They're not part of an evolved biological organism, so why would it be surprising if they're different? It is called artificial intelligence, and it's not a simulation of a brain like the Nematode OpenWorm.
> Reading everything becomes the default. At a cent per document, a model can read every paper in a field, every record in an archive, every email, or every message in a support queue as a matter of routine
What if I tell the model to go commit fraud or crimes and it complies? What if users are having psychotic episodes driven by their interactions with the model?
Just because safety is a hard and messy problem doesn't mean we should just wash our hands of it.
It is a hard and messy problem, and it doesn't help when people muddy the water further by stirring things like "Don't commit fraud," "Don't infringe on Disney's trademark," and "Don't be racist" into the mix and try to lump those things under the "Safety" umbrella.
Maybe this is an outdated definition, but I've always thought of safety as being about preventing injury. Things like safety glasses and hardhats on the work site, warning about slippery floors and so on. I think people are trying to expand the word to mean a great many more things in the context of AI, which doesn't help when it comes to focusing on it.
I think we need a different, clearer word for "The AI output shouldn't contain certain unauthorized things."
The more messy a problem is, the less it should be decoupled and siloed into its own team.
Instead of making actual improvement on the subject (you name it, safety, security, etc), it becomes a checkbox exercise and metrics and bureaucracies become increasingly decoupled from truth.
Usually all code has an owner though. If I encounter a bug the first thing I often do is look at git blame and see who wrote the code then ask them for help.
If the worst predictions about AI's effect on employment turn out to be correct, then I'd expect to see movements to force government regulation of AI. Particularly if it becomes the case that profits are accruing to a few massive corporations who run the AI.
There is no reason people have to tolerate a technology that is destructive to society, anymore than they have to tolerate companies selling fentanyl at 7/11.
I wish it was just psychos with power that are causing these issues. It's worse than that I think. It's the competition based systems of human organization that will result in what you're describing.
Even if people in one country manage to get rid of the psychos and give power back to the people, the countries that continue at full speed to full automation of the economy and the military will just win the competition over resources and power. For as long as our economic system and the systems that govern relationships between countries are based on competition, we are forced to continue on this path. The ones that choose not to will lose.
We would need to quickly build systems based on cooperation instead of competition if we want to avoid a disaster. No more markets, no more competing nation states. Probably an impossible task considering we don't have much time left before we have automated systems that make it impossible for people to take back control from the owners of those systems.
I believe decentralized, democratic systems(not the sham imposed in most countries) are inherently _better_ systems than autocratic rule, and will produce better rules for the whole.
Competition is good, but must be done by rules enforced by the global community.
Could be, if we can come up with efficient ways to govern using direct democracy that lead to better decisions than what we now have. I don't see much work being done to come up with such a system, though.
What they do there is not enough. All decisions should be made using some form of direct democracy, otherwise you leave an opening for power concentration again, which will lead to the same problems we're now facing. We can't make all decisions using referendums.
> then I'd expect to see movements to force government regulation of AI
The big question that never gets answered is: What regulation, specifically?
Any one country could come out and declare that AI can’t be used or just be taxed at an exorbitant rate or something along those lines, but what would happen? The AI usage would go to another country.
If the US heavily regulated AI, China just runs away with it all. None of the calls for regulation I’ve seen have an answer for this, aside from the completely crazy calls to bomb data centers in other countries.
Most people are far more concerned about their livelihood than about abstract notions of beating China in a game of geopolitics. In that scenario the US becomes an isolated economy, and other nations likely follow suit. It will be a poorer, less dynamic world, but most people will choose that outcome over poverty.
I'd expect it to be more dramatic. The worst predictions are something like "50% of all jobs will be completely eliminated in two years." That's violent uprising territory, not pressure on governments to improve regulation.
If "50% of all jobs will be completely eliminated in two years" comes to pass, then there will be a violent contraction, perhaps even a total collapse, of all advanced economies. In this eventuality, the venture capitalists who funded the rise of AI will lose their money.
If a large percentage of jobs have not been eliminated in two years' time, it will be because AI has largely failed to deliver on its boosters' predictions. In this eventuality, the venture capitalists who funded the rise of AI will lose their money.
The desirable end game is somewhere there in "a large percentage" - e.g. if they can realiably automate 5% of jobs each year, theirs is the Earth and everything that's in it.
>I'd expect to see movements to force government regulation of AI.
I agree. It will be an interesting debate to watch play out, because a) lots of end-users love using AI and will be loath to give it up, and b) advances in compute will almost certainly allow us to run current frontier models (or better) locally on our laptops and phones, which means that profits no longer accrue to a few massive AI labs. It would also would make regulating it a lot tricker, since kneecapping the AI labs would no longer effectively regulate the technology.
> There is no reason people have to tolerate a technology that is destructive to society,
All evidence to the contrary. Aside from the French occasionally burning down some cars the western populations (me unfortunately included) have become remarkably relaxed about such things.
Even very extreme examples like blatant refusal by government to investigate absolutely horrific stuff like Epstein gets at most some mildly upset TikTok reels
Add some aggressive lobbying by big tech and perhaps a sprinkle of palantir population monitoring and I don’t think we’ll see a refusal to tolerate at scale
