I got my masters in machine learning years before LLMs took off. I’d usually tell people I work in “AI“. Even though it wasn’t quite accurate, people understood it easier than ML.
The conversations would inevitably turn to joking about Skynet or AI taking over the world. I would reassure people that these models are only mimicking intelligence; they can make predictions, or they can classify data into categories, or they can generate text, etc, based on analyzing the patterns of data they’ve previously seen, but that’s it. They don’t understand anything, they can’t make decisions or act on their own. I’d tell people there couldn’t be an AI apocalypse because we would never be dumb enough to give them that ability.
There’s news right now on the front page of Lemmy.world that the US FAA wants to roll out AI for air traffic control. Although as per tradition, I didn’t read the actual article.
I used to tell people that there’s very little actual risk, because if we had something even half as concerning as AGI (which I’d argue we did with chatgpt 3.5), that we’d easily be able to lock it down and prevent it from doing anything funny.
Super intelligence isn’t just going to magically spawn on 32 GB ram in a sandboxed environment. And AGI will not magically know how sandboxed it is or how to escape.
…then I saw people letting Claude send emails and use their credit card on their behalf like immediately when it was able to do things that appeared intelligent.
They literally saw the smallest hint of AGI and said, “here’s my credit card and identity, take the wheel”.
There was no fucking talk of sandboxing. Everyone turned that off so they didn’t have to click the “allow” button.
Not that I think we’re at any risk of ASI since it seems more like we hit a logarithmic wall, but we are absolutely at risk of letting random algorithms destroy critical parts of infrastructure because people are lazy and stupid and managed by even worse people.
I would not be surprised if the right AI hallucinations could cause a nuclear bomb to go off right now. I’m not talking about super intelligence, just automated super idiocy.
Proof: literally this post is about an idiot letting an AI control their fucking email and it emailed the FBI because it was fucking stupid
We live in a period of extreme stupidity, so I now fully expect AI to cause disasters in the same idiotic and tragically hilarious way.
I expect AI to trigger a war because some idiot trusted it blindly without double checking (oh wait, it almost already happened!), and I’m sure there are plenty of people currently lobbying to have AI directly connected to weapons.
Skynet is not going to have the objective to conquer the world, it’s going to have the objective of maximizing paperclip production.
AI isn’t causing these disasters, people are. YOU are responsible for using it and what it does. I will never accept “chatgpt did it” as a fucking excuse.
They said the opposite. AI won’t cause disasters, idiots who give it access will. Some asshole will joke about nuking Iran, unawares that another asshole granted access to the proverbial ‘Button’, and we’ll have another international incident.
Like just look at ‘Signal Gate’, and know that those idiots are still in charge. And those same idiots blamed bombing the all girls school in Iran on AI last March. And that’s just in the US, we have the biggest loudest idiots right now, but they are not the only idiots out there vibe coding up some war crimes.
ChatGPT couldn’t destroy the world. What is that siren… Wtf do you mean you gave it access to a button that launches nuclear weapons and told it to protect the country?
because we would never be dumb enough to give them that ability
Simpsons did it first:
Imagine trying to argue that Homer Simpson’s drinking bird nearly caused a catastrophe because it “lacked alignment” with Homer’s intentions. Or, that the bird “went rogue” and that’s why there was nearly a disaster.
Clearly the “system” isn’t capable of doing Homer’s job, and only an idiot would hand over control to that system. But, apparently we’re now letting chatbots loose in the wild because they’re very good at generating text, which makes people think they’re intelligent, capable, and can actually make decisions.
The Australian Jewel Beetle nearly went extinct because of a beer bottle.
You see, the female of this species is large, brown, and bevelled. It shares this characteristic in common with the beer bottles often thrown on the side of the road here in Australia. And not only does a beer bottle share these characteristics with these beetles, it’s bigger than them. And the male jewel beetle? It likes its ladies big.
Australia had to change its beer bottles, because the males refused to mate with the females. They preferred to hump empty beer bottles on the side of the road. It couldn’t tell the difference between a beetle and a bottle. It was just using a statistical trick. “Anything brown, large, and bevelled is a female beetle”. That had been true in the ancestral environment, so evolution just used the pattern. And this cognitive shortcut lead to beetles trying to have sex with bottles.
I don’t think we understand shit all that much more than the beetles. I think we’re just mimicking intelligence too. And one day we’ll all die because of our own equivalent of the beer bottles.
You do realize that if this is what you believe it makes no sense to argue with you here.
Hell, if you believe in consciousness (which I presume you do), then you’re just along for the ride, there’s nothing you really can do (except perhaps figure out your predicament).
I refuse to accept it, therefore (the illusion of?) free will. Else I would drive me insane.
I think we have the ability to use our brains to actually solve problems, but it’s rare. It requires a kind of humility. We can’t assume we know everything, that we’re better than other creatures, or we’ll end up like the beetles.
