logoalt Hacker News

kypro • today at 9:17 PM • 1 reply • view on HN

There has long been debate in the AI safety community about where the upper bound of intelligence might be. If humans are near the upper bound then AI safety isn't a concern worth worrying about because we can basically treat AIs like very smart humans – a very smart human might be tricky to control, but far from impossible.

I've long suspected AIs will seem almost magically intelligent to us, and that the upper bound of intelligence is significantly beyond that of humans. I believe there are a number of reasons to suspect this is likely. But if I'm right it will mean AIs will be able to understand and discover things which are so complicated we humans will simply never be able to understand what AIs are doing with the depth required to replicate what they are able to do ourselves.

I realised we may be reaching this boundary recently when I read this paper on the recent progress AI has made on integer multiplication complexity, https://web.maths.unsw.edu.au/~davidharvey/research/subnlogn...

We're not worrying enough about this in my opinion. There's a huge space of things that are in theory possible, but in reality far beyond our intellectual ability. No human can look at 1 billion weights and make some tweaks so that the network performs more as they want, but an AI can reason about these kinds of seemingly impossible problems surprisingly well.

Please understand that the world around you is about to turn into Disney Land, except much of magic will not be pleasant.

I have no strong evidence for this, but I'd suggest it's probable there might be a series of sensory inputs which can brick your brain. And if such a thing exist then governments should be working on solving this kind of problem with AI or risk such a weapon being used against them.

Of course, I'd argue we simply shouldn't care the technology which unlocks these types of technologies on the tech tree, but don't be surprised in a few years when these kinds of horrors exist and are now here to stay.


Replies