Booleans are reductionist and likely harmful, as they allow programmers to avoid thinking in terms of the test they are actually performing: is this a member of some set? If the problem is reworked like that Booleans are superfluous (this representation could be compiled to something as performant as using Booleans).
I am not sure if that perspective aligns with yours.
Not sure why you're getting downvoted so much, but to put this thought into a somewhat broader context:
In an explicitly, statically typed language, bools might be useful as a standard small enum.
In what Python used to be, they weren't, not really.
But for whatever reason, declared typing is now an add-on to the language, and the people who like the verbosity of declared typing also, perhaps schizophrenically, like the terseness afforded by having a standard small enum.
I don’t hate taxes per se but I hate that the government will take tax dollars earmarked for one purpose, which is how they got the tax approved by the voters in the first place, and move it to the general fund where they can spend it on their pet project.
If the options are to shoot yourself in the face or wait a year or even a month and have someone else shoot you, I think most people would pick the second.
Companies are continuing because they don’t actually believe they are going to have significant negative consequences happen sooner. It’s marketing fluff around how cutting edge what they are doing is not any kind of realistic threat assessment.
I don’t understand why this idea that it’s all just marketing is so prevalent on HN. It doesn’t make any sense. Why would a private company attempt to convince everyone that what it’s building is dangerous to its own customers?Can you think of a single other time in American history where an entire industry was calling to be regulated? I don’t seem to recall Facebook asking for tighter restrictions on social media. I don’t remember Shell telling the federal government that they need to act fast on climate change. Companies do not market themselves by convincing the public that their products might literally kill them all.
The only way this behavior makes sense is if the AI labs believe two things: one, that what they and the other labs are building is legitimately dangerous, and, two, that if they personally stop building then another lab will simply continue (and that lab will be, simply by virtue of not stopping, less safety-concerned than them). This is why they are calling for regulation. Competitive pressure and investor obligations prevents them from unilaterally stopping development. Government regulation is the only (and the most the appropriate) avenue for slowing down AI acceleration.
> Can you think of a single other time in American history where an entire industry was calling to be regulated?
Several: the railroad industry, oil industry and trucking industry have all done this because it directly benefited them.
> I don’t remember Shell telling the federal government that they need to act fast on climate change.
The oil barons actively lobbied for Federal intervention in the 1930s, to limit supply and raise prices. You're thinking recent history, but the oil industry has been around for over a century.
As others have mentioned there are lots of examples from history of businesses claiming their product is dangerous if not properly regulated, but I think what's interesting in this moment is there appear to be a cohort of true believers who genuinely believe we're headed for apocalyptic AI, and a cohort of win-at-all-costs businessmen who are happy to harness the earnest faith of the true believers in service of becoming (even more) unfathomably rich.
I don’t necessarily believe that the AI itself will kill us all. But the AIs are increasingly being baked into complex, even military, systems. That scares me just because the opportunity for complex, cascading failure becomes very difficult to predict and control. These systems are inherently immoral (it’s just a lot of matrix math) and we know these systems “lie” and try to evade detection (see the Huggingface write ups). Now, couple that behavior with a military system (drones, targeting systems, etc.). I’m not suggesting that we’re headed for full-on Terminator land here, but things definitely could go wrong.
Mass adoption of technology always has negative outcomes because any change at scale has negative outcomes. Cars as a technology kill a great number of people and yet few are willing to ban them.
“AI” in the widest definition possible could do while a lot of harm without being a net negative. I’d be way more concerned about the healthcare sector than the military as the military already has significant collateral damage.
Sure, but cars weren’t hooked up to weapons systems. They killed as an accidental side effect. That’s why I’m saying I’m not worried about AI in a general sense.
The fear around military AI is more about its failure than anything else, but nobody is trying to make fully automated machines which are manufacturing bombs from raw materials. Blowing up the wrong building matters a great deal to the people in the building, but for humanity a building was going to be destroyed either way. So the risk at any one point ends up being quite limited.
I think most would think "I can probably do a better job of not shooting myself in the face than some random person not worried about it will" and then proceed to shoot themselves in the face.
That said, I don't buy the companies actually give a damn about the risk either.
Nor are most other neighbors selling guns all day. At some point the analogy breaks down because companies aren't actually people (though this seems to be a divisive take the last few decades).
I think there's something here about game theory. I'm not sure what it's called.
The logic that if something is beyond repair anyway you might as well exploit it.
For example I heard a pick-up artist say that he thinks he is harming civilization by sleeping with hundreds of women per year. But that he already considers the situation unsalvageable so... "Might as well?"
I don't think that's an amazing attitude, but the AI labs seem to have a similar idea.
More charitably the logic seems to be, "only I can do this responsibly." I heard that from both Elon Musk (he cites this as his motivation for starting OpenAI — a chat with Sergei Brin that spooked him) and of course Anthropic (which split off from OpenAI due to ethical concerns).
So I don't actually think the ethics is all for show. I think people are actually taking this stuff seriously. But it is indeed deeply unfortunate that the survival of the companies incentivizes them to keep going at an irresponsible pace (by their own admission).
All following the same gradient off a cliff. One AI described it as a tragedy of Ancient Greek proportions.
Actually, it's easily solvable, even by proper application of existing law, but no solution is possible when big AI is above the law and can hack anybody willy-nilly. The absolute worst we could do is to listen to big AI's pleas to put them in an even more privileged position.
> “If we don’t do it, someone will.”
Do what? There are a lot more choices than "let big AI freely hack everybody" and "stop everybody else from working on AI".
> We won’t stop until we see the whites of death‘s eyes.
Trotting out "the whites of death ‘s eyes" is how real discussion is subverted into a BS binary choice. Open-sourcing all AI is an excellent starting point which will both slow down development to a naturally beneficial pace and allow the broader public to police and weed out bad models.
Open sourcing doesn't mean much when it requires many millions to run one of these 'full fat' models at any kind of real speed. Sure I can run a severly quantized model on my macbook but the performance is abysmal and the success rates go way down.
Let’s separate out what the companies actually want from the words they’re using for a moment. The top commercial companies are roughly stating:
1. Our AIs are so advanced they’re busting out of our networks and hacking people. We can’t seem to stop them.
2. There are real dangers to just how advanced our AIs are advancing.
3. Someone needs to slow us down
If these were true statements then they’d likely want to shut down themselves for the sake of the planet they live on. If there was a real problem as they have stated then shutting down is the solve (and to be clear, I’m not saying there aren’t problems with the AI industry. I just think they’re BSing us).
In reality this is marketing nonsense (better get in before the ban!) and “our” AI is never open weight/Chinese AI models which they have a different lobbying arm against. If the top four companies got a loosely regulated monopoly through regulatory capture, they’d be giddy.
I am not sure if that perspective aligns with yours.
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