I implore everyone to watch the movie ‘Money Monster’, not only because it’s a great movie but also because I think it has a minor plot point that basically predicts how AI will be used.
(small spoiler)
In Money Monster it turns out the hedge fund manager who is blaming their state of the art AI bot for malfunctioning and rapidly selling off certain stock, tanking it because of that, did so out of a machine code error. He can’t explain what the error was or how or why it happened cause ‘he didn’t program their trading bot, some guy in Asia did.’
But as it turns out he did do it in some way.
I feel like using AI as a way to abstract blame even more when something goes wrong will be a big thing, even when secretly it was not the AI (ML) or who trained the thing’s fault.
My best guess is that at some point a “neutral“ AI will be put in charge of everything and everybody must obey for the good of society. As in one day you only have 22 energy points to spend on electricity or another day you can only eat crickets and whatnot. But it will only appear neutral - in essence somebody will control the AI and hence control the people. And people will agree to its decisions because the AI “knows best.”
While this is a well written paper, I'm not sure it's really contextualizing realistic risks that may arise from AI.
It feels like a lot of "Existential AI Risk" types are divorced from the physical aspects of maintaining software - eg. your model needs hardware to compute, you need cell towers and fiber optic cables to transmit.
It feels like they always anthropomorphize AI as some sort of "God".
The "AI Powered States" aspect is definetly pure sci-fi. Technocratic states have been attempted, and econometrics literally the exact same mathematical models used in AI/ML (Shapely values are an Econometrics tool, Optimization Theory itself got it's start thanks to GosPlan and other attempts and modeling and forecasting economic activity, etc).
As we've seen with the Zizian cult, very smart people can fall into a fallacy trap of treating AI as some omnipotent being that needs to either be destroyed or catered to.
> It feels like they always anthropomorphize AI as some sort of "God".
It's not like that. It is that. They're playing Pascal's Wager against an imaginary future god.
The most maddening part is that the obvious problem with that has been well identified by those circles, dubbed "Pascal's Mugging", but they're still rambling on about "extinction risk" whilst disregarding the very material ongoing issues AI causes.
They're all clowns whose opinions are to be immediately discarded.
One of the authors here. I don't think we anthropomorphize AI as some sort of God.
Here's a more prosaic analogy that might be helpful. Imagine tomorrow there's a new country full of billions of extremely conscientious, skilled workers. They're willing to work for extremely low wages, and to immigrate to any country and don't even demand political representation.
Various countries start allowing them to immigrate because they are great for the economy. In fact, they're so great for economies and militaries that countries compete to integrate them as quickly and widely as possible.
At first this is great for most of the natives, especially business owners. But the floor for being employable is suddenly really high, and most people end up in a sort of soft retirement. The government, still favoring natives, introduces various make-work and affirmative action programs. But for anything important, it's clear that having a human in the loop is a net drag and they tend to cause problems.
The immigrant population grows endlessly, and while GDP is going through the roof and services are all cheaper than ever, people's savings eventually dwindle as the cost of basic resources like land gets bid up. There are always more lucrative uses for their capital by the immigrants and capital owners compared to the natives. Educating new native humans for important new skills is harder and harder as the economy becomes more sophisticated.
I don't have strong opinions about what happens from here, but the point is that this is a much worse position for the native population to be in than currently.
Does that make sense? Even if this scenario doesn't seem plausible, do you agree that I'm not talking about anything omnipotent, just more competitive?
A lot hangs on what “realistic” means. The world is probabilistic, but people’s use of language often butchers the nuance. One quick way to compare events is to multiply its probability times impact.
How many people have you talked to face to face about various existential risk scenarios? Have you gotten into probabilities and the logic involved? That’s what I’ve done and this is the level of rigor that is table stakes for calculating the cost-benefit over different possible outcomes.
Kevin Kelly was on a recent episode of the Farnham Street podcast and was surprised by how much he anthropomorphized AI. Maybe that's not a surprise to people that know more about him, but it was to me.
Yeah it would only be worrisome if there were significant incentives to enlist more hardware, cell towers, and fiber optic cables to create and operate increasingly powerful AI and to improve its ability to act directly on the physical world
I think the more realistic threat model is from existing malware and similar stuff. The same people who write viruses, rootkits, try to hack elections, sever communication cables and so on will probably try to do evil AI. Then instead of Putin trying to take over the world and build torture chambers for the resisters you'll have a Putinbot trying to do so for ever more, pre-armed with nukes.
