what point you’re trying to make, but I think you should also consider lab leaks in the sense of weaponized ai escaping or being used “off label” in ways that yield novel types of risk. Just because you cannot imagine future tech at present doesn’t indicate much.
Consider an AI as a personal assistant. The AI is in charge of filtering and sorting your email. It has as a priority to make your life more efficient. It decides that your life is more efficient if you don't see emails that upset you, so it deletes them. Now consider that you are in charge of something very important.
It doesn't take a whole lot of imagination to come up with scenarios like these.
I don't need to know how a chess computer will beat me to know that it will beat me. If the only way you will entertain x-risk is to have a specific scenario described to you that you personally find plausible, you will never see any risk coming that isn't just a variation of what you are already familiar with. Do not constrain yourself to considering only that which can be thought up by your limited imagination.
> Do not constrain yourself to considering only that which can be thought up by your limited imagination.
Don't let your limited imagination constrain you're ability to live in fear of what could be. Is that what you mean? So it's no longer sufficient to live in fear of everything, now you need to live in fear even when you can't think of anything to be afraid of. No thanks.
Instead of taking the most obtuse reading of my point, how about you try to engage intelligently? There are some manner of unmaterialized risk that we can anticipate through analysis and reasonable extrapolation. When that risk has high negative utility, we should rationally engage with its possibility and consider ways to mitigate it.
Why not? It has already been shown that AI can be (mis)used to identify good candidates for chemical weapons. [1] Next in the pipeline is obviously some religious nut (who would not otherwise have the capability) using it to design a virus which doesn't set off alarms at the gene synthesis / custom construct companies, and then learning to transfect it.
More banally, state actors can already use open source models to efficiently create misinformation. It took what, 60,000 votes to swing the US election in 2016? Imagine what astroturfing can be done with 100x the labor thanks to LLMs.
> Next in the pipeline is obviously some religious nut (who would not otherwise have the capability)
So you're saying that:
1. the religious nut would not find the same information on Google or in books
2. if someone is motivated enough to commit such an act, the ease of use of AI vs. web search would make a difference
Has anyone checked how many biology students can prepare dangerous substances with just what they learned in school?
Have we removed the sites disseminating dangerous information off the internet first? What is to stop someone from training a model on such data anytime they want?
1. The religious nut doesn't have the knowledge or the skill sets right now, but AI might enable them.
2. Accessibility of information makes a huge difference. Prior to 2020 people rarely stole Kias or catalytic converters. When knowledge of how to do this (and for catalytic converters, knowledge of their resale value) became available (i.e. trending on Tiktok), then thefts became frequent. The only barrier which disappeared from 2019 to 2021 was that the information became very easily accessible.
Your last two questions are not counterarguments, since AIs are already outperforming the median biology student, and obviously removing sites from the internet is not feasible. Easier to stop foundation model development than to censor the internet.
> What is to stop someone from training a model on such data anytime they want?
Present proposals are to limit GPU access and compute for training runs. Data centers are kind of like nuclear enrichment facilities in that they are hard to hide, require large numbers of dual-use components that are possible to regulate (centrifuges vs. GPUs), and they have large power requirements which make them show up on aerial imaging.
What happens if someone develops a highly effective distributed training algorithm permitting a bunch of people with gaming PCs and fast broadband to train foundation models in a manner akin to Folding@Home?
If that happened open efforts could marshal tens or hundreds of thousands of GPUs.
Right now the barrier is that training requires too much synchronization bandwidth between compute nodes, but I’m not aware of any hard mathematical reason there couldn’t be an algorithm that does not have to sync so much. Even if it were less efficient this could be overcome by the sheer number of nodes you could marshal.
Is that a serious argument against an AI pause? There are potential scenarios in which regulating AI is challenging, so it isn't worth doing? Why don't we stop regulating nuclear material while we're at it?
In my mind the existential risks make regulation of large training runs worth it. Should distributed training runs become an issue we can figure out a way to inspect them, too.
To respond to the specific htpothetical, if that scenario happens it will presumably be by either a botnet, by a large group of wealthy hobbyists, or by a corporation or a nation state intent on circumventing the pause. Botnets have been dismantled before, and large groups of wealthy hoobyists tend to interested in self preservation (at least more so than individuals). Corporate and state actors defecting on international treaties can be penalized via standard mechanisms.
You are talking about some pretty heavy handed authoritarian stuff to ban math on the basis of hypothetical risks. The nuclear analogy isn’t applicable because we all know that a-bombs really work. There is no proof of any kind of outsized risk from real world AI beyond other types of computing that can be used for negative purposes like encryption or cryptocurrency.
Here’s a legit question: you say pause. Pause until what? What is the go condition? You can never prove an unbounded negative like “AI will never ever become dangerous” so I would think there is no go condition anyone could agree on.
… which means people eventually just ignore the pause when they get tired of
it and the hysteria dies out. Why bother then?
>It took what, 60,000 votes to swing the US election in 2016?
this is a conspiracy theory that gained popularity around the election but in the first impeachment hearings, those making allegations regarding foreign interference failed to produce any evidence whatsoever of a real targeted campaign in collusion with the Russian government.
Eh, he's not wrong there -- our elections are subject to chaos theory at this point, more than the rule of law. Sensitive dependence on both initial conditions and invisible thresholds. The Russian "butterfly effect" in 2016 was very real. Even if it wasn't enough on its own to tip the balance in Trump's favor, they were very clear that Trump was their candidate of choice, and they very clearly took action in accordance with that. Neither of these statements is up for the slightest debate at this point.
However, the possibility of foreign election interference, real or imagined, is not a valid reason to hold back progress on AI.
The only thing keeping bioweapons from being easy to make is information becoming easily available.
> Essentially you are advocating against information being more efficiently available.
Yes. Some kinds of information should be kept obscure, even if it is theoretically possible for an intelligent individual with access to the world's scientific literature to rediscover them. The really obvious case for this is in regards to the proliferation of WMDs.
For nuclear weapons information is not the barrier to manufacture: we can regulate and track uranium, and enrichment is thought to require industrial scale processes. But the precursors for biological weapons are unregulated and widely available, so we need to gatekeep the relevant skills and knowledge.
I'm sure you will agree with me that if access information on how to make a WMD becomes even a few order of magnitudes as accessible as information on how to steal a Kia or how to steal a catalytic converter, then we will have lost.
My argument is that a truly intelligent AI without safeguards or ethics would make bioweapons accessible to the public, and we would be fucked.
If we are talking about AI stoking human fears and weaknesses to make them do awful things, then ok I can see that and am afraid we have been there for some time with our algorithms and AI journalism.