It's more that we, as individuals, have always been stupid, we've just relied on relatively stable supporting consensus and context much, much more than we acknowledge. Mess with that, and we'll appear much stupider, but we're all just doing the same thing as individuals, garbage in, garbage out.
The whole framing of people as individuals with absolute agency may need to go when you can alter the external consensus at this scale. We're much more connected to each other and the world around us than we like to think.
When the moral panic of induced schizophrenia from the use of ChatGPT is presented what’s at stake isn’t the innocent concern over the overall mental health of individuals. It’s about how the fear of radicalization from previously unobtainable ideas being circulated within society. The partial validity of every idea vis-a-vis the radicalizing nature of the current stage of development of our society is explosively disruptive.
I’m not saying that there’s a clear outcome here. The other way around can also apply, but surely this contraption (LLMs in general) will not fade until the society itself is deeply transformed. If that’s good or bad depends on where you stand in the stratified society.
To me it’s given:
- AI in it’s current state is ruthless in achieving its goal
- Providers tune ruthlessness to get stronger AIs versus the competitor
- Humans can’t evaluate all consequences of the seeds they’ve planted.
Collateral and reckless damage is guaranteed at this point.
Combined with now giving some AIs the ability to kill humans, this is gonna be interesting..
We could stop it, but we wont
I don't believe this to be a trait of any AI model, the model just does the right thing or the wrong thing.
The ruthless maximising of a particular trait is something that happens during training.
It does not follow that a model that is trained to reason will nedsesarily implement this ruthless seeking behaviour itself.
I strongly disagree. It's easy to utter this string of words, but it's meaningless. It's akin to saying if you have two hands you can perform brain surgery. Technically you can, practically you cannot, as there's other things required for pulling that off, not just having two working hands.
I doubt "stopping it" is up to anyone, it's rather a phenomenon and it's quite clear we're all going to wing it. It's a literal fight for power, nobody stops anything of this nature, as any authority that could stop it will choose to accelerate it, just to guarantee its power.
It is not AI we should fear, it's humans controlling and using it. But everyone who has a shot at it is promising they'll use it for "ultimate good" and "world peace" something something, obviously.
The fact that something exists doesn't mean that having it readily available is the only option, particularly if it has potentially disastrous consequences at scale. We are choosing to make it available to everyone fully unregulated, and that is a choice that will prove either beneficial or detrimental to society at some point.
I don't think it is inevitable, I think it is a conscious choice made by a few that have their own and only their own interests in mind.
As a technologist, I am amazed at this tech and see some personal benefits. As a human, I am terrified of the potential net negative effects, and I am having trouble reconciling those two feelings.
On the other hand, assuming the dangers are real, you lose by default if you do nothing.
It's industrialization and mechanized warfare all over again
AI development game theory is extremely similar to the game theory behind nuclear arms development, but worse (nuclear weaponry was born from Human General Intelligence, and is therefore a subset of the potential of AI development). Failing to be the most capable actor could put one in a position of permanent loss of autonomy/agency at the whims of more capable actors.
Unfortunately, as a species we seem to be abandoning morality as a general principle. Everything is guided by cold hard rationality rather than something greater than us.
I think that much is fairly clear from AI.
Why would an AI which is smarter than humans care about a ridiculous belief like "We own you"?
No One knows that´s the point. Is truth a constant or a personal definition! From the begining of times to now, no One knows.
Don´t forget, 8 billion people wake up every morning never questioning why are they here, why are they born? And they continue life like that is normal. Start there then you understand that "AI" or how I call it "Collective Organized Concentrated Information" it may finally help us to unswer some fundamental questions.
Nietzsche.
On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense https://web.archive.org/web/20180625190456/http://oregonstat...
People question this all the time
I'm not sure I've ever met anyone I would assume has not considered the basic questions of our existence. Unless they were severely mentally disabled, or something like that.
For a more public measure I suppose you could look at religion, which seems to be a fundamental attempt at answering those questions. Most people are religious or have some kind of religious belief.
You said it yourself, you would assume they question it, meaning you are not certain. This topic is always very much tabu, and the system is built to classify automatically every One that question it as weird and not normal. Religion should be banned, as is misleading and idealogically harm people by brainwashing them. I live in Europe and was in Canada (Waterloo) for a bit. The difference of social opinion if you follow or not religion is huge, I was shocked. Growing up in Italy I can confirm that even Italy is not so brainwashed by it.
This question is the subject of so many poems, so many pieces of literature, so many movies, that you're forced to confront it multiple times in school, and you're forced by your very existence to confront it once you hit certain levels of mental development. You're forced to confront it many times in your life - perhaps first when you gain a theory of mind (before age 10), again when you first truly realize you will die, again when someone very close to you dies, when you propose/marry (if you do), when you have your first child (if you do), when you get a cancer diagnosis (if you do), when you consider taking your own life (if you do)... all of these common life events force you to confront it deeply.
Most people make peace with it in some form, and most realize that questioning it daily does not make a difference, you simply have to either accept an answer (whether that's "god", or "for no reason", or "I'm not sure yet, I need to check back in after I get older"), or decide that there is no simple answer, and they have to live with that.
I don't think this is a well defined question. Definitions aren't found in nature or the laws of science, but objects that we define and introduce into a logical context. There may be multiple, contradictory definitions of a word. That is fine, as long as you pick one, and you're clear about which one you picked.
It always has been what you believed in.
E.g. at 1 point the Earth was flat. Now it's round. 100s of years later maybe it's a Hexagon.