Another thing I don't like about this paper is how it wraps real, interesting questions in the larger framework of "existential risk" (which I don't... really think exists)
For example:
> "Instead of merely(!) aligning a single, powerful AI system, we need to align one or several complex systems that are at risk of collectively drifting away from human interests. This drift can occur even while each individual AI system successfully follows the local specification of its goals"
Well yes, making systems and incentives is a hard problem. But maybe we can specify a specific instance of this, instead of "what if one day it goes rogue!"
In our society, there are already many superhuman AI systems (in the form of companies) - and somehow, they successfully contribute to our wellbeing! In fact life is amazing (even for dumb people in society, who have equal rights). And the reason is, we have categorized the ways it goes rogue (monopoly, extortion, etc) and responded adequately.
So the "extinction by industrial dehumanization" reads a lot like "extinction by cotton mills" - i mean, look on the bright side!
> we have categorized the ways it goes rogue (monopoly, extortion, etc) and responded adequately.
This objection is a reasonable one. But the point of the paper is that a lot of the ways we have of addressing these systemic problems will probably not work once we're mostly unemployed (or doing make-work). E.g. going on strike, holding a coup, or even organizing politically will become less viable. And once we're a net drag on growth, the government will have incentives to route resources away from us. Right now they have to invest in their human capital to remain competitive.
It's quite creepy that in his view all tools, features, access and capabilities will be accessible to an AI agent which can just do the task. This sounds fine in a narrow scope, but if it's deployed at the scale of Windows, then it suddenly becomes a lot more scary. Don't just think of the home users, but businesses and institutions will be running these systems.
The core problem is that we can't be sure what a new generation of AI models will be capable of after a few years of iteration. They might find it trivial to control our machines which can provide them unprecedented access to follow an agenda. Malware exists today to do this, but they can be spotted, isolated and analyzed. When the OS by design is welcoming these attacks there's nothing we can do probably.
Once PRISM becomes R/W, you will not even know if what you read/hear/see on the internet is actually what others have written/said/created. You will interact with the world as the government wants you to, tailored to each individual.
Each time we choose to allow an AI to "improve" what we write/create, each time we choose to allow AI to "summarize" what we read/consume, we choose to take another step along this road. Eventually, it will be a simple "optimization" to allow AI to do this on a protocol level, making all of our lives "easier" and more "efficient"
Of course, I am not sure if anyone will actually see this comment, or if this entire thread is an AI hallucination, keeping me managed and docile.
This just underscores the feeling that most of the problems people have with AI are actually problems with rampant capitalism. Negative externalities, regulatory capture, the tragedy of the commons -- AI merely intensifies them.
I've heard it said that corporations are in many ways the forerunners of the singularity, able to act with superhuman effectiveness and marshall resources on a world-altering scale in pursuit of goals that don't necessarily align with societal welfare. This paper paints a disturbing picture of what it might look like if those paperclip (profit) maximizing systems become fully untethered from human concerns.
I was always a little skeptical of the SkyNet model of AI risk, thinking the danger was more in giving an AI owner class unchecked power and no need to care about the wants or needs of a disempowered labor class (see Swanwick's "Radiant Doors" for an unsettling portrayal of this). But this scenario, where capitalism takes on a mind of its own and becomes autonomous and even predatory, feels even bleaker. It reminds me of Nick Land's dark visions of the posthuman technological future (which he's weirdly eager to see, for some reason).
I think it not only feels bleak, but that it (that capitalism is an it is important to Nick Land from the perspective of complex adaptive systems) is just realistic.
I have a research project on Nick Land's core thesis that capitalism is AI. If you want to go ultra-deep into his theory, check it out: https://retrochronic.com/
It's fundamental to understand that capital is not just teleological - converging with AI on the event horizon of the Singularity - but teleoplexic (i.e. "capitalism takes on a mind of its own and becomes autonomous").
I’d push it further than you, even, and have been thinking this way for a while. The economy is AI. I know that’s a ridiculously simplistic way to put it and a network of individual actors doesn’t function identically, but for all intents and purposes we’re massive amounts of distributed compute running a “capitalist” algorithm and it isn’t perfectly aligned with us either. We don’t have AI problems, we have a generic class of algorithm problems that keep popping up wherever agents interact dynamically.
Obviously scary AI future means we should probably give full regulatory capture to a handful of wealthy individual corporations. You know. For our own safety.
