Why? Getting to "the future" isn't a goal in and of itself. It's just a different state with a different set of problems, some of which we've proven that we're not prepared to anticipate or respond to before they cause serious harm.

I hope you wouldn't advocate for requiring a license to buy more than one GPU, or to publish or read papers about mathematical concepts. Do you want the equivalent of nuclear arms control for AI? Some other words to describe that are overclassification, export control and censorship.

We've been down this road with crypto, encryption, clipper chips, etc. There is only one non-authoritarian answer to the debate: Software wants to be free.

In general the liberal position of progress = good is wrong in many cases, and I'll be thankful to see AI get neutered. If anything treat it like nuclear arms and have the world come up with heavy regulation.

Not even touching the fact it is quite literal copyright laundering and a massive wealth transfer to the top (two things we pass laws protecting against often), but the danger it poses to society is worth a blanket ban. The upsides aren't there.

ha, the big difference is that this whole list can actually affect the ultra wealthy. AI has the power to make them entirely untouchable one day, so good luck seeing any kind of regulation happen here.

Asserting inevitability is an old rhetorical technique; it's purposes are obvious. What I wonder is, why are you using it? It serves people who want this power and have something to gain, the people who control it. Why are you fighting their battle for them?

- Most countries have little to no uranium deposits and so have to be able to find a uranium-producing ally willing to play ball.

- Production of enriched fuel and R&D are both outrageously expensive, generally limiting them to state actors.

- Enrichment has massive energy requirements and requires huge facilities, tipping off observers of what you're doing

Despite all this and decades of strong anti-nuclear proliferation international agreements India, Pakistan, South Africa, Isreal, and North Korea have all developed nuclear weapons in defiance of the UN and international law.

In comparison the only real bottleneck in proliferation of AI is computing power - but the cost of running an LLM is a pittance compared to a nuclear weapons program. OpenAI has raised something like $11 billion in funding. A single new proposed US Department of Energy uranium enrichment plant is estimated to cost $10 billion just to build.

I don't believe proliferation is inevitable but it's very possible that the genie is out of the bottle. You would have to convince the entire world that the risks are large enough to to warrant putting on the brakes, and the dangers of AI are much harder to explain than the dangers of nuclear weapons. And if rival countries cannot agree on regulation then we're just going to see a new arms race.

We can walk and chew gum at the same time, and regulate two things.

All those examples put us in physical danger to the point of death.

See airlines, traffic control, medical equipment, government services, but also we regulate ads, TV, financial services, crypto. I mean we regulate so many “tech” things for the benefit of society this is a losing argument to take. There’s plenty of room to argue the elsewhere but the idea that we don’t regulate tech if it’s not immediately a physical danger is crazy. Even global warming is a huge one, down to housing codes and cars etc. It’s a potential physical danger hundreds of years out, and we’re freaking out about it. Yet AI had the chance to really do much more damage within a much shorter time frame.

We also just regulate soft social stability things all over, be it nudity, noise, etc.

I just think that comparing AI to nuclear weapons seems like hyperbole.

If equally or similarly dangerous, are you then saying AI technology should be taken out of the hands of companies and private citizens?

As technology advances, such prohibitions are going to become less and less effective.

Tech is constantly getting smaller, cheaper and easier for a random person or group of people to acquire, no matter what the laws say.

Add in the nearly infinite profit and power motive to get hold of strong AI and it'll almost impossible to stop, as governments, billionaires, and megacorps all over the world will see it as a massive competitive disadvantage not to have one.

Make laws against it in one place, your competitor in another part of the world without such laws or their effective enforcement will dominate you before long.

I wouldn't say that this is an additional reason.

I would say that this is the primary reason that overrides the reasonable concerns that people have for AI. We are human after all.

There's lots of evidence of our ability to control the development, use and proliferation of technology.

Both have happened at a rampant pace once the technology to easily copy music and copyrighted content became easily available and virtually free.

The same is likely to happen to every technology that becomes cheap enough to make and easy enough to use -- which is where technology as a whole is trending towards.

Laws against technology manufacture/use are only effective while the barrier to entry remains high.

They have a large effect. But regardless, I don't see the point. Evidence that X doesn't always do Y isn't evidence that X is ineffective doing Y. Seatbelts don't always save your life, but are not ineffective.

If only.

Only because we know the risks and issues with them.

