alt Hacker NewsWhat matters is that we accurately understand what these things are doing and why, otherwise we will keep on making mistakes both in how we build and train them, and in how we use them.
In a sense you are right, it doesn't matter whether it has malice or not, the astronauts are just as dead. However in Space Odyssey 2010 one of the computer scientists that built HAL gets to see the instructions HAL was given by the military commanders, and is appalled because if they'd asked he could have told them what would happen.
The users did not understand the tool they were using or how it functioned, they imagined it was like a person and it was not. That is happening now with LLMs.
I think we may be using different words to describe the same concept. You think of it as them not being “people“, and I think of it as them not being “aligned“. But fundamentally, the problem is they are entities that take unpredictable actions that that their creators and their users are not OK with.
The only place where I think we might still disagree is whether it’s possible to understand the tool. My position is that, at our current level, it’s not. And that the more advanced they get, the less possible it will be.