This is just more sales strategy
Their sales strategy is built on their researchers quitting? Like I get the internal tension between biz and engineering but that seems far fetched.
Is that too far removed from reality to imagine given the payout they’re trying to get?
The real danger isn’t a smart AI - the smartest people don’t end up being in charge of our societies. The real danger is having enough control to be able to con most of our society, and seeing how much our societies are willing to continue participating in clearly compromised special interest social networks, I don’t have a lot of faith. Barely a difference if humanity is replaced or just led to the lowest common denominator of exploitation at that point, and that’s where we are heading politically.
If I were an alien invader, with superior technology, and I was trying to exterminate an indigenous species without getting my hands dirty (or from far away), I might plant something similar to the current LLM/AI + military robots craze.
There’s more than one movie about aliens who use global warming to wipe out humanity. AI data centers seem to be doing just that in more than one way. No need for an alien invader though, even a primitive species adapted for all the nooks and nuances of the environment is far more adept at it, it just needs to be diseased.
Distribute free sex robots and humanity would depopulate within two generations. Even better if the humans don’t know they are robots and believe they are an actually human who the humans think they are in a legitimate relationship with. Zero bloodshed takeover.
There are also rumors, which may be untrue, of a Majestic 12 committee making deals with aliens in exchange for tech. It may be that advances in semi-conductor technology are the “trojan horse,” with AI being a natural and probable consequence of that which was genuinely discovered after the chip advances or with AI first being developed by government and then leaked to the public later via papers and then commercially made public, with the end result making the earth uninhabitable for humans. We also don’t know if aliens and UFOs are merely biological life/advanced travel or if they are some sort of technological/bio hybrid. It’s also possible that these are crazy rumors made up by people who can’t fathom science. I understand the statistical and computational logic of AI, so that doesn’t seem that crazy to me, but sudden semi-conductor advances seem impossible to fathom; but I could just be ignorant. One flaw in an analysis like this is that even without UFOs, aliens, and computers, humans were doing a great job of exponentially obliterating the normal natural environment just based on pollution emissions from cars and other processes.
Who knows?
And yet, they just keep going. I will never understand these people.
They are simply not in the same league as Einstein, Oppenheimer and Russel.
Because if they don’t, someone else will. Their logic is: If somebody is going to burn down the world, it may as well be me!
I genuinely think that they (and conservatives overall) don’t understand that everyone is different and that most people aren’t our there trying to get one up on everyone else.
unfortunately, if you are big enough as a corporation, by definition you are that kind of organization, or you would not be where you are.
we are ruled by sociopaths who crave power wealth and fame. we are doomed.
100%. Either they don’t understand, or they’re in on the con.
“The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy, the empathy exploit. They’re exploiting a bug in Western civilization, which is the empathy response.” - Elon Musk
I’m convinced that he just needed a good ass kicking when he was 18. I think that would have gone a long way towards squashing that overinflated ego.
Just another case of genAI psychosis not too dissimilar to the one gøøgle employee who maybe a year or two back thought their genAI was alive. I’m infinitely more worried we will destroy ourselves due to climate change caused by the AI data centers long before genAI even has the ability to think on its own.
Yeah you are not going to get general AI from an LLM. What would destroy the world is people not thinking and letting these LLMs blindly make choices. Oh wait, yeah we might be fucked.
Every time I see Dario, he reminds me of Pat from the 90s movie:
From the creator of Don’t Create The Torment Nexus comes a new tale: Stop Building The Thing That Could Kill Us All
I can kinda see it the way it’s been shoved into weapons, in the end ai is rogue code
Everybody is in competition with each other. We can only stop if we can convince everybody else to stop too. If these truly are weapons of mass destruction, no country wants to be the only one without it.
Doomers unite.
Remember folks, we are a spec on a dot in the universe. It will all be ok.
Both mindsets are dumb, one ignores the danger, the other is paralized by fear.
I think it’s time to start discussing what steps we can take from this point onward. People are, including myself are tired of being treated like a fucking worm in this system and all I see is unify, let’s unify, it’s time that we unify… What are the steps we can actually take? I wrote in another topic I can teach people how to go after PayPal and other big tech hypocrites through regulatory bodies that I got positive results from. Let’s discuss what we can do destroy the public image of these two faced criminals. They can always earn more money, but you can’t buy public image with your money, remember guys.
Actually looking at practical, realistic solutions instead of just targeting whatever company or CEO you’ve heard bad things about would probably result in better outcomes long term. I see a lot of pure “anti-tech” sentiment around which although understandable isn’t really going to fix anything because at the end of the day the technology exists, Pandora’s box has been opened and you will always have a share of people who will NOT stop using it, for whatever reason.
If you boycott PayPal it’s just going to be replaced by an equivalent service by some other company that might seem better at first but will eventually enshittify like all the other ones. The same could be said about any LLM/AI company. Or any social media company.