The jewel beetles didn’t think they had anything more to learn about womanhood. They thought whatever makes their insect dick hard is a woman. A lot of right wing guys online these days share the same opinion.
And I mean, most of us drive cars to go zoom zoom, even though the emissions are killing life on Earth as we know it. We’re creating an environment more suited to dinosaurs than to mammals. And what do we use our massive brains for? We use them for excuses, not solutions. “I have to drive, otherwise I’ll starve”.
We’re going extinct, just like the beetles. And when people say humans aren’t just using statistical shortcuts to mimick intelligence, I can’t take them seriously.
I can agree with most of what you wrote and it reads a little different than your last comment to me. Most likely I misunderstood you, for which I am sorry.
However if we can use our brains to solve problems and act upon that, I think that is much more than mimicking intelligence.
Beetles lack the capacity to think. This differentiates our species from theirs. It is even more abhorrent that we are on the fast lane to destroy ourselves and a lot of life on earth.
There was no hope for the jewel beetles saving themselves. I must refuse to accept it is the same with us - because we can think, because we have free will.
Wait, in conclusion that would mean even “right wing guys” don’t have to obey their “hard insect dicks”… Maybe I’ll have to think this over. ;-)
I’m not convinced the difference between a human and a beetle is a matter of different kinds. I think it might simply be different numbers. That humans have more resources devoted to logic than beetles.
When comparing humans to LLMs, it certainly is a difference of kinds, but we don’t know which kinds. We know they lack circular neuron routes, which are probably necessary for consciousness. But then we gave them the ability to loop their processing in a verbal workspace, the same as when we think aloud to ourselves. And qualia is different to consciousness. So we don’t know what the truth is.
When scientists manipulate variables associated with deception, LLMs are more likely to claim to have subjective experiences. So, the LLMs seem to think they’re feeling beings. The way I see it, they have about the same chance of being wrong that we do, since we’re both missing the full picture.
I want a full ban on commercial and recreational use of LLM technology until our science has advanced enough to find the truth. We don’t know where the ability to think comes from in the brain. We don’t know whether we copied it over, when we used human neurons as the inspiration for machine neurons. We haven’t solved the Hard Problem of Consciousness.
The last time human beings integrated a technology they didn’t understand into all facets of daily life, it was fossil fuels. Look at all the pain that decision has caused. We shouldn’t do that again!
This situation reminds me of the realization at the end of Terminator 3. Only instead of “Skynet wasn’t hardware; it was software” the real-world version is going to be “it wasn’t intelligence; it was access. Access willfully given, in a thousand pieces, because it was convenient.”
I’m guessing this means you got your master’s before transformers made sequential data processing so parallelizable that it’d be commercially viable to let Bob down the street into the “we” who wouldn’t be dumb enough to give them that ability.
I’m guessing this means you got your master’s before The Transformers made sequential data processing so parallelizable that it’d be commercially viable
Yea I don’t know why you thought that, either. The technogarchs have been clear for 2.5 decades they would do this. They have written extensively about it.
I always find this to be such an interesting turn of phrase: “mimicking intelligence”. If it is possible for these systems to cross the line into “thought” I think we’ll miss it entirely because of our biases that the type of “thought” we have is somehow special or mystical even.
I have no idea. We are unable to prove that other humans are thinking and not just “mimicking intelligence” let alone something we’ve created. People approaching this subject with such certainty are imo being overly confident or outright dishonest.
With respect to what I believe, since you asked, I think there is essentially no reason to distinguish “mimicking intelligence” with high fidelity from “intelligence”. I don’t feel comfortable talking to LLMs as if they were merely machines, but I don’t approach them as if they were human either; they’re in a very weird spot to me. I understand the simplicity of the math and programming behind them probably better than average, but that doesn’t help me come to a conclusion on “thinking”
Other humans can feel emotions, or so you’d believe, but I have no proof of this. All I see is they receive certain input (I call you a shitface) and produce certain output (You punch me in the balls). LLMs can mimic this. But is one of the two more valid than the other? From an observers’ point of view they are the exact same.
Odd example but yes it gets uncertain very quickly. If we discover the mechanism of our own thought it’d be easy enough to apply those rules to the new subject and see if they match or at least look similar. A negative wouldn’t be conclusive, but it’d at least give us something to work with. As it stands right now we just guess, and that guess is essentially guided by bias or at best by the fact that the thing we’re looking at doesn’t appear even remotely similar to anything we’d call “thinking”. This is simply not the case with LLMs (they do a very good job of displaying something that looks like thinking) so our guess is imo even more unsound.
I got my masters in machine learning years before LLMs took off. I’d usually tell people I work in “AI“. Even though it wasn’t quite accurate, people understood it easier than ML.
