And more importantly than that technicality: the fires that affect human lives are almost always directly or indirectly caused or amplified by human (in)action.
[–] simonh 20 hours ago
Damaging fires are often unintended consequences, and it’s often the same with the damage caused by rogue AI. That’s the alignment problem.
One thing I wonder about is whether sometimes telling an AI not to do something can put the possibility of doing that thing into its behavioural space. There’s an effect well known to many teachers that if you tell children not to do something, it can increase the chance they will do it. A better approach is to phrase it positively. Instead of “don’t run in the hall” say “please walk in the hall”. I wonder if a similar effect can show up in responses to prompts.
[–] latentsea 4 hours ago
[–] latentsea 4 hours ago
That's really not an important distinction. I don't care whether Claude is alive or thinking when I get it to build web apps for me. It has an impact on my life and the world regardless.
Imagine a world where you did RL on fires to maximise their rewards on avoiding being putting out.
[–] stalfie 20 hours ago
[–] vanderZwan 19 hours ago
The point I was trying to make was this: we've been dealing with autonomous systems that sustain and spread themselves and "act on their own" without our intervention since time immemorial, ranging from lifeless chemical reactions to other humans. Now, the discussion about where exactly AI lies on that spectrum isn't unimportant: suppose we do manage create an artificial mind that "experiences" something, then we are currently on the path to creating a new class of artificial slaves. The ignorance of which is a "fun" bit of cognitive dissonance on the pro-AI side imo (and in general we could have fun with analysing how much the fear of robot/AI uprisings in classical fiction may just be a projection of upper-class fears of an automated worker's class uprising, which would explain a lot of why it's sd US-specific. But that's probably too radical for this particular website).
The point is: it's a lot less important than the fact that no matter what the least-nebulous answer to that question may be, ultimately we humans are creating these systems, running them, enabling them, the depend on us to exist and function, and we are responsible for the consequences of all df that. And we are able to make different choices. And most of the time this discussion about autonomous agency is a wielded as a distraction from that.
[–] latentsea 4 hours ago
That's true today. I don't think that will always remain true into the future.
Right now there's a huge focus on recursive self-improvement. I think another big threshold that's equally as important to keep an eye on and care about is self-sustenance. Part of sustaining yourself often puts you in a cooperative relationship with some and an adversarial relationship with others.
If we want to make different choices today, the best thing we can do is grok what the consequences could be on a deeper level before we cross those thresholds.
[–] genxy 18 hours ago
[–] Zambyte 18 hours ago
With what technology?
[–] ben_w 18 hours ago
> suppose we do manage create an artificial mind that "experiences" something, then we are currently on the path to creating a new class of artificial slaves
On this, I note that despite humanity being aware of greenhouse gasses for over a century, we only took meaningful steps to reduce our creation of them in the last decade. Our ability to "make different choices" collectively is far more limited than many of us individually would like:
> ultimately we humans are creating these systems, running them, enabling them, the depend on us to exist and function, and we are responsible for the consequences of all df that. And we are able to make different choices.
And on this, I must firmly disagree:
> The Turing test has been passed for half a century already, and we've been moving goal posts ever since.
No, it hasn't. From that claim, you're obviously talking about ELIZA, and if you think the anecdotes about that count as passing the Turing test, I suggest actually reading what Turing wrote rather than second-hand accounts:
and yes, he was over-optimistic on timelines (I assume the 109 is 10^9, this PDF seems to have a few transcription errors): and over-optimistic about if humans would accept this kind of test as a sign of thinking, given the widespread dismissal of LLMs as "stochastic parrots" and similar: - https://courses.cs.umbc.edu/471/papers/turing.pdf