I know you are being facetious, but it is not obvious (to me at least) what the best approach is in this scenario where future AI capabilities and use is unclear. I don't know what the correct analogy for future AIs is because they don't exists yet. If AI have some offensive advantage then nuclear weapons might be the right analogy. The world would not be safer if everyone has their own nuclear weapon. If the harmless & helpful personal assistant analogy is correct, then we should democratize. But Biden's mandate that AI training runs of a certain size should be reported to the government (not in any way hindered) was (to me) just obviously good. Such a report would take at most the effort of one person-day (per Dario Amodei) and gives the government some overview of progress.
i know a guy who wrote this about capitalism (Karl Marx) about how there is this system that dis-empowers human decision making... all that is solid melts into air...
for example, regarding human marginalization in states, it's just rehashing basic tropes about government (tldr, technology exacerbates the creation of surveillance states)
- "If the creation and interpretation of laws becomes far more complex, it may become much harder for humans to even interact with legislation and the legal system directly"
Well duh. That's why as soon as we notice these things, we pass laws against it. AI isn't posing the "existential risk", the way we set up our systems are. There are lots of dictators, coups, surveillance states today. And yet, there are more places in which society functions decently well.
So overall, I'm more of the opinion that people will adapt and make things better for themselves. All this anthropomorphization of "the state" and "AI" obscures the basic premise, which is we created all this stuff, and we can (and have) modified the system to suit human flourishing
> as we notice these things, we pass laws against it
Well, the claim is that that's the sort of thing that will get harder once humans aren't involved in most important decisions.
> which is we created all this stuff, and we can (and have) modified the system to suit human flourishing
Why did we create North Korea? Why did we create WWI? We create horrible traps for ourselves all the time by accident. But so far there has been a floor on how bad things can get (sort of, most of the time), because eventually you run out of people to maintain the horrible system. But soon horrible systems will be more self-sustaining.
1. we evolve quickly in the grand scheme of the universe but slow when talking about human lives.
2. what would rapidly adapting to AI mean? if it’s become reliant on it for the most basic tasks in the way that people nowadays have become so reliant on calculators they barely even bother with doing math in their head, sure. If you mean adapting alongside AI where we in some way would also become way smarter as humans? Nonsense.
Which is being forced onto me by people who I truly believe want me dead or at least don’t care how many bodies they throw at building their cyberpunk dystopia.
It seems wild that someone could unironically talk about tools “disempowering” their users. Like, I get it, C disempowers programmers by shielding them from assembly language, and Cuisinarts disempower chefs, and airplanes disempower travelers by not making them walk through each territory.
But… isn’t that a pretty tortured interpretation of tool use? Doesn’t it lead to “the Stone Age was a mistake”, and right back to Douglas Adams’ “Many were increasingly of the opinion that they'd all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place”
I get that AI can be scary, and hey, it might kill us all and that would be bad, but this particular framing is just embarrassing.
Modern AI does not act like a tool. Tools behave predictably and deterministically. They act as a multiplier to human ability, not a replacement. Modern AI is a new class of thing that humanity has no experience with.
All of your examples are tools that incrementally improve upon what came before and, importantly, still require the user to have an understanding of and experience with the underlying skill.
The risk being posed here is that AI may not land as an incremental improvement that still requires the user to maintain some understanding of the underlying skill.
We aren’t quite there yet with the current LLMs. You still need to have a base level of knowledge to use them effectively. But if they were just a little bit better, hallucinated just a little bit less, the value of actually knowing things goes way down.
What would the incentive be to learn the underlying skill or area if the LLM can handle things just fine on its own? Why not just let the LLM figure it out and do it? And at that point, it ceases to be a tool and starts to be something you are completely dependent on. That is a risk.
yapyap|1 year ago
(small spoiler)
In Money Monster it turns out the hedge fund manager who is blaming their state of the art AI bot for malfunctioning and rapidly selling off certain stock, tanking it because of that, did so out of a machine code error. He can’t explain what the error was or how or why it happened cause ‘he didn’t program their trading bot, some guy in Asia did.’ But as it turns out he did do it in some way.
I feel like using AI as a way to abstract blame even more when something goes wrong will be a big thing, even when secretly it was not the AI (ML) or who trained the thing’s fault.
phero_cnstrcts|1 year ago
Centigonal|1 year ago
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/mathwashing
teg4n_|1 year ago
alephnerd|1 year ago
It feels like a lot of "Existential AI Risk" types are divorced from the physical aspects of maintaining software - eg. your model needs hardware to compute, you need cell towers and fiber optic cables to transmit.
It feels like they always anthropomorphize AI as some sort of "God".
The "AI Powered States" aspect is definetly pure sci-fi. Technocratic states have been attempted, and econometrics literally the exact same mathematical models used in AI/ML (Shapely values are an Econometrics tool, Optimization Theory itself got it's start thanks to GosPlan and other attempts and modeling and forecasting economic activity, etc).