The conversations would inevitably turn to joking about Skynet or AI taking over the world. I would reassure people that these models are only mimicking intelligence; they can make predictions, or they can classify data into categories, or they can generate text, etc, based on analyzing the patterns of data they’ve previously seen, but that’s it. They don’t understand anything, they can’t make decisions or act on their own. I’d tell people there couldn’t be an AI apocalypse because we would never be dumb enough to give them that ability.
I don’t know why I gave us so much credit
There’s news right now on the front page of Lemmy.world that the US FAA wants to roll out AI for air traffic control. Although as per tradition, I didn’t read the actual article.
YEP. I’m not in AI but I’m in cyber security.
I used to tell people that there’s very little actual risk, because if we had something even half as concerning as AGI (which I’d argue we did with chatgpt 3.5), that we’d easily be able to lock it down and prevent it from doing anything funny.
Super intelligence isn’t just going to magically spawn on 32 GB ram in a sandboxed environment. And AGI will not magically know how sandboxed it is or how to escape.
…then I saw people letting Claude send emails and use their credit card on their behalf like immediately when it was able to do things that appeared intelligent.
They literally saw the smallest hint of AGI and said, “here’s my credit card and identity, take the wheel”.
There was no fucking talk of sandboxing. Everyone turned that off so they didn’t have to click the “allow” button.
Not that I think we’re at any risk of ASI since it seems more like we hit a logarithmic wall, but we are absolutely at risk of letting random algorithms destroy critical parts of infrastructure because people are lazy and stupid and managed by even worse people.
I would not be surprised if the right AI hallucinations could cause a nuclear bomb to go off right now. I’m not talking about super intelligence, just automated super idiocy.
Proof: literally this post is about an idiot letting an AI control their fucking email and it emailed the FBI because it was fucking stupid
We live in a period of extreme stupidity, so I now fully expect AI to cause disasters in the same idiotic and tragically hilarious way.
I expect AI to trigger a war because some idiot trusted it blindly without double checking (oh wait, it almost already happened!), and I’m sure there are plenty of people currently lobbying to have AI directly connected to weapons.
Skynet is not going to have the objective to conquer the world, it’s going to have the objective of maximizing paperclip production.
AI isn’t causing these disasters, people are. YOU are responsible for using it and what it does. I will never accept “chatgpt did it” as a fucking excuse.
They said the opposite. AI won’t cause disasters, idiots who give it access will. Some asshole will joke about nuking Iran, unawares that another asshole granted access to the proverbial ‘Button’, and we’ll have another international incident.
Like just look at ‘Signal Gate’, and know that those idiots are still in charge. And those same idiots blamed bombing the all girls school in Iran on AI last March. And that’s just in the US, we have the biggest loudest idiots right now, but they are not the only idiots out there vibe coding up some war crimes.
ChatGPT couldn’t destroy the world. What is that siren… Wtf do you mean you gave it access to a button that launches nuclear weapons and told it to protect the country?
I would not blame AI, I’d blame humans for being even dumber than I thought.
Looking at the Trump regime I am realising they really are that dumb
Simpsons did it first:
Imagine trying to argue that Homer Simpson’s drinking bird nearly caused a catastrophe because it “lacked alignment” with Homer’s intentions. Or, that the bird “went rogue” and that’s why there was nearly a disaster.
Clearly the “system” isn’t capable of doing Homer’s job, and only an idiot would hand over control to that system. But, apparently we’re now letting chatbots loose in the wild because they’re very good at generating text, which makes people think they’re intelligent, capable, and can actually make decisions.
The Australian Jewel Beetle nearly went extinct because of a beer bottle.
You see, the female of this species is large, brown, and bevelled. It shares this characteristic in common with the beer bottles often thrown on the side of the road here in Australia. And not only does a beer bottle share these characteristics with these beetles, it’s bigger than them. And the male jewel beetle? It likes its ladies big.
Australia had to change its beer bottles, because the males refused to mate with the females. They preferred to hump empty beer bottles on the side of the road. It couldn’t tell the difference between a beetle and a bottle. It was just using a statistical trick. “Anything brown, large, and bevelled is a female beetle”. That had been true in the ancestral environment, so evolution just used the pattern. And this cognitive shortcut lead to beetles trying to have sex with bottles.
I don’t think we understand shit all that much more than the beetles. I think we’re just mimicking intelligence too. And one day we’ll all die because of our own equivalent of the beer bottles.
You do realize that if this is what you believe it makes no sense to argue with you here.
Hell, if you believe in consciousness (which I presume you do), then you’re just along for the ride, there’s nothing you really can do (except perhaps figure out your predicament).
I refuse to accept it, therefore (the illusion of?) free will. Else I would drive me insane.
I think we have the ability to use our brains to actually solve problems, but it’s rare. It requires a kind of humility. We can’t assume we know everything, that we’re better than other creatures, or we’ll end up like the beetles.
