Nuclear technology is tricky to get working even if you have decent scientists and all the published research about basic principles. For current ML tech, a big point is that the core techniques are really simple, the simple textbook methods work at large scale, you don't necessarily need any special sauce which could be restricted. Yes, there is a lot of engineering work that goes into a full system to scale it efficiently, but all of that can be replicated by any decent bunch of engineers, unlike nuclear weapons.
The cat is out of the bag; you can't put the genie back in the bottle, all the "sensitive knowledge" you'd need to restrict AI is already known by at least a few CS undergrads in every single university in the world.
A given AI, once created, is "just" data. It can be sent around the world and run on commodity hardware. Nothing special needed beyond the expertise that created it in the first place.
Think of how relatively easy it is to clamp down on bioweapons, and compare that with our ability to stop malware.
Certainly the models and weights that have been released publicly are out in the wild and near impossible to retract. That damage is done.
Soviet union was doing it back in the early 1900s
Even the ancient world did it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damnatio_memoriae
Yes we can fake more, but there are also more ways to get information so its harder to suppress true info. I think the two cancel each other out.
"More" is dramatically understating it. The new platforms (GPT4, Midjourney, etc.) are able to automate the propaganda output of literally millions of people.
If you wanted someone to Photoshop the pope into multiple new outfits and fool a lot of people, you used to need at least a few hours of an expert's time. Now you can do it almost instantly.
It's many orders of magnitude faster to create highly realistic lies than it used to be.
> but there are also more ways to get information so its harder to suppress true info.
There are the same ways to get information, and they're going to be: A) unverifiable, and B) drowned out by propaganda.
Let's say someone wants to take down Joe Biden, and they generate text, audio, video, and photos of him molesting a child. Millions of people would want to believe it and then believe it. How would we prove it's not real? How could we, other than finding the person who did it or exposing a digital trail?
They don't, unfortunately. The continued influence effect means that information received first will generally take priority.
I would characterize this as just adding more and more landmines to an already crowded space of potential collapse-inducing events through which have to try to navigate society. Oh, and adding glitzy blinkenlights to attract people towards those landmines. "Let the marketplace decide if landmines are fun to step on."
Very succinct way to explain end stage capitalism.
looks at history of organized religion
Um, I'm not so sure about that...
It doesn't matter if they're cautious or not. Even for real media, how can you tell it's real?
The result will be:
- there will be no way for anyone to verify any digital media, including phone calls from loved ones
- people will believe what they want to believe
We've seen the second thing happening, and it leads to fascism.
You've unfortunately been doing these things repeatedly, and they're not what the site is for and destroy what it is for.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
What is the public gonna do?
Oh, I see; goto school, goto work, passively consume todo lists society foists on them to distract from exploring their individual dynamism in deference to empowering billionaires to build AI they hate.
Maybe if the masses logged off rather than blithely contribute, but you all got fiat wealth to hallucinate the conjuring of in deference to elders who don’t know you; they just been told it’s your job to prop up their past investments. Pitter patter.
Otherwise enjoy living in a figurative ouroborus pushing Altman and the like towards the mouth, yourself towards the other end, then die some day. Enjoy that strange loop!
None of them have divine authority to the resources the species relies on. They’re surrounded by meat based VHS tapes repeating the truisms the elder’s foisted upon us decades ago.
Some countries have already successfully rewritten the history of less than 30 years ago with surveillance and media control.
What will happen when they can also control all digital reality? They can invent an uprising of millions of people that never actually happened, and there will be photo, audio, and video "evidence".
AGI is scary, but it's not immediate. I think companies like OpenAI are wrecklessly pushing us toward immediate societal collapse.