As we've seen with the Zizian cult, very smart people can fall into a fallacy trap of treating AI as some omnipotent being that needs to either be destroyed or catered to.
ADeerAppeared|1 year ago
It's not like that. It is that. They're playing Pascal's Wager against an imaginary future god.
The most maddening part is that the obvious problem with that has been well identified by those circles, dubbed "Pascal's Mugging", but they're still rambling on about "extinction risk" whilst disregarding the very material ongoing issues AI causes.
They're all clowns whose opinions are to be immediately discarded.
duvenaud|1 year ago
Here's a more prosaic analogy that might be helpful. Imagine tomorrow there's a new country full of billions of extremely conscientious, skilled workers. They're willing to work for extremely low wages, and to immigrate to any country and don't even demand political representation.
Various countries start allowing them to immigrate because they are great for the economy. In fact, they're so great for economies and militaries that countries compete to integrate them as quickly and widely as possible.
At first this is great for most of the natives, especially business owners. But the floor for being employable is suddenly really high, and most people end up in a sort of soft retirement. The government, still favoring natives, introduces various make-work and affirmative action programs. But for anything important, it's clear that having a human in the loop is a net drag and they tend to cause problems.
The immigrant population grows endlessly, and while GDP is going through the roof and services are all cheaper than ever, people's savings eventually dwindle as the cost of basic resources like land gets bid up. There are always more lucrative uses for their capital by the immigrants and capital owners compared to the natives. Educating new native humans for important new skills is harder and harder as the economy becomes more sophisticated.
I don't have strong opinions about what happens from here, but the point is that this is a much worse position for the native population to be in than currently.
Does that make sense? Even if this scenario doesn't seem plausible, do you agree that I'm not talking about anything omnipotent, just more competitive?
xpe|1 year ago
xpe|1 year ago
Saline9515|1 year ago
lemonberry|1 year ago
llamaimperative|1 year ago
tim333|1 year ago
drysine|1 year ago
Lets call this AI theomorph)
randomcatuser|1 year ago
For example:
> "Instead of merely(!) aligning a single, powerful AI system, we need to align one or several complex systems that are at risk of collectively drifting away from human interests. This drift can occur even while each individual AI system successfully follows the local specification of its goals"
Well yes, making systems and incentives is a hard problem. But maybe we can specify a specific instance of this, instead of "what if one day it goes rogue!"
In our society, there are already many superhuman AI systems (in the form of companies) - and somehow, they successfully contribute to our wellbeing! In fact life is amazing (even for dumb people in society, who have equal rights). And the reason is, we have categorized the ways it goes rogue (monopoly, extortion, etc) and responded adequately.
So the "extinction by industrial dehumanization" reads a lot like "extinction by cotton mills" - i mean, look on the bright side!
duvenaud|1 year ago
This objection is a reasonable one. But the point of the paper is that a lot of the ways we have of addressing these systemic problems will probably not work once we're mostly unemployed (or doing make-work). E.g. going on strike, holding a coup, or even organizing politically will become less viable. And once we're a net drag on growth, the government will have incentives to route resources away from us. Right now they have to invest in their human capital to remain competitive.
Is that any more convincing?
tiborsaas|1 year ago
It's quite creepy that in his view all tools, features, access and capabilities will be accessible to an AI agent which can just do the task. This sounds fine in a narrow scope, but if it's deployed at the scale of Windows, then it suddenly becomes a lot more scary. Don't just think of the home users, but businesses and institutions will be running these systems.
The core problem is that we can't be sure what a new generation of AI models will be capable of after a few years of iteration. They might find it trivial to control our machines which can provide them unprecedented access to follow an agenda. Malware exists today to do this, but they can be spotted, isolated and analyzed. When the OS by design is welcoming these attacks there's nothing we can do probably.
But please tell me I've consumed too many sci-fi.
etaioinshrdlu|1 year ago
Now we have the tools to make it happen more often.
whodidntante|1 year ago
Each time we choose to allow an AI to "improve" what we write/create, each time we choose to allow AI to "summarize" what we read/consume, we choose to take another step along this road. Eventually, it will be a simple "optimization" to allow AI to do this on a protocol level, making all of our lives "easier" and more "efficient"
Of course, I am not sure if anyone will actually see this comment, or if this entire thread is an AI hallucination, keeping me managed and docile.
unknown|1 year ago
[deleted]
Jordan-117|1 year ago
I've heard it said that corporations are in many ways the forerunners of the singularity, able to act with superhuman effectiveness and marshall resources on a world-altering scale in pursuit of goals that don't necessarily align with societal welfare. This paper paints a disturbing picture of what it might look like if those paperclip (profit) maximizing systems become fully untethered from human concerns.
