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#aisafety#largelanguagemodels#existentialrisk

The A.I. Dilemma - March 9, 2023

Center for Humane Technology

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  • Recommended by 11 people: 11 on Hacker News.
  • Presented by Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin, co-founders of the Center for Humane Technology
  • Linked in the descriptionarXiv 2211.06956Paper on biorxiv.orgPaper on biorxiv.org
  • May be out of date. The tools, versions or practices it shows have likely moved on.
  • An opinion. It argues one side of a question engineers disagree on.

Beginner. No background in the topic needed.

3.6M views3 years ago11 recommendations

AI and machine learningAI safety and impactTransformers and LLMsThe tech industry

Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin discuss the catastrophic societal risks posed by rapid, unregulated deployment of large language models.

Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin discuss how existing A.I. capabilities already pose catastrophic risks to a functional society, how A.I. companies are caught in a race to deploy as quickly as possible without adequate safety measures, and what it would mean to upgrade our institutions to a post-A.I. world. This presentation is from a private gathering in San Francisco on March 9th, 2023 with leading technologists and decision-makers with the ability to influence the future of large-language model A.I.s. This presentation was given before the launch of GPT-4. We encourage viewers to consider calling their political representatives to advocate for holding hearings on AI risk and creating adequate guardrails. For the podcast version, please visit: humanetech.com/podcast/the-ai-dilemma ------ Citations: 2022 Expert Survey on Progress in AI: aiimpacts.org/2022-expert-survey-on-progress-in-ai/ Seeing Beyond the Brain: Conditional Diffusion Model with Sparse Masked Modeling for Vision Decoding: arxiv.org/abs/2211.06956 High-resolution image reconstruction with latent diffusion models from human brain activity: biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.11.18.517004v3 Semantic reconstruction of continuous language from non-invasive brain recordings: biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.09.29.509744v1 Sit Up Straight: Wi-Fi Signals Can Be Used to Detect Your Body Position: pcmag.com/news/sit-up-straight-wi-fi-signals-can-be-used-to-… They thought loved ones were calling for help. It was an AI scam: washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/03/05/ai-voice-scam/ Theory of Mind Emerges in Artificial Intelligence: sciencetimes.com/articles/42488/20230220/theory-mind-emerges… Emergent Abilities of Large Language Models: arxiv.org/abs/2206.07682 Is GPT-3 all you need for low-data discovery in chemistry? chemrxiv.org/engage/chemrxiv/article-details/63eb5a669da0bc6… Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2210.11610 Forecasting: AI solving competition-level mathematics with 80%+ accuracy: bounded-regret.ghost.io/ai-forecasting ChatGPT reaching 100M users compared with other major tech companies: twitter.com/kylelf_/status/1623679176246185985 Snap: washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/03/14/snapchat-myai/ Percent of large-scale AI results coming from academia: twitter.com/johnjnay/status/1618692328524496897?lang=en How Satya Nadella describes the pace at which the company is releasing AI: nytimes.com/2023/02/23/opinion/microsoft-bing-ai-ethics.html The Day After film: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_After China’s view on chatbots: foreignpolicy.com/2023/03/03/china-censors-chatbots-artifici… Facebook’s LLM leaks online: vice.com/en/article/xgwqgw/facebooks-powerful-large-l

Why it's here

11 people recommend this

What people say. Recommended as a compelling and urgent overview of the existential and societal risks associated with rapid AI development.

NumberWangManon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Ask HN: How do you cope with the existential dread of AGI?”

Have you watched this video? link to this video (You don't have to, of course. An hour-long video recommended by a stranger on the internet is a big ask) There's a ton of evidence that this is moving way faster than people think. I don't think there's anything particularly special about human intelligence. And time and time again, we've been able to copy things that nature does and make them way more powerful, like planes vs birds. It does the same thing, but in a completely different way. It would be surprising if we couldn't do it with brains. I feel like a lot of people are not going to admit that we have already created AGI until we literally have an unstoppable AI that has taken over everything. I…

than3on Hacker News • Recommends

On “AI Will Rapidly Transform Labor, Exacerbating Inequality, Insecurity, Poverty”

I agree, insofar that most of the discourse I've seen often neglects fundamental drivers of our economy such as the division of labor and has undue focus on outcomes that are less likely to come to pass, as opposed to risk oriented discussion which is key in risk management. There was a very good video someone posted not too long ago that covers what should be covered as an overview. Link: link to this video Any engineer knows as soon as the rate of change exceeds the reaction time, you can't keep up and failures happen. In the case of systems, the larger the system the bigger and more damaging the failure. We're dealing with societal mechanics, so failures may have global impact.

