askchapo

23013 readers

80 users here now

Ask Hexbear is the place to ask and answer ~~thought-provoking~~ questions.

Rules:

Posts must ask a question.
If the question asked is serious, answer seriously.
Questions where you want to learn more about socialism are allowed, but questions in bad faith are not.
Try [email protected] if you're having questions about regarding moderation, site policy, the site itself, development, volunteering or the mod team.

founded 4 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

[Big Yudd free zone] So what do we think about AI Safety guys? (hexbear.net)

submitted 1 week ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

30 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Prompted by the recent troll post, I've been thinking about AI. Obviously we have our criticisms of both the AI hype manchildren and the AI doom manchildren (see title of the post. This is a Rationalist free post. Looking for it? Leave)

But looking at the AI doom guys with an open mind, sometimes it appear that they make a halfway decent argument that's backed up by real results. This YouTube channel has been talking about the alignment problem for a while, and I think he probably is a bit of a Goodhart's Law merchant (as in, by making a career out of measuring the dangers of AI, his alarmism is structural) so he should be taken with a grain of salt, it does feel pretty concerning that LLMs show inner misalignment and are masking their intentions (to anthropomorphize) under training vs deployment.

Now, I mainly think that these people are just extrapolating out all the problems with dumb LLMs and saying "yeah but if they were AGI it would become a real problem" and while that might be true if taking the premise at face value, the idea that AGI will ever happen is itself pretty questionable. The channel I linked has a video arguing that AGI safety is not a Pascal's mugging, but I'm not convinced.

Thoughts? Does the commercialization of dumb AI make it a threat on a similar scale to hypothetical AGI? Is this all just a huge waste of time to think about?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago

I don't think AI safety is such a big problem that it means we gotta stop building AI or we'll destroy the world or something, but I do agree there should be things like regulations, oversight, some specialized people to make sure AI is being developed in a safe way just to help mitigate problems that could possibly come up. There is a mentality that AI will never be as smart as humans so any time people suggest some sort of policies for AI safety that it's unreasonable because it's overhyping how good AI is and it won't get to a point of being dangerous for a long time. But if we have this mentality indefinitely then eventually when it does become dangerous we'd have no roadblocks and it might actually become a problem. I do think completely unregulated AI developed without any oversight or guardrails could in the future lead to bad consequences, but I also don't think that is something that can't be mitigated with oversight. I don't believe for example like an AGI will somehow "break free" and take over the world if it is ever developed. If it is "freed" in a way that starts doing harm, it would be because someone allowed that.