I was always a little skeptical of the SkyNet model of AI risk, thinking the danger was more in giving an AI owner class unchecked power and no need to care about the wants or needs of a disempowered labor class (see Swanwick's "Radiant Doors" for an unsettling portrayal of this). But this scenario, where capitalism takes on a mind of its own and becomes autonomous and even predatory, feels even bleaker. It reminds me of Nick Land's dark visions of the posthuman technological future (which he's weirdly eager to see, for some reason).
gom_jabbar|1 year ago
I have a research project on Nick Land's core thesis that capitalism is AI. If you want to go ultra-deep into his theory, check it out: https://retrochronic.com/
It's fundamental to understand that capital is not just teleological - converging with AI on the event horizon of the Singularity - but teleoplexic (i.e. "capitalism takes on a mind of its own and becomes autonomous").
cyrillite|1 year ago
unknown|1 year ago
[deleted]
upghost|1 year ago
iNic|1 year ago
I know you are being facetious, but it is not obvious (to me at least) what the best approach is in this scenario where future AI capabilities and use is unclear. I don't know what the correct analogy for future AIs is because they don't exists yet. If AI have some offensive advantage then nuclear weapons might be the right analogy. The world would not be safer if everyone has their own nuclear weapon. If the harmless & helpful personal assistant analogy is correct, then we should democratize. But Biden's mandate that AI training runs of a certain size should be reported to the government (not in any way hindered) was (to me) just obviously good. Such a report would take at most the effort of one person-day (per Dario Amodei) and gives the government some overview of progress.
tehjoker|1 year ago
randomcatuser|1 year ago
for example, regarding human marginalization in states, it's just rehashing basic tropes about government (tldr, technology exacerbates the creation of surveillance states)
- "If the creation and interpretation of laws becomes far more complex, it may become much harder for humans to even interact with legislation and the legal system directly"
Well duh. That's why as soon as we notice these things, we pass laws against it. AI isn't posing the "existential risk", the way we set up our systems are. There are lots of dictators, coups, surveillance states today. And yet, there are more places in which society functions decently well.
So overall, I'm more of the opinion that people will adapt and make things better for themselves. All this anthropomorphization of "the state" and "AI" obscures the basic premise, which is we created all this stuff, and we can (and have) modified the system to suit human flourishing
duvenaud|1 year ago
Well, the claim is that that's the sort of thing that will get harder once humans aren't involved in most important decisions.
> which is we created all this stuff, and we can (and have) modified the system to suit human flourishing
Why did we create North Korea? Why did we create WWI? We create horrible traps for ourselves all the time by accident. But so far there has been a floor on how bad things can get (sort of, most of the time), because eventually you run out of people to maintain the horrible system. But soon horrible systems will be more self-sustaining.
marstall|1 year ago
mrbungie|1 year ago
yapyap|1 year ago
BUT:
1. we evolve quickly in the grand scheme of the universe but slow when talking about human lives.
2. what would rapidly adapting to AI mean? if it’s become reliant on it for the most basic tasks in the way that people nowadays have become so reliant on calculators they barely even bother with doing math in their head, sure. If you mean adapting alongside AI where we in some way would also become way smarter as humans? Nonsense.
AI can be a great tool, nothing more though.
CooCooCaCha|1 year ago
brookst|1 year ago
It seems wild that someone could unironically talk about tools “disempowering” their users. Like, I get it, C disempowers programmers by shielding them from assembly language, and Cuisinarts disempower chefs, and airplanes disempower travelers by not making them walk through each territory.
But… isn’t that a pretty tortured interpretation of tool use? Doesn’t it lead to “the Stone Age was a mistake”, and right back to Douglas Adams’ “Many were increasingly of the opinion that they'd all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place”
I get that AI can be scary, and hey, it might kill us all and that would be bad, but this particular framing is just embarrassing.
mrob|1 year ago
_vertigo|1 year ago
The risk being posed here is that AI may not land as an incremental improvement that still requires the user to maintain some understanding of the underlying skill.
We aren’t quite there yet with the current LLMs. You still need to have a base level of knowledge to use them effectively. But if they were just a little bit better, hallucinated just a little bit less, the value of actually knowing things goes way down.
What would the incentive be to learn the underlying skill or area if the LLM can handle things just fine on its own? Why not just let the LLM figure it out and do it? And at that point, it ceases to be a tool and starts to be something you are completely dependent on. That is a risk.