[HKH2]

I really can't grasp how people think that a system that doesn't have a need to preserve itself will somehow start thinking for itself.

AI is quite troublesome for privacy though. How much privacy humans need is a question we'll probably have answered the hard way.

[HeatrayEnjoyer]

Who said anything about thinking for itself?

A thing does not require intent or consciousness to be dangerous. How many chemists have blown themselves up because they didn't realize an experiment was dangerous? How many production systems have crashed because the developer didn't accurately predict what the code they wrote will do?

Alkali metals and C++ code do not require ill intent, but they will still obliterate your limbs / revenue if you build and use them wrong.

One of my more tangible hypotheses is a sort of runaway effect. Economic, geopolitical, and military competitive pressures will quickly push out anyone and anything that still relies on last era human-in-the-loop processes, the same way any organization that doesn't utilize artificial lighting, electricity, and instant communication will obviously be left far behind. You have to just trust that the machine running stock market transactions will do its math right.

But unlike transaction software failure modes, which quickly result in outright crashes or verifiably incorrect errors, failure modes of non-bayesian decision making software probably looks something like what happens when existing economic, geopolitical, and military decision-makers make decisions that are harmful, unethical, or otherwise undesirable for humanity. This time augmented with, if not superhuman intelligence, at least superhuman speed and superhuman knowledge breadth.

[sumanthvepa]

Love that observation on C++. That's the reason I love C++. It's a language for those who need, nay crave, absolute raw performance. No training wheels. Short of assembly, it's just as close to the machine as you can get.

[pdimitar]

> No training wheels.

Very cute for hobby projects, a huge liability for commercial projects.

Use as many training wheels there as humanly possible, please.

[sumanthvepa]

Sure. I use Java, Python and Javascript all the time. But when I need the performance, for demanding VR/ graphics, nothing comes close to combination of speed and expressive power of abstraction of C++.

[pdimitar]

C++ has many things, but expressive power is not one of them.

But Stockholm syndrome I guess. :P

[oakpond]

C++ has enough expressive power to make you wish it had less.

[nextaccountic]

Rust?

[stocknoob]

Does a prion have a need to preserve itself?

If you make enough varied AIs, some will have self-replicating behavior, just like if you make enough random proteins, some will self-replicate.

[HKH2]

Does a prion think for itself? Who said self-replication is sufficient for AGI?

[pdimitar]

Oh yeah, it will replicate after the computer is shut down and then reinstalled from scratch. Especially when it's much simpler than that i.e. the whole thing lives in a throwaway container.

[rafaelmn]

> I really can't grasp how people think that a system that doesn't have a need to preserve itself will somehow start thinking for itself.

Society exists because cooperation outperforms the alternatives. If you have human level AI at some point there is no benefit to cooperation and a major incentive to prevent anyone else gaining access to equal/better AI.

AI itself does not need to have any motivation - people in charge have plenty of incentives to eliminate the rest once they don't need them anymore.

[HKH2]

Sure, in the prisoner's dilemma we could trust that all other parties will do the right thing, but that seems very unlikely.

[loki-ai]

that’s precisely the point: the technical geniuses lack creativity to predict how things can go wrong in a thousand of different ways.

[orbital-decay]

What makes you think they're predicting the apocalypse correctly, then?

Another thing the technical geniuses tend to be good at is exploiting the power they suddenly obtain in their own interest, either directly or with regulations and collusion with those who hold actual hard power.

Evil AI owners seem to be much closer and far more material than an evil AI, and coincidentally it's something that is almost entirely lacking from the discourse, as public attention is too focused on sci-fi hypotheticals.

[PeterisP]

The bar is different - saying "there is no risk of apocalypse" requires you to be ~100% certain, because it you're saying "I'm 99% certain that there won't be a an apocalypse" then you're on the side of the AI-risk people, because a low-probability extinction event does justify action; the risk argument isn't that apocalypse is certain but rather that it is sufficiently plausible to take preventive measures.

[nradov]

I am only 99% certain that we won't be invaded by hostile aliens. Therefore we should take measures like building a giant space laser to prevent that apocalypse.

[PeterisP]

It is somewhat similar, but substantially different - we can make a solid argument that the likelihood of getting invaded by hostile aliens in the nearest century is far lower than 1%, and also if such an invasion does happen, then building a giant space laser won't make any difference at all.

The key difference between powerful alien invaders and us creating a powerful alien entity that we can't control is that the former either will or won't happen due to external circumstances, but the latter is something we would be doing to ourselves and can avoid if we choose to.

[nradov]

Bullshit. You can't presume to quantify the probability of either event. You're just making things up. All of the arguments are built on a foundation of sand. This stuff falls in the realm of religion and philosophy, not hard science and math.