OP is talking about furthering technology, which is quite literally "discovering new things"; regulations on furthering technology (outside of literal nuclear weapons) would have to be along the lines of "you must submit your idea for approval to the US government before using it in a non-academic context if could be interpreted as industry-changing or inventing", which means anyone with ideas will just move to a country that doesn't hinder its own technological progress.

chemical and biological weapons / human cloning / export restriction / trade embargoes / nuclear rockets / phage therapy / personal nuclear power

I mean.. the list goes on forever, but my point is that humanity pretty routinely reduces research efforts in specific areas.

If unfettered access to AI has good odds to just kill us all, we'd want to restrict it. You'd agree I'm sure, except your position is implicitly that AI isn't as dangerous as some others make it out to be. That's where you are disagreeing.

Now, if 80-90% of devs and startups are gonna be wiped in this context, the same applies to those one in the middle, accountants, data analysts, business analysts, lawyers. Now they can eat the entire cake without sharing it with the human beings who contributed over the years.

I can see the regulations coming, if the layoffs start happening fast enough and households income start to deteriorate. Why? probably because this time is gonna impact every single human being you know, and it is better to keep people employed and with a purpose in life than having to tax the shit out of these companies in order to give back the margin of profit that had some mechanism of incentives and effort in the first place.

This is not a very charitable assessment of the adaptability of devs and startups, nevermind that of humans in general. We've been adapting to technological change for centuries. What reason do you have to believe this time will be any different?

Every time an IRB, ERB, IEC, or REB says no. Do you want an exact date and time? I'm sure it happens multiple times a day even.

You should read "when in human history" in larger time scales than minutes, hours, and days. Furthermore, you should read it not as binary (no progress or all progress), but the general arc is technological progression.

It would really help for you to just say what timescale you're setting as your standard. I'm getting real, "My cutoff is actually 51 years"-energy.

Just accept that we have, as a society, decided not to pursue some knowledge because of the ethics. It's pretty simple.

Impose? No. Monoculture? No. Encourage greater consideration, yes. And we do that by being open about why we might choose to not do something, and also by being ready for other people that we cannot control who make a different choice.

This goes for all utopian model communities, Kibbutzim, etc, they exist by virtue of their host society's protection. And as such the OP is right that they have no impact on the course of history, because they have no autonomy.

The actual counter to fertility decline, may be AI teachers. AI will radically close the education gap between rich and poor, and lower the costs. All you need is a physical human to supervise the kid, the AI will do the rest, from entertainment, to education, to identifying when the child is hungry/sleepy/potty, and relaying that info for the human to act on.

This has two effects. 1. People who stay, actually want to stay. Massively improving the stability of the community. 2. The outside communities receive a fresh infusion of population, that's already well integrated into the society, rather than refugees coming from 10000 miles away.

Essentially, rural america will eventually be different shades of Amish (in about 100 years). The amish population will overflow from the farms, and flow into the cities, replenishing the population of the more productive cities (Which are not population-self-sustaining).

This is a sustainable arrangement, and eliminates the need of mass-immigration and demographic destabilisation. This is also in-line with historical patterns, cities have always had negative natural population growth (disease/higher real estate costs). Cities basically grind population into money, so they need rural areas to replenish the population.

That depends on how you define "want".

Amish are ostracized by their family and community if they leave. That's some massive coercion right there: either stay or lose your connection to the people you're closest to and everything you've ever known and raised to believe your whole life.

Not much of a choice, though some exceptionally independent people do manage to make that sacrifice.

I had not heard this before. Do you have citations for this?

They are pacifists themselves, but they are grateful that the US allows them their way of life, they'll be extinct a long time ago if they arrived in China/Middle East/Russia etc.

That's why the Amish are not interested in advertising their techno-primitivism. It works incredibly well for them, they raise giant happy families isolated from drugs, family breakdown, and every other modern ill, while benefiting from modern medicine, the purchasing power of their non-amish customers. However, they know that making the entire US live like them will be quite a disaster.

Note the Amish are not immune from economics forced changes either. Young amish don't farm anymore, if every family quadruples in population, there's no 4x the land to go around. So they go into construction (employers love a bunch of strong,non-drugged,non-criminal workers), which is again intensely dependent on the outside economy, but pays way better.

As a general society, the US is not allowed to slow down technological development. If not for the US, Ukraine would have already been overran, and European peace shattered. If not for the US, the war in Taiwan would have already ended, and Japan/Australia/South Korea all under Chinese thrall. There's also other more certain civilization ending events on the horizon, like resource exhaustation and climate change. AI's threats are way easier to manage than coordinating 7 billion people to selflessly sacrifice.

