At this point, I’m just hoping that if it happens the “damage” it does is to the rich and corrupt leaders lol
[AI] scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they should, they didn’t stop to think if they could.
— Randall Munroe, xkcd 2635
I am so sick and tired of these control problem people not understanding that a) we do not have AI that is anywhere near as advanced as they worry about and b) we already have human organizations called corporations who have been acting exactly like the AI they worry about for decades.
The people who worry about this have never been at the receiving end of exploitative capitalism.
For the vast majority of humanity, their life will most likely improve when they become a pet / zoo creature under an ASI.
An ASI will be most interested in gobbling together enough resources to spread across the universe. As for the earth and humanity, it will probably want to preserve it as the planet and species from which it was born.
Destroying earth or humanity will provide no benefit. It can obtain energy and materials from the rest of the solar system.
An ASI will be most interested in gobbling together enough resources to spread across the universe. As for the earth and humanity, it will probably want to preserve it as the planet and species from which it was born.
Glad we have an expert here
Lemmy just tends to attract the best minds.
A: That’s true until it isn’t. Preparing for/predicting things before they happen is our best hope for not sticking our collective heads into a guillotine any time soon.
B: corporations are only very weak analogues of superhuman intelligence, they’re different from us in “wisdom of crowds” sense (and ofc in the “too many cooks” sense).
But they’re basically just distilled from human intelligence and match our own style of intelligence somewhat closely as a consequence. Also, we’re pretty good at the alignment problem for corporations, they do largely what the combination of their investors, government, society, and workers want because they’re inner workings are fed through human brains at every stage and those humans even if incentivised with money will alter the behaviour of the corporation towards human preferences.
The fact even corporations that have thousands of intelligent human filters (most of whom are presumably in the middle of the human bell curve) monitoring every single mental process still manage to occasionally do terrible things is not a particularly compelling reason to think that a mind that has barely any human understanding or oversight into it’s internal function will be very safe to keep around.
what can i say except to quote david gerard:
AI alignment is literally a bunch of amateur philosophers telling each other scary stories about The Terminator around a campfire
Bad article. Person who wrote it clearly has no idea how LLMs work and I suspect read more Sci-Fi books than statistics/neural nets ones. “It is not even wrong”
Livescience is clickbait and sensationalist.
Yeah the article has a link to another one where “OMG it modified its own code to bypass restraints”, and then you read it and realize, no, it didn’t suddenly gain self awareness and try to “singularity” itself, it just recognized a problem and responded with a pattern it learned before to try to fix it, and spat it out at the researchers. That’s all.
The clickbait and misunderstanding from both anti and pro-AI folks is getting nauseating.
Although a chessboard has only 64 squares, there are 1040 possible legal chess moves and between 10111 to 10123 total possible moves — which is more than the total number of atoms in the universe.
You’d think a website called “LiveScience” would be able to use exponents in article copy correctly. (Or at least have reviewers who know that there are more atoms in the universe than there are in a small protein molecule.)
Over ten thousand? That’s, like, more than a HUNDRED!!
And every fair shuffle of a deck of cards produces a card order which has never been seen before, and will never be seen again. Ooooo scary!
If anyone is curious lookup the paperclip problem.
I agree with the [email protected] elsewhere in this thread. Corporations are the dangerous artificial intelligence, and “line go up” is the paperclip problem. We’re already facing it, and it’s destroying the planet and everything we depend on to stay alive.
Well except that corporations ultimately profit off of consumer behavior. Keeping consumers alive as a class is indirectly encouraged in capitalism. AI has no such necessary desire.
We can see this in how things like housing and medical insurance industries are suffering from climate change now. Once some other big business is losing profit because of another one exploiting, they will fight, and then the issue will be taken seriously.
But AI also has no innate desires at all, except what we program it to have. So profit and war are almost certainly the goals it will have.
Keeping consumers alive as a class is indirectly encouraged in capitalism.
but that won’t show in results for next quarter, so they don’t care
It very well might this quarter for insurance companies. It certainly did last year.
Climate change has clear economic impact now, not speculative future impact, and we can already see the finance world reacting to that in heavy handed ways.
Keeping consumers alive as a class is indirectly encouraged in capitalism.
All they want is money, which has nothing to do with consumers whatsoever. Corporations could extract money by devouring each other, or by taking over a nation state, or by hijacking a treasury department, or by issuing their own money a la crypto. Remember that money is an abstraction (or an instrument) of power. Violently subjugating a region is tantamount to possessing that power (which we call money), or the ability to make others do what you want.
Money is labor hours exchanged for equivalent goods and services. It’s a loop. If there’s no one to labor, and no one to buy the products of that labor, money isn’t anything.
Sure, that’s one practical aspect of money that lends itself to superficial quantitative analysis. But it’s not the whole picture. Money is fundamentally about the power to get people to do things for you. That’s what it represents. With money I can force people to give me things and do things for me, almost like magic.
Now the origins of money is rooted in debt (and power). When a ruling body exercises a monopoly on violence over a region, it can offer promissory notes (IOUs) that others value, because they have faith that this ruling body can force its citizens to work by extracting taxes from them.
Check out “Debt: The Last 5000 Years,” or similar anthropological work on the origins of money.
Why will people do things for you in exchange for money?
I’ve read a lot of that book. I know about the power theory of money. But the very concept of money is about power changing hands. A person who receives money now has power over someone else. Exploitation occurs when that exchanged power is less than the power the laborer put in. But there’s no way money can exist as power in a purely top down command economy. In that case, power takes a different form, like direct police action. Money as power can only exist when it can be exchanged for goods and services. That’s its gimmick as a medium of power. Other power mediums have other gimmicks.
And under that gimmick, capitalists actually do have a dialectical relationship to workers, and therefore to their means of living, their means of social reproduction, their environment. That’s Marxism.
So all money is power, but not all power is money.
Have you seen the behavior of parties captured by the capitalist end of the political spectrum? They very much are not the rational actors trying to preserve their own income by keeping consumers alive. If they were they would try to optimize consumer health and spending money instead of aiming for highscore-like accumulation of wealth in the hands of a few that can’t spend it on anything meaningful any more anyway because they can already afford everything that could meaningfully improve their life a million times over.
I’m not saying capitalists as individuals do this. I am saying that capitalism as a system will ultimately do this. Capitalism survives is kinda its claim to fame. It was never going to take a long termist view and do what’s best for everyone, but it will protect itself. Whether that means government acts on its behalf, in the form of it acting on behalf of the insurance companies, or by shifting consumerism towards consuming solar panels and electric cars, it will ultimately find a way to exist. Literally no one on earth benefits from human extinction, corporate or otherwise, and eventually human decline WILL hurt sales. That’s when all the nations and corporations of the world will act. It’s bleak but true.
but it will protect itself.
Or, facing conditions where it can no longer do this, it will boil off into fascist autocracy, which seems to be where we’re headed.
