Is the brain just a computer By Iris van Rooij, a psychologist and cognitive scientist (and she is also a bit skeptical about the claims about AI). Might be an interesting read for the people here.
this post was submitted on 30 Dec 2024
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noodling on a blog post - does anyone with more experience of LW/EA than me know if "AI safety" people are referencing the invention of nuclear weapons as a template for regulating/forbidding "AGI"?
just after end of manhattan project there was an idea coming from some of manhattan project scientists to dispose american nukes and ban development of nukes in any other country. that's why we live in era of lasting peace without nuclear weapons. /s
some EAs had similar idea wrt spicy autocomplete development, which comes with implied assumption that spicy autocomplete is dangerous or at least useful (as in nuclear power, civilian or military)
Yeah, my starting position would be that it was obvious to any competent physicist at the time (although there weren't that many) that the potential energy release from nuclear fission was a real thing - the "only" thing to do to weaponise it or use it for peaceful ends was engineering.
The analogy to "runaway X-risk AGI" is there's a similar straight line from ELIZA to Acausal Robot God, all that's required is a bit of elbow grease and good ole fashioned American ingenuity. But my point is that apart from Yud and a few others, no serious person believes this.
I don't think it was obvious from first principles in 30s that fission works or releases energy, but if provided experimental evidence there was no other way to interpret it. also people had general sense that nuclear materials can be a source of energy because there were attempts at controlling decay, i think in interbellum. the other part is cult thinking and i don't have links for this particular one
Yeah it's been decades since I read Rhodes' history about the atom bomb, so I missed the years a bit. My point is that even if we couldn't explain exactly what was happening there was something physically there, and we knew enough about it that Oppenheimer and co. could convince the US Army to build Oak Ridge and many other facilities at massive expense.
We can't say the same about "AI".
I'd be surprised if Eliezer hasn't mentioned it at some point, maybe more in the way that you're after. Can't find any examples though.
In his Times article the only place he mentions nukes is what we should do to countries that have too many GPUs: https://time.com/6266923/ai-eliezer-yudkowsky-open-letter-not-enough/
Edit: Not Mr. Yudkowski but see https://futureoflife.org/document/policymaking-in-the-pause/
“The time for saying that this is just pure research has long since passed. […] It’s in no country’s interest for any country to develop and release AI systems we cannot control. Insisting on sensible precautions is not anti-industry. Chernobyl destroyed lives, but it also decimated the global nuclear industry. I’m an AI researcher. I do not want my field of research destroyed. Humanity has much to gain from AI, but also everything to lose.”
“Let’s slow down. Let’s make sure that we develop better guardrails, let’s make sure that we discuss these questions internationally just like we’ve done for nuclear power and nuclear weapons. Let’s make sure we better understand these very large systems, that we improve on their robustness and the process by which we can audit them and verify that they are safe for the public.”
I’m an AI researcher
*jerking off motion*
When they mention AI guardrails, they mean so it does become racist, spamming, abusive and based on the largest abuse of the cultural sector since spotify right?
Right?
A notable article from our dear friend Nick Bostrom mentions the atmospheric auto-ignition story:
https://nickbostrom.com/papers/vulnerable.pdf
Type-0 (‘surprising strangelets’): In 1942, it occurred to Edward Teller, one of the Manhattan scientists, that a nuclear explosion would create a temperature unprecedented in Earth’s history, producing conditions similar to those in the center of the sun, and that this could conceivably trigger a self-sustaining thermonuclear reaction in the surrounding air or water (Rhodes, 1986).
(this goes on for a number of paragraphs)
This whole article has some wild stuff if you haven't seen it before BTW, so buckle up. He also mentions this story in https://nickbostrom.com/existential/risks and https://existential-risk.com/concept.pdf if you want older examples.
a reply from a mastodon thread about an instance of AI crankery:
Claude has a response for ya. "You're oversimplifying. While language models do use probabilistic token selection, reducing them to "fancy RNGs" is like calling a brain "just electrical signals." The learned probability distributions capture complex semantic relationships and patterns from human knowledge. That said, your skepticism about AI hype is fair - there are plenty of overinflated claims worth challenging." Not bad for a bucket of bolts 'rando number generator', eh?
maybe I’m late to this realization because it’s a very stupid thing to do, but a lot of the promptfondlers who come here regurgitating this exact marketing fluff and swearing they know exactly how LLMs work when they obviously don’t really are just asking the fucking LLMs, aren’t they?
Not bad for a bucket of bolts ‘rando number generator’, eh?
Because... because it generated plausibly looking sentence? Do... do you think the "just electrical signals" bit is clever or creative?
Here's an LLM performance test that I call the Elon Test: does the sentence plausibly look like it could've been said by Elon Musk? Yes? Then your thing is stupid and a failure.
That test doesn't totally work as Elon does often say fuck.
That first post. They are using llms to create quantum resistant crypto systems? Eyelid twitch
E: also, as I think cryptography is the only part of CS which really attracts cranks, this made me realize how much worse science crankery is going to get due to LLMs.