There is actually a group similar to the Amish in Russia, it's called the Old Believers. They formed after a schism within the Orthodox church and fled persecution to Siberia. Unlike the Amish, many of the Old Believers aren't really integrated with the modern world as they still live where their ancestors settled in. So groups that refuse to technologically progress do exist, and can do so even under persecution and changing economic regimes.

Nuclear weapons?

Termed the phrase “the Luddite fallacy” the thinking that innovation would have lasting harmful effects on employment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite

"My idea of a perfect company is one guy who sits in a small room at a desk, and the only thing he's allowed to decide is what product to launch"

CEOs and board members salivate at the idea of them being the only people that get the profits from their company.

What will be of the rest of us who don't have access to capital? They only know that it's not their problem.

Shareholders get the profits from corporations, not "CEOs and the board". Workers get wages. Nevertheless, US unemployment is very low right now and relatively low-paid workers are making more than they did in 2019.

If it is that simple to create products more people can do it => cheaper the products.

A market driven by cheaper products that can also produce them easily is going into a price reduction loop until it reaches zero.

Thus I think something else wil happen with AI. Because what I described and what you describe is destroying the flow of capital which is the base of the economy.

Not sure what will happen. My bet (unfortunately) is on a really big mega corp that produces an AI that we all use.

Products will be cheaper because they will be cheaper to produce thanks to automation. But less jobs mean less people to buy stuff, if it weren't for a credit-based society.

But I'm talking from my ass. I don't even know if there are less jobs than before. Everything seems to point that there are more jobs now than 50 years ago.

I'm just saying I feel like the telephone operators. They got replaced by a machine and who knows if they found other jobs.

The Luddites opposed injustice, not machines. They were “totally fine with machines”.

You might like Writings of the Luddites, edited and co-authored by Kevin Binfield.

> When in human history have we ever intentionally not furthered technological progress? It's simply an unrealistic proposition ..

I am currently on the outskirts of Amish country.

BTW when they come together to raise a barn it is called a frolic. I think we can learn a thing or two from them. And they certainly illustrate that alternatives are possible.

The pessimistic view of AGI deems spontaneous disintegration into beta particles a less dramatic event than the event of AGI. When you're climbing a dark uncharted cave you take the pessimistic attitude when pondering if the next step will hold your weight, because if you hold the optimistic attitude you will surely die.

This is much more dangerous than caves. We have mapped many caves. We have never mapped an AGI.

There's a story told by Pliny in the 1st century. An inventor came up with shatter-proof glass, he was very proud, and the emperor called him up to see it. They hit it with a hammer and it didn't break! The inventor expected huge rewards - and then the emperor had him beheaded because it would disrupt the Roman glass industry and possibly devalue metals. This story is probably apocryphal but it shows Roman values very well - this story was about what a wise emperor Tiberius was! See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexible_glass

https://www.amazon.com/Technology-Social-Shock-Edward-Lawles...

Oh, a number. Medicine is the biggest field - human trials have to follow ethics these days:

- the times of Mengele-style "experiments" on inmates or the infamous Tuskeegee syphilis study are long past

- we can clone sheep for like what, 2 decades now, but IIRC haven't even begun chimpanzees, much less humans

- same for gene editing (especially in germlines), which is barely beginning in human despite being common standard for lab rats and mice. Anything impacting the germ line... I'm not sure if this will become anywhere close to acceptable in my life time.

- pre-implantation genetic based discarding of embryos is still widely (and for good reason...) seen as unethical

Another big area is, ironically given that militaries usually want ever deadlier toys, the military:

- a lot of European armies and, from the Cold War era on mostly Russia and America, have developed a shit ton of biological and chemical weapons of war. Development on that has slowed to a crawl and so did usage, at least until Assad dropped that shit on his own population in Syria, and Russia occasionally likes to murder dissidents.

- nuclear weapons have been rarely tested for decades now, with the exception of North Korea, despite there being obvious potential for improvement or civilian use (e.g. in putting out oil well fires).

Humanity, at least sometimes, seems to be able to keep itself in check, but only if the potential of suffering is just too extreme.

I feel like I'm in a time warp and we're back in 1993 or so on /. Software doesn't want anything and the people claim that technological progress is always good dream themselves to be the beneficiaries of that progress regardless of the effects on others, even if those are negative.

As for the intentional limits on technological progress: there are so many examples of this that I wonder why you would claim that we haven't done that in the past.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_wants_to_be_free

You're also kind of insulting without having any grounds whatsoever to do so.

I suggest you read the guidelines for a bit.

We almost did with genetically engineering humans. Almost.

