[beachy]

I don't get this hand waving.

Does anyone really think that nefarious foreign powers aren't already researching with no guard rails, with the explicit goal of developing AI-powered autonomous weapons, propaganda platforms, deepfake extortion sites, scambots etc.?

You can be sure they won't be slowed down by regulation.

[andy99]

All current "guardrails" are silly censorship / political correctness stuff, or for business appropriateness. They are also trivially circumvented. There is no "threat" from the un-shielded capability of current or foreseeable ML models.

[whimsicalism]

none of yall saying this “foresaw” anything even in 2020 when it was obvious.

i’ve been listening to skeptics be wrong about future capability predictions for 4 years now and the confidence doesn’t seem to be waning at all. i have no clue what the future brings but your confidence is misplaced

[astrange]

I don't think this was obvious in 2020, it wasn't a popular research direction until InstructGPT came out in 2022.

I have continued to have the same opinion of it not being a problem since then. Especially since the AI doomer theories are based on 90s ideas of GOFAI that isn't even how GPTs work.

LLMs are a pretty neat impossible thing, but we'd need a few more uncorrelated impossible things for it to be "dangerous".

[janice1999]

> You can be sure they won't be slowed down by regulation.

You should read up on existing regulations. The EU AI Act explicitly exempts national security, research and military uses for example.

Regulation isn't some all or nothing force that smothers everything. It's carefully crafted legislation (well, should be../) that is supposed to work to benefit the state and its citizens. Let's not give OpenAI a free for all to do anything because you think China is making Skynet drones.

[beachy]

> because you think China is making Skynet drones

I'm pretty sure China is making Skynet drones. Why wouldn't they be? Russia, North Korea as well. Seems a no-brainer to me. They are dictatorships where a handful of people rely on military power to subdue their populace and achieve their goals, why wouldn't they be throwing everything at weapons development?

Times have changed and it's probably unwise to rely on the tech geniuses and multi-year procurement cycles inside the military industrial complex for our weapons, things are moving so fast and the tech is already in the hands of the masses.

If a genius Chinese kid is tinkering around and attaches a nerf gun to his DJI drone and creates a super effective autonomous weapon, then his govt will gratefully take that and add it to their arsenal.

If some US-specific regulation prevents his peer genius American kid from even attaching a nerf gun to his drone for fear of being locked up, that means China has an edge in the weapons development race.

[lttlrck]

If there is any regulation I imagine there will be huge carve outs for the military industrial complex.

[pessimizer]

Excellent defense of biological weapons programs. Nothing like an assumed fascism "missile gap" to commit to chasing. What if other countries start experimenting with bringing back chattel slavery? How will we compete? Shouldn't we just assume that they have already, and we're behind?

Our scum is no less nefarious than their scum.

edit: the answer is to cooperate, rather than antagonize. We realized this in the past with nukes, but the least moral people in the world think that entering agreements between state-sized powers is just a delaying tactic until you can get an advantage. Let's figure out how to relieve those people of power as if all of our lives depended on it. If other countries being prosperous is always going to be considered a threat, we're always going to be in a fight that ends in mutual destruction.

[astrange]

> What if other countries start experimenting with bringing back chattel slavery? How will we compete?

Slavery is not competitive, so you can compete by continuing to not do it. (There are countries with near slavery like the UAE.)

This is actually why economics is called the dismal science, a slaveholder didn't like it when economists told him that!