Asklemmy

40+ years on this planet have made me 100% certain that no one with the power to safeguard AGI will make any legitimate effort to do so. Just like we have companies spending millions greenwashing while they pollute more than ever, we'll have plenty of lip-service about it but never anything useful.

This is AskLemmy, not go on a rant and spread whatever narrative you feel spreading and add a question mark at the end.

Somewhere between

A bunch of incapable, spoilt, completely insane men-children with too much money think they can save the world.

and

A bunch of scam artists build an artificial human who they claim can talk and draw and reason just like a real human would.

For the CEOs of this brave new AI world this probably changes depending on their level of hangover and/or midlife crisis.

It's common business practice for the first big companies in a new market/industry to create "barriers to entry". The calls for regulation are exactly that. They don't care about safety--just money.

For your first point sure it couldn't run itsself on consumer hardware, but it could design new zero day malware faster than any human and come up with new scams to get it onto people's machines

It could also design a more efficient version of itsself to spread that will run on lower powered hardware

AGI is still science fiction right now

I'm of the opinion that Microsoft was tired of losing money on OpenAI, so made some kind of plan to out the current CEO, tank the stock price, and be in the perfect position to buy the company and monopolize AI technology. It wouldn't be the first time they pulled shady crap like that.

How could an intelligence that requires massive amounts of CPU, RAM, and database storage even concievably able to leave the confines of its own computing environment?

Why would it need to leave its own environment in order to impact the world? How about an AGI taking over the remote fly system for an F-35, B-21, or NGAD in order to go all Skynet? It doesn't have to execute itself on the onboard system of the plane, it simply has to have control of the remote control system. Penetration of and fuckery with the systems that run major stock exchanges present the same problem. It doesn't need to execute itself on those platforms, merely exert control over them.

The concern here isn't about an AGI taking over systems in order to execute itself, it's about AGI taking control of systems away from humans in much the same way that traditional Black Hat hackers would but at a much faster speed and with potentially far less concern for any human cost.

Money wins, every time.

And right there, you answered your own (presumably rhetorical) question.

The money people jumped on AI as soon as they scented the chance of profit, and that's it. ALL other considerations are now secondary to a handful of psychopaths making as much money as possible.

I think there are real concerns to be addressed in the realm of AGI alignment. I've found Robert Miles' talks on the subject to be quite fascinating, and as such I'm hesitant to label all of Elizier Yudkowsky's concerns as crank (Although Roko's Basilisk is BS of the highest degree, and effective altruism is a reimagined Pascal's mugging for an atheist/agnostic crowd).

Even while today's LLMs are toys compared to what a hypothetical AGI could achieve, we already have demonstrable cases where we know that the "AI" does not "desire" the same end goal that we desire the "AI" to achieve. Without more advancement in how to approach AI alignment, the danger of misaligned goals will only grow as (if) we give AI-like systems more control over daily life.

I for one don't understand why people have the need for a Tech Visionary Messiah to cling on to and adore. Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, lots of others, Sam Altman is the latest. They always and without exception turn out to be little human beings with little selfish needs behind their grandiose altruistic sales pitches. People never learn, do they.

What's AGI?

AI isn't the danger, it's human application of "AI" that will be horrible as fuck.

Homie got rich and famous by making a chat bot that spits out the internet back at you while spewing out buzzwords like only the best Valley hustlers can.

Personally I'm more worried about the robodogs and terminators that the likes of Boston Labs are putting out.

Perhaps we should actually do some research and not use Hollywood movies as our reference?

AGI isn’t real

I agree with everything you said I only want to add that there is kinda one or two ways for the AGI problem a la Sci-Fi to happen.

By far the most straight forward way is if the military believe that it can be used as a fail safe in MAD scenarios, i.e. if they give the AI the power to launch nuclear ICBM's a la War Games. Not very likely, but still not something we want to dismiss entirely. This is also a problem with regular AI and LLM's.

The second, and, in my opinion, more likely scenario is if the AI is able to get a large number of people to trust it implicitly and then use seemingly unrelated benign actions from each of them to do something catastrophic.

Something you may notice about these two scenarios is that neither one of them can be "safeguarded" in the code, only by educating people on the proper usage of and posture to have when handling AI.

Once they saw the big stack of money, they suddenly forgot that OpenAI's charter specifically mentioned preventing AI to benefits select fews and instead hands over everything to Microsoft on a silver platter.

I wish this narrative would get more traction. I don't get the love for Altman, even inside Open AI.

This whole drama has revealed.what I suspect is a larger problem across tech- that there are product-focused people who are legitimately trying to make tools to better society, and there are people who just want to make money.

Two guesses which type of person is usually in the C suite.

At this point I think it's safe to assume that if a business is doing something, they're doing it for money no matter what else they say. And while OpenAi is a 'non-profit' the board is made up of almost all business folks who are gonna behave the same way regardless of the venue.

itt, lots of people who don't know shit about the glorified decision trees people call ai

It doesn’t matter if anyone cares about the safety of AGI.

AGI is a direct source of power, much like any weapon. As soon as AGI exists, we will exist in a state of warfare due to the fact that the “big guns” will be out.

I know I’m having trouble articulating this point, but it’s very important to understand. AGI is like a nuclear weapon: once a person has it, it doesn’t matter how much others may want to regulate them. It’s just not possible to regulate.

The ONLY strategy that gives us hope of surviving AGI’s emergence without being enslaved is to spread AGI far and wide to ensure a multipolar AGI ecosystem, which will force AGI to learn prosocial interaction as a means of ensuring its own survival.

And if you want to come at me with “AGI doesn’t inherently have a self interest”, consider that the same is true of nuclear weapons. And yet nuclear weapons get their interests from their wielders. And the only way to stay safe from nuclear weapons is also to proliferate them far and wide so that there is a multipolar ecosystem of nuclear weapons, ensuring those holding nuclear weapons have to play nice to ensure their own survival.

All of this talk about restricting AGI will only have the effect of concentrating it in a few hands, leading to the very nightmare the regulators are trying to avoid.

If the regulators had succeeded, and the US had been the only nation to possess nuclear weapons in the long run, humanity would have suffered massively from that lack of parity. Let me be less coy: humanity would have suffered under the brutality of repeated nuclear holocausts as the interests of the few led to further and further justification of larger and larger strikes.

Nuclear weapons cannot be regulated by law. They can only be regulated by other nuclear weapons. Same is true of AGI.

Money is the catalyst to our own demise. By hook or by crook (ha!) greed and pride will crush us eventually unless extreme wealth is curtailed. The imaginary system of beans and shells that we arbitrarily follow is destroying us in fast motion.

My biggest issue with this whole debacle is that the non-profit board hasn't clearly explained itself to the pubic or its employees. There's an ethics discussion that absolutely positively needs to happen and there needs to be some sort of governance in place around a myriad legal and moral issues from copyright to displacing human jobs and that can't happen right now because we still don't know what the fuck the board was trying to accomplish.

I'm all for responsible stewards of AI, but I don't think this board is it. They've cut themselves out of any future governance ability in any event.

How could an intelligence that requires massive amounts of CPU, RAM, and database storage even concievably

What you define as "massive" amounts might still be large amounts for most consumers. But even then it's not... really. Developers frequently fit these models in their own laptops. Some of the ML models fit on an iPhone or Android phone. It can generate ten, or hundreds of words (tokens) per second.

So the fact that they don't need massive amounts of CPU, RAM, and database storage is rather the point. Imagine if it could escape and multiply. It could conceivably do so quite quickly given current technology.

Any space. Any place. Money wins.