alt Hacker NewsTo everyone who believes that this is some nefarious plot by CEOs to bring about regulation or to hide that they've hit a wall or to make their models seem more capable or whatever:
The AI risk arguments are philosophical arguments that are 20-30 years old and don't have anything to do with the current corporate landscape. They were thought of by people who really care about the issue and all the "gotcha" lines have well-developed counters. Of course they might be stuck in their ideology but they deserve a bit more credit.
I don't doubt that AI CEOs can profit from a crisis and that they don't necessarily have our best interests at heart. But this is the same way governments during COVID tested how much they can restrain freedom. This doesn't mean COVID doesn't exist or that vaccines are evil or ineffective or whatever. Same way here, if there is an advantage to CEOs to regulate things doesn't mean AIs can't kill us all and that regulation might bring us more time to solve alignment.
Also: I accept I might be wrong and AI risk might be a fake issue and/or alignment might be impossible, but please bring better arguments if you want to convince me.
Replies
They aren’t 20-30 years old - they are 160 years old.
Samuel Butler wrote Erewhon in 1872 - which was based on an essay he wrote about RSI and superintelligence - in 1863.
> But this is the same way governments during COVID tested how much they can restrain freedom
So AI CEOs don't have our best interests at heart, but the people who got voted for, who supposedly does have our best interests at heart, is secretely engaging in plots to "test how much they can restrain freedom"?
I'm sorry, but this seems backwards. You're trusting the leaders of for-profit companies to do right regardless of their skewed incentives, and then the others are the ones to distrust. Sounds like you might want to move country is this is really how you feel.
> To everyone who believes that this is some nefarious plot by CEOs to bring about regulation or to hide that they've hit a wall or whatever
It's this but also much more that those insiders just want to pump the value of their stocks by making it seem like the unreleased models are much stronger than they actually are.
OpenAI said GPT-2 was too powerful to release, Antropic said Mythos was too powerful to release. Both are GA now and everyone has long realized those supposed fears were just lies.
This looks like halfway through your comment you realised it is indeed a nefarious plot by the CEOs, reusing existing arguments to further their own goals.
> The AI risk arguments ... are 20-30 years old
Yeah so climate change is known to cause many excess deaths already now and we know pretty precisely what we have to do for decades, and we only do some bare minimum if anything at all. But now there is a huge PR offensive to do something about a 'risk' that until now caused zero deaths, is not certain to exist at all and is stoked not by concerned outsiders but by people certain to profit handsomely from heavy regulation of their industry. I'd say it's not opponents who need better arguments.
Thank you for the epistemic humility here. It's a breath of fresh air amongst the polarized declarations we seem to have upregulated amongst ourselves for whatever reason these days.