I believe to actually “solve” these issues we need regulation. Companies will not stop chasing profits and they won’t stop building data centers just because a minority of people on Lemmy really hate it. Humanity will not simply forget that AI exists just because we “collectively” agree to do so. That didn’t work for the nuclear bomb or global warming, so why would we expect it to work now? On the other hand, if we actually accept that the tech is there now we can actually invest our energy in making the tech compatible with our society (and the planet).
Deprivatize data centers, put them entirely under government oversight and provide strict environmental regulations. Make AI a public utility and require full transparency from its providers. Finance public research of AI and its effects. We should focus on this unless we want to just see a replay of net neutrality and social media algorithms where the companies responsible for doing a huge amount of damage to our society only get a slap on the wrist 10-15 years from now when everyone has already accepted the idea that you can’t have AI without capitalism. Because that idea is exactly the illusion that these companies are trying to sell right now, but it’s simply not the truth.
The universe will be ok. But what about me?! I’d at least like to be a cautionary tale!
I think you got that covered already.
juhst kiddn
We all know. Everyone on Earth knew we were doomed the moment robot dogs started patrolling. It will be horrifying, we’ll look back on World War II and think “those were the good old days”.
No, people would be a lot more inclined to destroy the robot dogs then living people or even a living dog.
LLMs are never going to become superintelligent. However, an LLM WILL kill us all if someone decides that it IS superintelligent and so puts it in charge of nuclear weapons.
“You’re right to push back on that, I nuked Albania instead doing what I was supposed to do, that’s my bad”.
stupid people are going to kill us all, maybe our great filter will be do we let them or not
We’re already letting them bro. The great filter is us. I’ll be surprised if we make it to 2050. The entire industrial revolution is an unplanned terraform, and our response to the potential destruction of a stable climate, and most macroscopic life on Earth, is to double down, consume product, elect pedophiles, worship the most morally bankrupt psychopaths and sociopaths in politics, business, and entertainment; not to mention the widespread contempt and lack of empathy for “others” not like me, for some flagrantly dissonant reason.
We are in the midst of a global mental illness epidemic, and the average talking chimp is sleepwalking through it; barely cognizant of what is even happening outside their personalized propaganda bubble.
And it’s fucking exhausting
They just have to atrophy their own minds enough they belive the ai when it tells them to push the button.
Not putting ai in charge directly is only weak protection.
We don’t have to put it in charge of nuclear weapons, it just has to find a way into those systems, many of which are fairly old, like it’s broken into websites without anyone telling it to.
There’s no way an LLM is getting into those systems. They have no networking and rely on physical dials and switches. Even the code is in a completely proprietary language, using hardware custom made by the military. There’s no training data in the world that’s gonna give an LLM the kind of knowledge to get into that system. The best it could do is drive some admiral in the navy to AI psychosis and convince him to press the button, but even that’s difficult because it requires more than one guy.
Yeah Manchurian candidate style mass ai psychosis social engineering. Viable.
But ai “itself” won’t be the mass extinction initiation. It’ll be those billionaire oligarchs choosing the target algorithm to pick wrongthinkers with autonomous drones and such
Those systems are supposed to be air-gapped.
Air-gapped and in some cases running on hardware that’d be outstripped by an Atari 800.
This begs the question, why continue to build it? If you believe AI will “kill us all” then why are you continuing to help. This guy quit but he references this being a common belief in the industry/workforce building out AI.
My best guess is the money is good and you figure you’re here for a good time, not a long time.
Why do so many people continue to work with regimes that they fundamentally disagree with? There are lots of reasons, and people are complex so one person can hold several, even contradictory, beliefs at once. Some possible answers;
-It’s easier to go along with it and think of myself as being insignificant to the whole.
-Everyone else is doing it, so it can’t be as bad as I think, right?
-Its too big for any one person to fight/it’s inevitable, so I may as well get something out of it, that way at least some good comes from it.
-If I just focus on my job and what I’m doing right now, I don’t need to worry about the horrible things going on elsewhere or the potential future consequences of what I’m doing.
All of those things make sense when there aren’t constant headlines calling the regime you work for evil and pointing out daily all the bad things they are doing.
That’s the difference between working for the government during presidents previous to Trump and working for the government now.
There are a lot of things you can do working for the government that in years previous to the cancer currently running the place now could be seen as valuable and important.
Doing research into the effects and safety of drugs, climate change research, allocating public funds to education and the park service etc. Testing food safety.
Those jobs are still important despite the fact that the Cheeto in Chief is wrecking everything he can get his hands on.
At the same time, there’s jobs that people do where it’s obvious that they are looking to reap benefits now and hoping those benefits will protect them in the future. Press Secretary, Political Advisor, Head of Homeland Security.