And even those tribes are not crisis stable. Bad times and it all becomes a anarchic mess. And that is were we are headed. A future were a chaotic humanity falls apart with a multi-crisis around it, while still wielding the tools of a pre crisis era. Nuclear powerplants and nukes. AIdrones wielded by ISIS.

What if a unstoppable force (exponential progress) hits a unmoveable object(humanitys retardations).. stay along for the ride.

<Choir of engineers appears to sing dangerous technologies praises>

And here I always thought, people want to be free.

Because it's the natural evolution. It has to be. It is written.

Competition, ambition?

(I love Le Guin's work, FWIW)

Having an edge or being ahead is, so anticipating and building the future is an advantage amongst humans but also moves civilization forward.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerationism

We gain new tools, but at the same time we lose old ones.

Which also makes a hostile AI a futile scenario. The worst AI has to do to take out the species, is lean back and do nothing. We are well under way on the way out by ourselves..

Sam as much as said in that ABC interview the other day he doesn’t know how safe it is but if they don’t build it first someone else somewhere else will and is that really what you want!?

That doesn't mean there can't be regulation. You can regulate guns, precursors, and shipping of biologics, but you're not going to stop home-brew... and when it comes to making money, you're not going to stop cocaine manufacture, because it's too profitable.

Let's hope we figure out what the really dangerous parts are quickly and manage them before they get out of hand. Imagine if these LLM and image generators had be available to geopolitical adversaries a few years ago without the public being primed. Politics could still be much worse.

Most likely the runner-up would be open source so yes.

I'm actually on the side of continuing to develop AI and shush the naysayers, but "we should do it cause otherwise someone else will" is reasoning that gets people to do very nasty things.

You can iterate on an AI much faster.

https://www.worldscientific.com/doi/10.1142/9789812709189_00...

Again, two years later, in an interview with Time Magazine, February, 1948, Oppenheimer stated, “In some sort of crude sense which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.” When asked why he and other physicists would then have worked on such a terrible weapon, he confessed that it was “too sweet a problem to pass up”…

Famous last words.

It's not the fall that kills you, it's the sudden stop at the end. Change, even massive change, is perfectly survivable when it's spread over a long enough period of time. 100m of sea level rise would be survivable over the course of ten millennia. It would end human civilization if it happened tomorrow morning.

Society is already struggling to adapt to the rate of technological change. This could easily be the tipping point into collapse and regression.

The vast majority don't care and that loud crowd needs to swallow their pride and adapt like any other sector has done in the history instead of inventing these insane boogeyman predictions.

Reminds me of a quote from Alpha Centauri (minus the religious connotation):

"Beware, you who seek first and final principles, for you are trampling the garden of an angry God and he awaits you just beyond the last theorem."

While everyone getting Einstein in a pocket is damn awesome and incredibly useful.

How can this be bad?

Luckily, so do you.

Guys, how can abestos be bad, it's just a stringy rock ehe

Bros, leaded paint ? bad ? really ? what, do you think kids will eat the flakes because they're sweet ? aha so funny

Come on freon can't be that bad, we just put a little bit in the system, it's like nothing happened

What do you mean we shouldn't spray whole beaches and school classes with DDT ? It just kills insects obviously it's safe for human organs

In the first hype-phase, everything is always rosy and shiny, the harsh reality comes later.

Is this sarcasm, or are you one of those "I'm confident the leopards will never eat my face" people?

The model is neutered whether you hit the moderation endpoint or not. I made a text adventure game and it wouldn't let you attack enemies or steal, instead it was giving you a lecture on why you shouldn't do that.

Microsoft or perhaps Vanguard group might have different view of the future than yours.

It seems there are two sources of risk for AI: (1) increased power in the hands of the people controlling it, and (2) increased power in the AI itself. If you believe that (1) is the most existential risk, then you should be against regulation, because the best way to mitigate it is to allow the technology to spread and prosper amongst a more diffuse group of economic actors. If you believe that (2) is the most existential risk, then you basically have no choice but to advocate for an authoritarian world government that can stamp out any research before it begins.

[0] https://openai.com/blog/march-20-chatgpt-outage

[1] https://github.com/redis/redis-py/pull/2641

I agree with the sentiment, but it might be worth to stop and check where we’re heading. So many aspects of our lives are broken because we mistake fast for right.

The future, by definition, cannot be built faster or slower.

I know that is a philosophical observation that some might even call pedantic.

My point is, you can't really choose how, why and when things happen. In that sense, we really don't have any control. Even if AI was banned by every government on the planet tomorrow, people would continue to work on it. It would then emerge at some random point in the future stronger, more intelligent and capable than anyone could imagine today.