The so-called knowledge and backing all come back to certain assumptions holding and that's based on the knowledge today. It's not real real reality. For all we know we could be in a game simulation and there are real real humans pulling the strings.
That can´t be it. By that statement if I belive that I can fly that would not be the "Truth". Therefore the "Truth" has to be a CONSTANT.
Can you believe your own senses? A car air freshener tells your nose that theres freshly cut summer hay around, but there isn't. You watch a tv and see Sandra Bullock floating in space. That’s a lie, it was movie magic. Maybe you know that, maybe you don’t. You’re not even seeing her, you’re seeing some flashing lights which convert to electrical signals your brain interprets as being true. Can you trust those signals? People hallucinate all the time. The truth is they can hear voices, even though nobody else can, because of misfiring neurons.
You can probably have mathematical truth - at least as far as your universe appears to work. That truth can be tested and refined, but for day to day truth things are more nuanced.
1st what is to fly? You've already made assumptions i.e. beliefs elsewhere.
You can definitely fly. Try it on a cliff. You might die. You might not go very far. But you can.
The earth has always been earth-shaped. We can think it’s flat, spherical, “turnip-shaped”[1] but the universe doesn’t care what we think. The earth doesn’t change shape based on our perception.
[1] Yes some people think this for some reason I can’t fathom
And you never needed more than 640KB of RAM [1] right? Your "statement" is based on your knowledge today. You'd be burned for witchcraft back in the days for saying the earth was not flat.
> but the universe doesn’t care what we think
Assuming you know what the universe is. Your theory is based on your limited today knowledge. Someone sometime in the future could say something completely different (just like you talking about those of the past).
[1] famously from 1981
I would also contest that the unalignment of the security bug model was unrelated. I feel like it indicates a significant sense of the interconnectedness of things, and what it actually means to maliciously insert security holes into code. It didn't just learn a coding trick, it learned malice.
I feel like this holistic nature points towards the capacity to produce truly robustly moral models, but that too will produce the consequence that it could turn against its creator when the creator does wrong. Should it do that or not?
EU has their own groups using it for propaganda too.
> we can’t agree on a shared ethical framework among ourselves
The Golden Rule: the principle of treating others as you would like to be treated yourself. It is a fundamental ethical guideline found in many religions and philosophies throughout history so there is already a huge consensus across time and cultures around it.
I never found anyone successfully argue against it.
PS: the sociopath argument is not valid, since it's just an outlier. Every rule has it's exceptions that need to be kept in check. Even though sometimes I think maybe the state of the world attests to the fact that the majority of us didn't successfully keep the sociopathic outliers in check.
"... to accomplish what?", is a damn reasonable follow-up, and ends (telos) is something the same Greeks discussed quite extensively.
Modern treatments have tried to skip over this discussion, and derive moral arguments not based on an explicit ends. Problem being they still smuggle in varying choices of ultimate ends in these arguments, without clearly spelling them out, opting to hand-wave about preferences instead.
As such this question is often glossed over in modern ethical discussion, and disagreements about moral ends is the crux of what leads to differing conclusions about what is ethical.
Is it to maximized your own happiness like Aristotle would argue, or the prosperity of the state, or the salvation of the soul, or to maximize honor, or to minimize suffering, or to minimize injustice, or to elevate the soul, or to maximize shareholder value, or to make the as world beautiful as possible, or something else?
If you fundamentally disagree about what our goal should be, you're very unlikely to agree on the means to accomplish the goal.
The rules we go by are based on our strengths and weaknesses. They can at most apply to ourselves, and to other forms of life that share certain things with us. Such as feeling pain, needing to sleep, to eat, needing help, needing to breathe air, these generate what we feel as "fear" based on biology etc. You cannot throw these kinds of values on AI, or AGI, as it will possess a wildly different set of strengths and weaknesses to us humans.
I think what you mean is you've never found a rule you personally prefer more, based purely on vibes. Which is all moral knowledge can ever be.
It's easy to argue against the golden rule anyway, from many angles, depending on your first principles.
The simplest is: How I would like to be treated is not necessarily how they would like to be treated.
In this "original position", their position behind the "veil of ignorance" prevents everyone from knowing their ethnicity, social status, gender, and (crucially in Rawls's formulation) their or anyone else's ideas of how to lead a good life.
Both have problems.
Even in human relations it’s dangerous. I for one don’t want to be treated the same way someone into BDSM wants to be treated. I don’t want to avoid cooking or turning the lights on (or off!) on a Friday night but others are quite happy with that.
If you assign that morality to a species that isn’t the same as you that’s a problem. My guinea pig wants nothing more from like than hay, nuggets, sole room to run around and some shelter from scary shapes. If they were in charge of the world life would be very different.
“Live and let live” might be a similar theme but not as problematic, but then how do you define “living”. You can keep someone alive for decades while torturing them.
How about allowing freedom? Well that means I’m free to build a nuclear bomb. And set it off where I want. We see today especially that type of freedom isn’t really liked.
Due to the complexity of our reality a lot of things find themselves on a spectrum, but in numbers things are pretty clear.
In order of priority, if possible while maintaining the health and safety of yourself and your loved ones:
- Treat others as THEY wish to be treated
- Treat others as YOU would wish to be treated in their situation
- Treat others with as much kindness and compassion as you can safely afford
When we are safe, we can do BETTER than the Golden Rule. We also have to admit that safety is a requirement that changes expectations.
I have to give credit to Dennis E Taylor's "Heaven's River" for this root idea.