AI Causes Real Harm. Let’s Focus on That over the End-of-Humanity Hype

Re:AI Causes Real Harm. Let’s Focus on That over the End-of-... by zygi on Friday August 11, 2023 @09:58PM (#37096207)

> Is it not an existential threat that large swaths of the population will essentially become redundant in the next decades?

This is precisely the crux. In the scenario where there's no mass-paperclipping etc, AI is not an existential threat. It's a threat to the current regime, and I probably agree with you that the regimes it enables will be worse for people with our current values, but it's not an existential threat to humanity.

The people who worry about AI existential threats primarily worry about one thing: can humanity as a species survive? There are likely scenarios where it won't. Those scenarios should be prevented.

Another frame to think about this is: a libertarian probably wouldn't be concerned about the threats described in your comment. But both a libertarian and a socialist will be worried about paperclipping.

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Re:AI Causes Real Harm. Let’s Focus on That over the End-of-... by mario-main on Friday August 11, 2023 @10:26PM (#37096376)

What is paperclipping? I looked it up and the results were all about a dating trend.

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Re:AI Causes Real Harm. Let’s Focus on That over the End-of-... by sverona on Friday August 11, 2023 @10:33PM (#37096421)

It's a reference to the paperclip maximizer.

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Re:AI Causes Real Harm. Let’s Focus on That over the End-of-... by cratermoon on Saturday August 12, 2023 @04:56PM (#37104165)

"The paperclip maximizer is a thought experiment described by Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom in 2003. It illustrates the existential risk that an artificial general intelligence may pose to human beings were it to be successfully designed to pursue even seemingly harmless goals and the necessity of incorporating machine ethics into artificial intelligence design"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_convergence#Paper...

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Re:AI Causes Real Harm. Let’s Focus on That over the End-of-... by dTal on Friday August 11, 2023 @11:12PM (#37096646)

This has a Pascal's wager sort of feel. The possible negative consequences of a rampant AI are infinite, so we all ought to take it Very Seriously. The trouble is that there are lots of other scenarios with unbounded negative value - for instance, tight centralized control of technology supports a stable dystopia that keeps nearly all humans in a perpetual state of suffering. It's not at all clear, when you add it all up, that "prevent 'misaligned' AIs from being deployed at all costs" is the correct strategy to minimize risk.

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Re:AI Causes Real Harm. Let’s Focus on That over the End-of-... by circuit10 on Saturday August 12, 2023 @06:11AM (#37098683)

The difference to Pascal’s wager is that with that the probability is vanishingly small, but given current progress the probability of AI causing an existential threat is actually quite high. You can’t just call anything that has very bad negative consequences Pascal’s wager

Video about this: “Is AI Safety a Pascal’s Mugging?” https://youtu.be/JRuNA2eK7w0

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Re:AI Causes Real Harm. Let’s Focus on That over the End-of-... by circuit10 on Saturday August 12, 2023 @03:49PM (#37103621)

I sort of mixed up “wager” and “mugging” here but you get the point

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Re:AI Causes Real Harm. Let’s Focus on That over the End-of-... by dTal on Saturday August 12, 2023 @07:53PM (#37105260)

Not at all, "Pascal's mugging" was exactly the term I would have used, had I remembered it :) That video is a very good reply. One response that comes to mind is that there is an implicit subtext behind any discussion of AI safety that we must do something about it, and soon. A good "anti-god" for his payoff matrix would be "the act of calling for AI safety will inadvertently be used as political capital by those wishing to be the gatekeepers of powerful technology" - the chances of that are quite high, and the negative consequences quite bad, if not necessarily apocalyptic.

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