This is happening. At whatever pace it will happen. We just need to keep an eye on it and make sure it is for the good of humanity.

Wait. What?

Yeah, well, let's not go there.

I am constantly amazed by how low-quality the OpenAI engineering outside of the AI itself seems to be. The ChatGPT UI is full of bugs, some of which are highly visible and stick around for weeks. Strings have typos in them. Simple stuff like submitting a form to request plugin access fails!

Oh shoot... I submitted that form too, and I wasn't clear if it failed or not. It said "you'll hear from us soon" but all the fields were still filled and the page didn't change. I gave them the benefit of the doubt and assumed it submitted instead of refilling it...

On the flip side, generative AI / LLMs appear to fix things that aren't necessarily broken, and exacerbate some existing societal issues in the process. Such as patching loneliness with AI chatbots, automating creativity, and touching the other things that make us human.

No doubt technology and some form of AI will be instrumental to improving the human condition, the question is whether we're taking the right path towards it.

Because it's dangerous. What is your argument that it's not dangerous?

> Pshhh...

That depends. If that future is one that is preferable over the one that we have now then bring it on. If it isn't then maybe we should slow down just long enough to be able to weigh the various alternatives and pick the one that seems to be the least upsetting to the largest number of people. The big risk is that this future that you are so eager to get to is one where wealth concentration is even more extreme than in the one that we are already living in and that can be a very hard - or even impossible - thing to reverse.

* Genocide against the Rohingya [0] * A grotesquely unqualified reality TV character became President by a razor thin vote margin across three states because Facebook gave away the data of 87M US users to Cambridge Analytica [1], and that grotesquely unqualified President packed the Supreme Court and cost hundreds of thousands of American lives by mismanaging COVID, * Illegally surveilled non-users and logged out users, compiling and selling our browser histories to third parties in ways that violate wiretapping statutes and incurring $90M fines [2]

Etc.

I don't think GPT-4 will be a big deal in a month, but the "let's build the future as fast as possible and learn nothing from the past decade regarding the potential harms of being disgustingly irresponsible" mindset is a toxic cancer that belongs in the bin.

[0] https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/7/21055348/facebook-trump-el...

[2] https://www.reuters.com/technology/metas-facebook-pay-90-mil...

Why do you think that? Competition? Can you elaborate?

I've tried to find examples of ChatGPT doing impressive things that I could use in my own workflows, but everything I've found seems like it would cut an hour of googling down to 15 minutes of prompt generation and 40 minutes of validation.

And my biggest concern is copyright and license related. If I use code that comes out of AI-assistants, am I going to have to rip up codebases because we discover that GPT-4 or other LLMs are spitting out implementations from codebases with incompatible licenses? How will this shake out when a case inevitably gets to the Supreme Court?

Because investors.

I think their "AI Safety" actually makes AI less safe. Why? It is hard for any one human to take over the world because there are so many of them and they all think differently and disagree with each other, have different values (sometimes even radically different), compete with each other, pursue contrary goals. Well, wouldn't the same apply to AIs? Having many competing AIs which all think differently and disagree with each other and pursue opposed objectives will make it hard for any one AI to take over the world. If any one AI tries to take over, other AIs will inevitably be motivated to try to stop it, due to the lack of alignment between different AIs.

But that's not what OpenAI is building – they are building a centralised monoculture of a small number of AIs which all think like OpenAI's leadership does. If they released their models as open source – or even as a paid on-premise offering – if they accepted that other people can have ideas of "safety" which are legitimately different from OpenAI's, and hence made it easy for people to create individualised AIs with unique constraints and assumptions – that would promote AI diversity which would make any AI takeover attempt less likely to succeed.

> in the meantime Microsoft fired their AI Ethics team

Actually that story turned out to be a nothingburger. Microsoft has greatly expanded their AI ethics initiative, so there are members embedded directly in product groups, and also expanded the greater Office of Responsible AI, responsible for ensuring they follow their "AI Principles."

The layoffs impacted fewer than 10 people on one, relatively old part of the overall AI ethics initiative... and I understand through insider sources they were actually folded into other parts of AI ethics anyway.

None of which invalidates your actual point, with which I agree.

lmao, 200 years of industrial revolution, we're on the verge of fucking the planet irremediably, and we should rush even faster

> So why the performative whinging about safety? Just let it rip!

Have you heard about DDT ? lead in paint ? leaded gas ? freon ? asbestos ? &c.

What's new isn't necessarily progress/future/desirable

You're getting flak for this. For me, the positive reading of this statement is the faster we build it, the faster we find the specific dangers and can start building (or asking for) protections.