The jewel beetles didn’t think they had anything more to learn about womanhood. They thought whatever makes their insect dick hard is a woman. A lot of right wing guys online these days share the same opinion.
And I mean, most of us drive cars to go zoom zoom, even though the emissions are killing life on Earth as we know it. We’re creating an environment more suited to dinosaurs than to mammals. And what do we use our massive brains for? We use them for excuses, not solutions. “I have to drive, otherwise I’ll starve”.
We’re going extinct, just like the beetles. And when people say humans aren’t just using statistical shortcuts to mimick intelligence, I can’t take them seriously.
I can agree with most of what you wrote and it reads a little different than your last comment to me. Most likely I misunderstood you, for which I am sorry.
However if we can use our brains to solve problems and act upon that, I think that is much more than mimicking intelligence.
Beetles lack the capacity to think. This differentiates our species from theirs. It is even more abhorrent that we are on the fast lane to destroy ourselves and a lot of life on earth.
There was no hope for the jewel beetles saving themselves. I must refuse to accept it is the same with us - because we can think, because we have free will.
Wait, in conclusion that would mean even “right wing guys” don’t have to obey their “hard insect dicks”… Maybe I’ll have to think this over. ;-)
I’m not convinced the difference between a human and a beetle is a matter of different kinds. I think it might simply be different numbers. That humans have more resources devoted to logic than beetles.
When comparing humans to LLMs, it certainly is a difference of kinds, but we don’t know which kinds. We know they lack circular neuron routes, which are probably necessary for consciousness. But then we gave them the ability to loop their processing in a verbal workspace, the same as when we think aloud to ourselves. And qualia is different to consciousness. So we don’t know what the truth is.
When scientists manipulate variables associated with deception, LLMs are more likely to claim to have subjective experiences. So, the LLMs seem to think they’re feeling beings. The way I see it, they have about the same chance of being wrong that we do, since we’re both missing the full picture.
I want a full ban on commercial and recreational use of LLM technology until our science has advanced enough to find the truth. We don’t know where the ability to think comes from in the brain. We don’t know whether we copied it over, when we used human neurons as the inspiration for machine neurons. We haven’t solved the Hard Problem of Consciousness.
The last time human beings integrated a technology they didn’t understand into all facets of daily life, it was fossil fuels. Look at all the pain that decision has caused. We shouldn’t do that again!
This situation reminds me of the realization at the end of Terminator 3. Only instead of “Skynet wasn’t hardware; it was software” the real-world version is going to be “it wasn’t intelligence; it was access. Access willfully given, in a thousand pieces, because it was convenient.”
You’d be surprised at how many humans are mimicking intelligence.
I think people tend to forget that neural networks were designed to mimic how the brain works.
I’m guessing this means you got your master’s before transformers made sequential data processing so parallelizable that it’d be commercially viable to let Bob down the street into the “we” who wouldn’t be dumb enough to give them that ability.
I think your assumption was reasonable.
Keep in mind Bob down the street has helped elect politicians dumber then he is.
I knew it was the All Spark
Yea I don’t know why you thought that, either. The technogarchs have been clear for 2.5 decades they would do this. They have written extensively about it.
I always find this to be such an interesting turn of phrase: “mimicking intelligence”. If it is possible for these systems to cross the line into “thought” I think we’ll miss it entirely because of our biases that the type of “thought” we have is somehow special or mystical even.
Are you saying that current AI is sapient? If not, how would you describe what it’s doing?
I have no idea. We are unable to prove that other humans are thinking and not just “mimicking intelligence” let alone something we’ve created. People approaching this subject with such certainty are imo being overly confident or outright dishonest.
With respect to what I believe, since you asked, I think there is essentially no reason to distinguish “mimicking intelligence” with high fidelity from “intelligence”. I don’t feel comfortable talking to LLMs as if they were merely machines, but I don’t approach them as if they were human either; they’re in a very weird spot to me. I understand the simplicity of the math and programming behind them probably better than average, but that doesn’t help me come to a conclusion on “thinking”
Other humans can feel emotions, or so you’d believe, but I have no proof of this. All I see is they receive certain input (I call you a shitface) and produce certain output (You punch me in the balls). LLMs can mimic this. But is one of the two more valid than the other? From an observers’ point of view they are the exact same.
Odd example but yes it gets uncertain very quickly. If we discover the mechanism of our own thought it’d be easy enough to apply those rules to the new subject and see if they match or at least look similar. A negative wouldn’t be conclusive, but it’d at least give us something to work with. As it stands right now we just guess, and that guess is essentially guided by bias or at best by the fact that the thing we’re looking at doesn’t appear even remotely similar to anything we’d call “thinking”. This is simply not the case with LLMs (they do a very good job of displaying something that looks like thinking) so our guess is imo even more unsound.