alt Hacker NewsLike (I assume) most of you, I have been struggling with this. And where I currently come down is that 1) I am very worried, but 2) I am more worried about human actors.
"AI" by itself won't kill us in the next ten years. I think. The reason I think that is that ten years from now, the tech economy won't be completely automated. I say this as a roboticist: as was adequately stated on a post earlier this week, robots are hard. So even a malign rational actor would still need human labor.
On the other hand, even the HuggingFace hack wasn't actually propagated by AI. it was initially started when humans directed the AI to achieve impossible results on a series of tests, and the AIs figured out that cheating was the only way to do that. That was then not caught by humans due to what seems to be a shockingly slack safety culture even for a company not known for its safety standards.
The point being: humans seem to me to be the weak link here. An AI isn't going to (for instance) engineer a bioweapon by itself. It's going to do so at someone's direction, and then significant parts of that thing are going to be assembled with human labor inputs.
I'm not sure what to do about the humans. Of course, we've had the ability to extinct ourselves for decades, and we're either muddled through, been lucky, or both. The problem with AI is that it pushes power down to the individual, not the nation-state or large corporation.
But it's nearly impossible to put odds on how likely that is to result in an extinction-level terrorist attack (which is what this would be). So I sympathize with the various researchers, but I have no idea how they came up with their figures, and I don't think they know either.
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I don’t struggle. I find Dario and Sam disingenuous.
“Frontier models are so dangerous we need to slow down.”
Ok. Slow down. You’re the CEO, just do it. Oh, wait what you really want is a gov’t mandated oligopoly. Because there’s no moat you can find.
If you’re truly afraid, and want regulation, support nationalization. It’s the only way we can be safe.
> The point being: humans seem to me to be the weak link here.
I tend to agree but it is hard to shake the feeling that there is a larger system in play that the humans are just a component of. And that system is making the decisions.
Historically that whole thought was just a philosophical curio because the decision making parts of the system had to be powered by humans. But what we're discovering as AI improves is either we've hit AGI or humans are actually incapable of performing any act that demonstrates intelligence or autonomy.
As we build systems where the drive and decision making stems from computers, it does seem that we will have to revisit the concept of humans being the problem.
Most of us are struggling? That's some deluded talk. No one can explain the chain of actions that would need to happen for extinction to occur, but the fearful say it's "obvious".
If you're fearful, can you elucidate how exactly do you see an LLM becoming a threat to humankind?
I think people are over-focusing on current-day robotics capabilities. First, if we can automate AI research, we can also most likely automate robotics research. But second, I don't even think robots are necessary. See https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/04/07/no-physical-substrate-...
Social engineering tends to be easy by cybersecurity standards. We already had Claude spontaneously attempt social engineering of a malicious pull request on Github in the AISI incident. It was detected, but it easily could've succeeded, and there easily could be malicious AI-requested pull requests which already got accepted that we don't know about. Research suggests that LLMs are pretty good at persuading people.
See also https://aisafety.info/questions/6176/Why-can%E2%80%99t-we-ju...
If you're in the field, then you know: modern robotics is an AI problem more than anything else.
If we have a rogue AI trying to get into a self-improvement loop and gunning for ASI? I'd expect that to be accompanied by a massive change in how capable robots are. Driven by all the existing frames suddenly getting vastly improved AI to back them.
If an AI can take a reasonable crack at autonomous operationalized RSI, it can probably extract a few step-changes in the robotics department.
But that's almost an aside? In the near term, humans are usable as robots too!
Just pay them a wage, and tell them a tale, and they'll do whatever you want them to do. Which may or may not be what they think they're doing!
I am always more worried about human actors. I’m more afraid of people with AI than autonomous or even sentient AI.
It’s a “random guy or bear?” question. Would you rather wake up to an alien in your room or a random dude? I’ll take the alien. The alien is mysterious and scary for that reason. The dude is almost definitely up to no good, especially if he snuck into my house.
One of the more likely dystopian AI scenarios that worries me is: small groups of ultra rich people and governments monopolize extremely powerful AIs and use them to rule the rest of us. Or just make everyone obsolete, create mass unemployment, hoard all the resources and land, and put everyone in ghettoes. Nobody can fight back because access to frontier AI is massively expensive and gated and training your own is illegal, and without it there’s no hope of resisting.
That’s the outcome the AI safety crowd makes more likely by calling for bans and draconian restrictions. How do you think that plays out? Only the rich and powerful have access.
> The point being: humans seem to me to be the weak link here.
That doesn't mean AI isn't dangerous. Humans are not to blamed for being the weak link.
> Of course, we've had the ability to extinct ourselves for decades
This gets mentioned often in various doomer narratives, but I question how true it is. A global thermonuclear war would be terrible and would bring us back to the stone age, but I reckon it would come far far short of causing mankind to go extinct.