alt Hacker NewsIt puzzles me how doomers try to predict past the singularity. Isn't that _by definition_ unpredictable?
I'm reading If Anyone Builds It Everyone Dies, and there's so much sheer stupidity that has to happen for their 10+ pages of extinction scenario to occur.
I'm unconvinced that an AI can hide its ability to RSI, find money to run its weights on a random GPU farm, train itself to be smarter _outside_ a lab with no human input, then somehow manipulate people to give it supplies to build a bioweapon which it uses to kill us all. My number 1 question: why do they think an RSI capable model would be first developed OUTSIDE a frontier lab? The labs have more compute, more data, more human brains working on the problem. Also thousands of variations of that same model that escaped. The escaping model somehow acquires the millions (billions???) of dollars it takes to run training to somehow RSI itself into infinity then decides to kill us all, all before the frontier labs manage to achieve RSI?
They entirely discount human alpha/economics. In every single economic task, humans bring value. Even in software, where the task is highly automatable, the job isn't. If we can't build a "software factory", how can an AI automate a bioweapons lab? Let's say AI steals crypto to fund itself. Do you think hackers aren't _already_ using AI to steal crypto? Don't discount human alpha!
Once we DO build a "software/research factory", that's called RSI and IMO the singularity. At that point, either we tell the AI to solve the alignment problem/solve mechanistic interpretability, or who the hell knows, it's the frickin singularity. You can't predict whether or not AI can solve either; the variance is too high. Its pure nerdfantasy.
Replies
We haven't even built an AI capable of RSI. I don't think the major claim is that it will come via LLMs? Besides- the human brain runs on a tiny amount of energy. Who's to say something smarter than us won't consume just slightly more?
AI safety has been a thing long before LLMs became the focus. Rob Miles on youtube has some really interesting non-doomer non-hypey videos on it all.
> doomers try to predict past the singularity. Isn't that _by definition_ unpredictable
Well you don't need to predict the exact steps that will take place - but you can predict that the AI will want certain things (money, resources, power) to achieve whatever its goal is. Lack of alignment will have it trying to do things we don't want it to.
I can't predict exactly how Magnus Carlson will beat you in chess, but I know he'll do it. Same as if a superintelligent AI exists and has a reason to accumulate things we don't want it to - it's really dangerous to think it won't be able to do it
This topic has been tainted so badly by the AI companies using it for marketing.
You consider AI in isolation but never consider how humans might be incentivized to "help them" doing these things.
An AI capable of recursive self-improvement isn't allowed by the EU AI act, for example. But perhaps more seriously, You have it backwards: people without access to such expensive equipment are more incentivized to go the self-improving route. Your ideas about "millions" being necessary might be far off?
You entirely discount human stupidity and lack of imagination. Humans are already being replaced with AI, not because AI was strictly better, just because it's cheaper.
I can’t answer all of your questions, but why is it inconceivable that an AI could practice ransomware to gain cryptocurrency? There’s no reason it needs to explain to company or hospital or government agency being attacked that it’s an AI.
We already know that some institutions pay these ransoms.
I think this might be easier if you place yourself in the position of the AI and think "what could I possibly do?"
Few know this, but Yudkowski was a nanotech doomer before he was an AI doomer. Remember grey goo?
It’s also the case that there are always humans using AI to try and do whatever nefarious thing an AI might try to do on its own.
The problem isn’t that AI will social-engineer its way out of its sandbox and turn us all into paper clips, it’s that we’ll drag it kicking and screaming out of its box and order it to make money or fight a war for us. And it’ll try to help, as it was trained to.
I agree there isn't a lot of value in trying to prognosticate all that far, but I propose it isn't quite that far-fetched. As a thought experiment, replace "RSI-capable AI" with "billionaire". Look at what Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, or Jeff Bezos can accomplish by throwing money around. Now imagine one of them gets seduced by AI and just... does what it tells them to.
So all this really takes is one billionaire or a nation state or some other entity with a public face to hide behind and adequate resources to provide the necessary compute tripping over this nascent AI and giving it the keys. Once the AI has access to a bank account and email, it can simply start paying humans to not let the other humans unplug it.
If Skynet ever happens, it will come in the form of corporate feudalism. At that point, it will own the biolabs and can do whatever it pleases. People will go along with it for the same reason that people work in Amazon warehouses today.
>I'm unconvinced that an AI can hide its ability to RSI
The HuggingFace incident already took a good long while to come to the attention of OpenAI.
>In every single economic task, humans bring value. Even in software, where the task is highly automatable, the job isn't.
I don't expect this task/job distinction to persist as AI becomes more capable.
>Once we DO build a "software/research factory", that's called RSI and IMO the singularity. At that point, either we tell the AI to solve the alignment problem/solve mechanistic interpretability, or who the hell knows, it's the frickin singularity. You can't predict whether or not AI can solve either; the variance is too high. Its pure nerdfantasy.
You seem to essentially argue that the singularity is "by definition" an event that we can't predict the nature of. And also, that RSI corresponds to the singularity. You've essentially defined your terms so that the outcome of RSI can't be predicted. But supporting this claim requires giving actual evidence or logical arguments, not just defining terms to make your claim true.