[orbital-decay]

The issue is that the doomsday scenario is extremely vague. The actual mechanism of action of a hypothetical rogue AGI is usually handwaved away as "it will be self-improving, superhumanly persuasive, and far smarter than us, so it will somehow figure out how to do something, or convince us to do it". What exactly will happen? How exactly will it happen? Will the world do nothing until that moment? How do society, politics, military fit into that scenario? All that rationalist navel gazing I've seen so far is either hilariously unaware of the existence of the outside world or assumes it won't change in the process.

You can't fight what you can't even see, let alone not sure if it exists at all. You don't invent a pair of wings because 1900s' you thinks that "the scientists will invent an anti-aging cure in the next decade, and surely personal flight will be ubiquitous in 2000's". You don't design a plasma gun for your Mars landing just in case you land in a city between Martian canals and see an army of little green men there. The world doesn't work like that, by the time you reach the Mars surface the context will be wildly different. You get burned and put guardrails, maybe. Not the other way around. Nobody can see through higher order effects, no matter how smart they are. And as the threat becomes progressively more clear there will be more caution, if needed. Premature optimization yada yada.

What actually happens right now is everybody and my aunt seriously discussing the evil robots that will come and kill us. That's pure mass hysteria, caused by the scaremongering and the cult-like beliefs of very smart people with disproportional influence who can't contain their own conjectures and bullshit in the realm of science fiction.

On the other hand,the end goal of OpenAI is the major job replacement, according to their current charter. [1] "Broadly distributed"... will they distribute their utopia to North Korea? Not happening, isn't it? I think it's obvious that if the actual job replacement rate will ever get anywhere close to the levels of late 19th early 20th century industrialization, this will produce major societal shifts and struggles, wealth and power redistribution, and a lot of blood and wars. Because the dependence on your job is the only ephemeral influence you (as a worker) have on this world. And of course, the companies that control the AI will be gatekeepers, and they will be more than happy to close the open research and open source models, and pull the regulation ladder and lie in bed with politicians and military, like OpenAI already does for years, of course they realize that and their utopical self-contradicting "charter" is nothing more than marketing hogwash that they already changed and will change in the future.

This is far more realistic and will happen much earlier than the rogue AI science fiction, if happens at all. In fact it's slowly happening now, and it's not talked about nearly enough, because the attention is mostly misdirected onto the vague superhuman AI red herring.

[1] https://openai.com/charter

[PeterisP]

The actual mechanism of action is handwaved away because there are many options, we don't expect to ever have an exhaustive list and specifics of those are largely irrelevant with respect to preventing them, so IMHO it's not worth spending time and effort analyzing specific scenarios as long as we assume that there exists at least one plausible (even if unlikely) scenario. A hypothetical specific scenario of a rogue AI engineering and launching a deadly supervirus is effectively equivalent to a specific scenario resulting in a world consumed by 'grey goo' nanobots - you don't (can't) fix the former by implementing some resilience or detection for diseases, you don't (can't) fix the latter by doing extra research on nanorobotics, you approach both (and any others) by tackling the core issues of, for example, ensuring that you can control what goals artificial agents have even if they are self-modifying in some aspects.

Like, "What exactly will happen? How exactly will it happen?" is worth discussing if and only if one party seriously believes they can convince the other that none of the imaginable scenarios are even remotely plausible; and if we assume that there is at least one scenario where we can say "I'm 99% certain it won't happen and 1% it could" then that discussion is pretty much over, the existential risk is plausible (and the consequences of that are so much incomparably larger than e.g. major job displacement that it justifies attention even if it's many orders of magnitude less likely) and we should instead talk about how to prevent it.

I'm not making the argument that the existence of stronger-than-human general AI will result in a catastrophe, but I am asserting that the mere existence of a stronger-than-human general AI (without some controls we currently can't figure out how to make or even if they are possible) carries at least some plausible chance of existential risk - for the sake or argument, let's say at least 1%; and I am asserting that a 1% of existential risk is a totally absolutely unacceptably high risk that must not be allowed to happen, because it is far more important[1] than e.g 100% certainty of major job displacement and social unrest.

"Will the world do nothing until that moment?" I think that what we saw from the global reaction to things like start of Covid-19 or climate change is completely sufficient to assume that we can't rely on the world stopping a major-but-stoppable issue in a timely manner, so "surely the world will do something" is not a sufficiently convincing argument to discount the risk; I don't think you can plausibly deny that even for a clearly catastrophic problem there is at least a 10% chance that the world could still delay sufficient action until it's too late; and this means that it doesn't really matter what the exact likelihood of that is based on society, politics, military aspects, we should work with the assumption that the world actually might do nothing to prevent any specific scenario from unfolding, and we should de-risk it in other ways.

[1] Looking at other posts, perhaps this is where we'd disagree, and in that case it's probably the core of the discussion which also doesn't really depend on any details of specific scenarios.

[oh_sigh]

So...who isn't lacking the creativity? In fact, I would say techies are unreasonably gloomy because they grew up obsessing over sci-fi.

[pdimitar]

Which also means they can't predict the apocalyptic scenarios.

Q.E.D.