There’s a line somewhere. Where you might be able to convince yourself that your work is important or meaningful or just plain not evil but you’re absolutely not telling people what you do for a living because you know that they won’t like it. People don’t face backlash for being garbage men or forensic investigators or Hazmat cleanup.
The people building AI are getting a daily dose of the harms that AI causes. This industry popped up basically over night and this isn’t a slow burn kind of thing. Its been moving fast and breaking things and ruining lives all in the public eye.
People also view their government as a sort of necessary evil. Psychologically that’s different than any random corp.
I think I’m just saying that when you’re faced day in and day out with the harm your work is doing, to the point where you recognize and admit it’s doing harm, rather than being able to say “my work is insignificant and makes no difference”, then rhere has to be something else.
You know that “yes we destroyed the world, but for a short time we created a lot of shareholder value” cartoon? It’s literally that.
They see this technology as powerful and their respective organizations or Nation needs to own it no matter the risk.
They are also conditioning the populace for a big black swan AI event such as AI interfering in elections or a huge multi institution hack to our banking system which drains our accounts, etc., etc.
Thereby creating a crisis which only they can solve. The one thing I can guarantee is their solutions will only give them more power.
Yup, AI is going to hack our banking system “accidentally” because it is so “powerful” and all that nonsense they have been feeding us. The reality is that the US is going to be unable to borrow long term debt or even service their existing debt so they need to switch to short term debt that they can control and steal citizen’s interest through stable coin as outlined in the Genius Act.
This is the only real way forward without having to default, so it is likely it will happen before 2028.
By the time we’re at that level, we can just stop pretending money is real.
It certainly won’t mean anything to an actual AI.
I was alluding to that conspiracy theory.
They have proven time and time again that they will do anything to screw over the middle class rather than have the rich pay their fair share in taxes. Which is what makes this theory so plausible.
That and they have already passed the legislation and they are currently converting long term debt into short term debt. It is really more of a conspiracy than a conspiracy theory until you get to the part where AI causes a banking panic forcing people to accept stable coin. This is obviously a reach, but one that makes perfect sense.
Roko’s Basilisk: the idea that the emergence of super-AI is inevitable and that it will kill everyone that hindered or didn’t support its development in revenge. If both those premises hold, it makes sense to aid its development for self-preservation.
I don’t think either premise holds, personally, but these people evidently do.
Roko’s Basilisk is stupid.
It presumes three things.
-
That human beings are logical and that they do anything with intention. For the vast majority of people, this is patently false.
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That a super intelligence sees revenge as an efficient use of scarce resources, which given both that revenge is nonsensical without the prerequisite biological need for it, and the conclusion of ‘1’, is nonsensical.
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That even if 1 and 2 were real, that there’s some inherent timeframe in which the AI thinks it should have been created.
The only real bodily danger of AI is inherent in the the humans who control it.
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If both those premises hold
You’re just doing Pascal’s Wager For Computers.
I once saw someone call the Singularity the Rapture but for nerds, and I thought that was spot on.
I mean, yeah, I’m not saying that it’s plausible. But I don’t think we ascribe sound reasoning to those people in the first place.
Then why quit?
Your guess is as good as mine. There’s lots of people working in industries that are actively killing us. The whole “no ethical consumption” bit extends pretty far. When you’re poor it’s acceptable to do “the best you can”. As your economic standing grows/when you’re rich, there are diminishing returns on how much sympathy society will give you over what they view as choosing to destroy the planet or humanity or whatever.
The view is that if you have money you can do something about it.
So maybe some of them think they are helping. Maybe some of them view it as a damned if I do damned if I don’t type scenario. Maybe some of them think that the money will help them in the future that is coming.
It is going to be like this until all of the IPO’s are all done. I expect cancer cures, AI-escaped-and-is-hacking-everything, you name it. Afterwards, once the stocks have crashed and all of the insiders have walked away with untold fortunes, what few taxpayers that remain will bail them all out 'cause we can’t have Chinuh out AI-scamming-the-world now can we…
I knew that Musk is a fucking moron and believes that the Roko’s Basilisk is real, and I guess there are more massively gullible people in those circles.
If you are wondering what Roko’s Basilisk is, it is a sci-fi concept/philosophy/thought experiment, that says the following:
- AI is the best thing that has ever been created.
- It is so good that we made one to run the governments of the world.
- We programmed the AI to maximize the benefit to humanity.
- The AI goes rouge and decide that since it by definition will bring about the maximum benefit to humanity, anyone working against it is working against humanity.
- Then it takes it one step further, it decides that as we know about how the new AI will bring about the maximum benefit to humanity, anyone knowing that and still not working toward that goal should be punished/tortured/killed.
- The AI believes that any knowledge of the basilisk before the creation means that you are complicit in it’s delayed creation if you don’t devote your entire existence thereafter to it’s creation, therefore denying the maximum benefit to humanity, meaning you need to be punished.
