This argument should be reframed as "AI has the potential to cause catastrophic loss of life". It's too high of a bar to prove that AI will "wipe out humanity". It's sorta like climate change, it's easier to show that weather patterns are becoming increasingly dangerous.
So far after using agents and having built an agent, the "AI will destroy humanity" argument seems to be a marketing ploy so these companies that lied about LLM's capabilities and received billions in investments can artificially "slow down progress" after running into some serious limitations. I'm not expert and won't claim to be, but that just sounds like the reality at the moment. Will AI cause some serious harm to the job market and cause more wealth disparity though? So far all signs point to yes.
Or is it to lobby for restrictive rules on AI research that only the largest firms can hope to comply with? And "only coincidentally" ends up outlawing open source / open weight / import of overseas AI models?
not just, its also very likley to be the tool used to create civil unrest and even war.
the damage it can do to the masses by misinformation or ragebating by feeding everyone its own paticular echo chamber is was too often not even spoken about.
Agreed, and while I want to see AGI come into existence, I'm also for policies aimed at harm reduction. This doesn't have to be an all or nothing form of argument.
Those are distillations of existing knowledge. They are necessarily behind the status quo. "You can't call this newfangled contraption a computer, because a computer is a person!"
That seems like a really bizarre way to describe a tool that solved an open Millennium Prize Problem. They are, empirically and repeatedly, ahead of the status quo.
So if your argument depends on them being behind the status quo, reality has already disproven it multiple times over.
I believe the argument you're responding to is "a set of dictionary definitions does not suffice to define intelligence"?
I will admit the first time I read the thing you're replying to, I had a similar thought as you; From the sibling reply from them, I think they think they were obvious, but that also means I wouldn't expect their reply to help unless you had the same flash of inspiration I had.
The people who write dictionaries generally take a descriptivist approach, that’s why slang terms enter the dictionary after they start to become popular.
The state of the art of human knowledge would be another step ahead of the common use of any language.
That's an interesting take, and I can see how "computer" could refer to a human a hundred years ago, but they also mentioned "status quo", which should indicate that a reasonable person should use a modern definition.
Imagine you're the first one to invent a digital electronic computer. You call it a computer, and I go on Tinkerer News and post (by carrier pigeon) "ummm akshully computers are people????" - which one of us would be adding value and which one subtracting it?
Again I’m not the person who wrote the comment, but I think they were exaggerating for effect and maybe lost the audience in doing so. While “computer” has meant the same thing for many decades now, the term “intelligence” really does seem like a moving goalpost?
yet those movements came with clear definitions. If you have a new definition for intelligence, which isn't just designed as a definitional dodge, then please provide one
I think it's only a moving goalpost if you can show that the goalpost has moved with a new definition that fits our current usage of it. The people saying "this isn't intelligence", and then claim "we don't even know what intelligence is", are encouraged to offer such a definition.
That is simply not possible, they are mutually exclusive matters.
Ignoring for the time being that many freedoms have already been adversely curtailed, including freedom of speech, assembly, self-governance and even self-preservation in America, you cannot even preserve the reminding freedoms if you want to “change” rules, i.e., curtail freedom.
Rules inherently curtail freedom and unfortunately for all of us, the absolutely worst types of people are in control of things like AI, convinced of themselves that they are in fact the right people to determine the rules for all of humanity.
At least that was the plan. The wrench in their gears seemingly were the Chinese models that have offered, ironically indeed, immense freedom and on top of that, an escape from the prison the American AI cabal was and continues to build around all of humanity.
I think rules can also enhance freedoms, for example having rules in national parks keeps those parks in better condition for future generations, which in a way supports the freedom to enjoy that nature. Have rules for driving makes it safer to drive, thus preserving my freedom to drive. We can wax on like this, but what I'm really searching for are pros and cons for each rule we propose.
Can you explain what you mean by "job" and "you must take it".. what does that mean in concrete terms?
And what do you mean by "sacrifices"? For example, if students don't agree to TurnItIn's policy, it becomes significantly harder to take classes. Do you mean to say students should have to suffer the consequences of these sacrifices just because we can't seem to support their right to privacy?
> a state in which one is not observed or disturbed by other people.
> the state of being free from public attention.
From this, it seems obvious that a person should not be observed in our digital spaces without clear consent, where consent is not tied to preclusion of goods or services (i.e. without coercion).
The doomsday virus has a first-mover advantage over the vaccine. The time that people start to drop dead from the virus is the time you start to make and distribute a vaccine. Even if AI can design and synthesize a vaccine within hours, how fast can it be rolled out to the general populace? It took months to distribute the Covid vaccines, even when we already knew how to make them. You have to physically load the doses on trucks[...]
was just 'make a viral vaccine with a shorter incubation period and infect everyone'. Handwavey problems require handwavey solutions.
“It’s too late” is a logistical issue IMO. In this article, virus production is totally decentralized and fast, but vaccine production is centralized and slow. Why?
It still doesn't say anything about vaccine production being slow either:
> Overnight, with the help of frontier LLMs, they design highly effective mRNA vaccines and antivirals against all the viruses and start shipping them across the world.
"overnight", that's way faster than the virus production! And I doubly don't see how "decentralizing" that would help, at all, what that has to do with anything.
It says why it's too late right in the next sentence:
> It’s too late. Because of the viruses’ long asymptomatic contagious periods, most people already have at least one of the viruses, so the vaccines don’t work.
You might say by the time production starts it's already too late. A vaccine isn't a cure. It could be distributed by teleportation into the bloodstream of anyone on Earth instantly, the instant it was discovered, and it would still be too late.
Some exploit hunters sell strictly to the grey/black market to avoid opsec issues. If you're selling on both, you're more likely to be identified by both.
I'm not a fan of joking about those efforts. The people doing that work to catch predators and prevent their evil from reaching the general public are heroes.
I'm not a lawyer, but in my view copyright violations center around distribution, not necessarily the method by which a work is obtained
e.g. if someone is reciting a poem they wrote in a public park, and I make a recording of that recitation, I have not violated their copyright in doing so, however I might violate their copyright by reconstructing that poem and then distributing it
As in all cases it depends on jurisdiction. For example where I am performers have a right to not be recorded so you may in fact not make such recording, you didn’t not necessarily violate copyright but you violated related rights.
And likewise if you distribute any sort of copy of the recording you made you are violating at least one if not more copyrights.
where I live, anything in public view is allowed to be filmed/recorded, which is how the news can record things on the street without getting a release from those that they filmed, and they certainly distribute those recordings
If the news reporter said "Someone at a park played this 4 minute copyrighted song, and today's top story is just us showing you the recording" I'd bet that would be illegal where you live.
> however I might violate their copyright by reconstructing that poem and then distributing it
My argument is that the recording itself is not a copyright violation, not that distributing such a recording couldn't be construed as one (however I disagree on principle with that being illegal as well, as it puts an undue burden on the exercise of free speech, which should include the ability to accurately and entirely recite what I had experienced in a public place).
Which is why torrenting is the dumbest way to do this, since every downloader is also an uploader. That is what gets torrenters locked up. It is possible to leach only, but its not the default mode, and if this guy was broadcasting his IP address, then he was seeding... distributing.
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