EGregon Hacker News • Recommends

On “A Former Pilot on Why Autonomous Vehicles Are So Risky”

Pretty much the entire AI industry is like this now. Similar to Web3 industry before it, except AI is potentially far more dangerous. AI Experts have predicted a chance of 10-20% human level extinction from AI, have a history of underestimating AI, but companies are rushing to the precipice, and it is just the early days. Everyone should listen to this warning: link to this video

reducesufferingon Hacker News • Recommends

On “OpenAI chief goes before US Congress to propose licenses for building AI”

…? We all know social media has been a net good, right? Many of you sound exactly like the few remaining social media cheerleaders (of which there were plenty 5 years ago) who still think Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, isn't causing depression and manipulation. If you appreciated what The Social Dilemma illuminated, then watch the same people on AI: link to this video…

stillpointon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Ask HN: What is the apocolyptic scenario for AI “breaking loose”?”

"Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin discuss how existing A.I. capabilities already pose catastrophic risks to a functional society, how A.I. companies are caught in a race to deploy as quickly as possible without adequate safety measures, and what it would mean to upgrade our institutions to a post-A.I. world." link to this video A very succinct quote from this presentation, by Yuval Noah Harari: "What nukes are to the physical world... AI is to the virtual and symbolic world."

112on Hacker News • Recommends

On “Auto-GPT: An experimental open-source attempt to make GPT-4 fully autonomous”

Been involved with LLMs for the past 2 years, and what I can say is we have no idea what the technology can do, and we have no way of monitoring when it gains new abilities. We're racing towards autonomous everything, and we're too slow and blind to even detect hidden exponential developments. Here's a good overview to get up to speed: link to this video

musicaleon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Thoughts on A.I. Dilemma: Language as the ultimate medium”

Surprised there hasn't been more discussion on this on HN. Podcast and transcript: link Video: link to this video The argument against putting a potential bioweapon (etc.) in everyone's pocket is compelling, but I fear that the cat is already out of the bag.

fwsgonzoon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Ask HN: Am I wrong to feel sorry for people that mindlessly scroll all day long?”

It's an open secret that social media and engangement metrics has created something that we don't know how to undo now. No media whether it be news or entertainment will show you anything but what they think gets extra engagement. Outrage, clickbait, infinite scrolling, auto-playing content, recommendations etc. Just have a look at r/teachers to see what the next generation of kids look like. They can't concentrate more than 30 seconds. I'm no expert on this subject, so I would just recommend watching the AI Dilemma video which goes a bit into the social media side, but also talks about LLMs. link to this video

nehal3mon Hacker News • Recommends

On “AI has hacked the operating system of human civilisation”

In this very interesting video, Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin argue that LLM's can feasibly generate their own training data sets 1. It's a very interesting (and a slightly alarming) talk, maybe check it out. 1 link to this video

tpowellon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google and can now speak freely about his AI concern”

Yesterday, I randomly watched his full interview from a month ago with CBS Morning, and found the discussion much more nuanced than today's headlines. link The next video in my recommendations was more dire, but equally as interesting: link to this video

than3on Hacker News • Recommends

On “Ken Griffin says the AI community is making a mistake by creating so much hype”

…ther examples if you bother to go looking. link You can dispute it all you want, it won't make you any less wrong when it happens, and many experts are deeply concerned because the rate of change has been exponential even if you refuse to believe it. There's a video that covers the important parts if you want to educate yourself, its on youtube. link to this video…

reciprocityon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Gavin Newsom vetoes SB 1047”

link This link convinced me otherwise. I wasn't too sure before (I'm a little ashamed to admit I hadn't been following the development of SB 1047). I will also specifically share this talk on YouTube: link to this video I think this passing this bill would have probably been a very good idea. Not perfect, but far, very far from broken. Edit: I'm actually not sure if we as a community gave this topic enough attention leading in the months leading up to the announcement of this decision.

musicaleon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Ask HN: What is the apocolyptic scenario for AI “breaking loose”?”

…t that AI-fueled malware generation is already a thing. Another worrisome scenario is that models seem to be able to be optimized and shrunk. The emergent behavior from millions of them is unclear. And they note that AI (unlike nukes) can improve itself. This may lead to surprising step functions in emergent capabilities at an increasing rate. 1 link to this video (video) link (podcast and transcript) 2 link…

hudonon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Palantir CEO Rejects Calls to Pause AI Development”

This is missing a key argument from the AI-cautious, which is that we shouldn't "pause AI development", but rather "pause public deployment". The case for only pausing the public deployment solves the "China problem" because we could continue development. On top of that, it would be harder for China to fast-follow if there isn't any public deployment of what is being researched and built. edit: I'm realizing there may be different classes of people who want to regulate AI in some capacity. I'm basing myself off of this train of thought from the Center for Humane Technology: link to this video

hudonon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Palantir CEO Rejects Calls to Pause AI Development”

Maybe we're not talking about the same people, then. I am repeating almost verbatim what the folks at the Centre for Humane Technology say here: link to this video

chxon Hacker News • Mentions

On “AI is fundamentally ‘a surveillance technology’”

However, the dangers here are immense. There was link to this video where they argued for 2028 being an AI election where the person with most computing power wins. Propaganda produced by humans on small scale killed 300 000 people in the US alone in this pandemic link imagine the next pandemic when it'll be produced on an industrial scale by LLMs. Literally millions will die of it. This bubble must be extinguished by all force US regulators possess. There's not much time left, it must banned with prejudice.