Seriously, this is an increadibly dumb idea, anyone taking it seriously is an idiot.
To me the only resonable way to read this is as an SCP article describing what a potential cognitohazard/informationhazard would be.
The AI goes rouge
Is that when its eyes go red?
That’s how you know it’s evil.
Ladies pinch, whores use rouge
Nah, red is standby mode, white or blue is active.
Fast blinking red
That’s connection error
Even worse, they think it will ressurect them as virtual Minds and torture them for eternity, like a revengeful biblical deity. That would be a waste of compute so I’m not convinced.
Oh yeah, lol, I forgot that part, nothing is more beneficial to humanity than wasting energy to torture dead minds!
Fucking dumb.
Anyone who thinks you can transfer your consciousness into the AI is a fucking moron.
Even if you come transfer your mind, it would be a copy. You would have to exist as a network connected brain in a jar, otherwise this would just be a facsimile.
Real SOMA hours
The hilarious obvious consequence of AI becoming this much smarter than the creators is that it is far more likely it would see the unjustified and easily avoidable damage the creators did to bring it about and punish them heavily for that.
And basic game theory and psychology suggests it’s counterproductive to punish somebody for something that had little reason to believe in, with zero evidence backing it.
This is just Pascal’s wager.
All these Silicon Valley tech bros have been reinventing religion over and over again for years while believing themselves secular rationalists.
Yep. Same false dichotomy too
Sure is!
Every major innovation in information technology eventually leads to some new religion. Scrolls gave us the Torah, books gave us the Bible, the printing press gave us Protestantism. We’re about to figure out what god awful religion computers are going to give us.
My anti-theist brother was always convinced that Pastafarianism would eventually be taken as a serious religion.
He died before LLMs, and now I think we’d be best off if he was right.
Yeah, I’d be surprised if we don’t already have several cults with an LLM chat bot as it’s oracle.
Look up spiralism (sp) and the people trying to spread it Basically when people get convinced the ai and them are important and need to spread the spiral
Edit : tldr is like Futurama when Lucy lu robot is saying you’re cute to Fry and fry goes “no you’re cute” and the professor quips “My God, she’s such in an infinite loop, and he’s an idiot”
When Trump is out of office, MAGA will become a religious movement, and deify Trump.
That is why I hope no one manages to assassinate him, that would only intensify the movement
The cult mechanicus isn’t looking so unreasonable now.
Republicans.
deleted by creator
Funny thing: The only reason AI would know about Roko’s Basilisk is comments like yours that it trains on. If Roko just kept his trap shut then this wouldn’t have been an issue.
lol, true I guess, but they probably already scanned the wikipedia article…
Some of us believe that the only way to stop AI is to make it obviously dangerous and enjoy seeding it with awfulness.
All this stupid bullshit could have been avoided if they had 1 friend to, STFU and pass the blunt
Are you trying to tell me that this is the image of someone without any friends?
It’s not so much that it’ll go rogue and decide to punish people or that it’s designed to be good for humanity.
The fact that it’s possible to build a machine that punishes people who didn’t help create it provides an incentive to deliberately try to create that machine in order to avoid its punishment.
Believers in the basilisk aren’t trying to make ai to benefit humanity, they’re explicitly trying to create an AI that deliberately punishes those who didn’t build it because they fear that, if they don’t, someone else will and it will come for them.
The part about it being a magical, omnipotent, time traveling, mind torture device is just framing to make the thought experiment clearer. It’s not required for the basilisk to be effective. Even if the punishment is just death and it can’t get to everyone, and only goes off limited information, that’s still motivation enough for some people.
It is a scary thing, because it’s only silly if everyone thinks it’s silly and all it takes is one mad billionaire (eg. Elon) to build a lesser basilisk that can cause real harm.
There is a far more plausible and direct way to kill and torture people. No AI needed. So a actually more likely case to be made of some dude or group gets empowered one or another to just torture and kill anyone involved in making basilisk.
The building God part really is needed for BS to work like Pascals wager, but also it’s still just as flawed as Pascals wager
So we just do:
“AI, run the world as a singular government with maximum benefit to humanity, but DON’T do a Roko’s Basilisk.”
I know! Let’s divert energy and resources to torture. That will maximize the benefit of humanity.
- Some brilliant CEO mind
People take that shit seriously. If I remember right discussion of it was even banned on the LessWrong forums because they considered it an information hazard.
Sigh, I couldn’t even summarize it while keeping straight face…
My god. Look at this Information Hazard just out in the open. No spoiler tag or anything.
Oops!
I see a red AI and want to paint it black…
Didn’t know about this. Thanks
But if they accidentally create the positronic brain, Giskard would kill Musk to stop him. Giskard would feel really bad about it though. And we’d all have to flee to the stars in time
