alt Hacker NewsI think what’s missing in "AI is dangerous and needs control" is a lack of measurable harm. For example, with nuclear weapons development in the 1940s-1980s, it was clear to everyone how devastating the technology was.
With AI, what is it? Scraping Australian government's data, and going around a bug in a website to get in?
I think humanity develops all its technology in three phases. Build it, see if it’s too bad, apply regulations and or roll back. We naturally won't move to the phase 3 before we see the phase 2.
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That's the part I struggle too with all these "omg it's so dangerous" warnings. Things like nuclear weapons and bioweapons have immediate consequences in the real world.
Here we are talking about something with consequences in the digital world, usually on something pretty niche.
There IS an argument about pacing, and about not letting weapons, energy grids, hospitals, etc. getting managed by an autonomous AI, but I think we are still pretty far from it and even further to it being so in charge that it will obliterate us.
The "HuggingFace" incident is a good starting point - short version, an unreleased OpenAI model chained together multiple zero day exploits to escape a sandbox, then hacked another company just to get the "cheat sheet" for a benchmarking test.
Turns out that AI models have been committing similar felonies for a while now - no one is telling them "hack this company", it just turns out to be the easiest way to accomplish their goals.
Now imagine if the goal was less benign than "pass an exam", and consider that they are already better at hacking and security than the average person working in that field.
If you want to get really wild, imagine what they'll be doing in a year or two when they're even better at hacking. But I'll concede that's technically still "science fiction" for the time being :)