As self and khalid_salad said, there are certainly other branches of CS that attract cranks. I'm not much of a computer scientist myself but even I have seen some 🤔-ass claims about compilers, computational complexity, syntactic validity of the entire C programming language (?), and divine approval or lack thereof of particular operating systems and even the sorting algorithms used in their schedulers!
I thought those non crypto cranks were relatively rare, which is why I added the "really" part. There has been only one templeos after all. And cryptography (crypto too but that is more financial cranks) has that 'this will ve revolutionary feeling which cranks seem to love, while also feeling accessable (compared to complexity theory, which you usually only know about if you know some cs already). I didn't mean there are no cranks/weird ass claims about the whole field, but Id think that cryptography attracts the lions share. The lambda calculus bit down thread might prove me wrong however.
I know what you mean. I think the main genre of CS cranks is people trying way too hard to prove something they've gotten way too attached to and cryptography (and its more or less obviously stupid applications) and functional programming (proven to be no more or less powerful than procedural, but sometimes more or less fun) seem to attract a particularly high share of cranks. Almost certainly other fields too.
I still need to finish that FPGA Krivine machine because it’s still living rent-free in my head and will do so until it’s finally evaluating expressions, but boy howdy fuck am I not looking forward to the cranks finding it
write a series of blog posts about it, all of which end "And in conclusion, punch a Nazi."
also sprinkle it at the start, and throughout
because you just know the tiring fuckers won't bother reading in depth
I think cryptography is the only part of CS which really attracts cranks
every once in a while we get a "here is a compression scheme that works on all data, fuck you and your pidgins" but yeah i think this is right
there’s unfortunately a lot of cranks around lambda calculus and computability (specifically check out the Wikipedia article on hypercomputation and start chasing links; you’re guaranteed to find at least one aggressive crank editing their favorite grift into the less watched corners of the wiki), and a lot of them have TESCREAL roots or some ties to that belief cluster or to technofascism, because it’s much easier to form a computer death cult when your idea of computation is utterly fucked
fair, there are cranks still trying to trisect an arbitrary angle with an unmarked straight-edge and compass, so i shouldn't be surprised. there are probably cranks still trying to solve the halting problem
Right, well God says:
meditated exude faithful estimate nature message glittering indiana intelligences dedicate deception ruinous asleep sensitive plentiful thinks justification subjoinedst rapture wealthy frenzied release trusting apostles judge access disguising billows deliver range
Not bad for the almighty creator 'rando number generator', eh?
a non-zero amount of the time, yeah
also, that poster's profile, holy fuck. even just the About is a trip
Wow, how is every post somehow weird and offputting? And lol at 'im seeing evidence the voting public was HACKED! (emph mine)' a few moments later 'anybody know some big 5 webscrape API coders? I need them for evidence gathering'. The delightful pattern of crankery where there is a big sweeping new idea that nobody else has seen, plus no actual ability in a technical field.
Wow, how is every post somehow weird and offputting?
just an ordinary mastodon poster, doing the utterly ordinary thing of fedposting in every thread started by a popular leftist account, calling “their wing” a bunch of cowards for not talking in public about doing acts of stochastic violence, and pondering why they don’t have more followers
LLMs continue to be so good and wagmi that they've progressed to the serving ads part of the extractivist SaaS lifecycle
I find it impressive how gen-AI developed a technology that is fine-tuned to generate content that looks precisely passably plausible, but never good enough to be correct or interesting or beautiful or worthwhile in any way.
Like if I was trying to fill the Internet with noise to ruin it, on purpose, I couldn't do better than this. (mostly on accounr of me not having massive data centres nor the moral calousness to spew that much carbon, but still). It's like the ideal infohazard weapon if your goal is to worsen as many lives as you can
It was made to write copy for catalogs, alumni bulletins, and mediocre in-flight magazines.
It also is 'great' for creating post for people who want to debate others but who dont actually care to make up arguments themselves, quality of the argument doesnt even matter. Which is quite the shit development.
At least you can recognize real replies as there are words they never fucking use.
A "high-tech" grifter car that only endangers its own inhabitants, a Trump and Musk fan showing his devotion by blowing himself up alongside symbols of both, the failure of this trained and experienced murderer to think through the actual material function of his weaponry, welcome to the Years of Lead Paint.
from I Was Promised a More Aesthetically Pleasing Cyberpunk Dystopia by Vicky Osterweil
"A new report showed that Trump's win was extremely narrow except in 'News deserts', places where there is no local reporting or information, where he won by upwards of fifty points"
Apparently the repubs always do good there or something, i saw somebody complain that the news desert stuff claims there is a much stronger casual link between news desert and trump won than there actually is.
"if you chat with it about its designers"
I hope the people here at least realize how bullshit this is right? The ai doesnt know who designed it. It isnt a child talking about how their parents looked.
To be fair it also endangers people outside the car, just not when a deflagration is set off inside.
Wow, that's bleak. The whole article I mean.
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