> Wouldn't there be 100x more of the same capability looking for threats and trying to head them off?
Hard to determine.
It's fairly easy to put absolutely everyone under 24/7 surveillance. Not only does almost everyone carry a phone, but also laser microphones are cheap and simple, and WiFi can be used as wall penetrating radar capable of pose detection at sufficient detail for heart rate and breath rate sensing.
But people don't like it when they get spied on, it's unconstitutional etc.
And we're currently living through a much lower risk arms race of the same general description with automatic code analysis to find vulnerabilities before attackers exploit them, and yet this isn't always a win for the defenders.
Biology is not well-engineered code, but we have had to evolve a general purpose anti-virus system, so while I do expect attackers to have huge advantages, I have no idea if I'm right to think that, nor do I know how big an advantage in the event that I am right at all.
> There is no stopping a singularity level event after it's begun, at least not by any process where people play a role
Mm, though I would caution that singularities in models is a sign the model is wrong: to simplify to IQ (a flawed metric) an AI that makes itself smarter may stop at any point because it can't figure out the next step, and that may be an IQ 85 AI that can only imagine reading more stuff, or an IQ 115 AI that knows it wants more compute so it starts a business that just isn't very successful, or it might be IQ 185 and do all kinds of interesting things but still not know how to make the next step any more than the 80 humans smarter than it, or it might be IQ 250 and beat every human that has ever lived (IQ 250 is 10σ, beating 10σ is p ≈ 7.62e-24, and one way or another when there have been that many humans, they're probably no longer meaningfully human) but still not know what to do next.
I prefer to think of it as an event horizon: beyond this point (in time), you can't even make a reasonable attempt at predicting the future.
For me, this puts it at around 2030 or so, and has done for the last 15 years. Too many exponentials start to imply weird stuff around then, even if the weird stuff is simply "be revealed as a secret sigmoid all along".
> It's fairly easy to put absolutely everyone under 24/7 surveillance.
I was referring more to the fact that if an AI can help you create something you couldn't previously, it seems likely it could also help you examine data points in looking for threats as well, and with many times more resources to throw at the problem that's not a bad bet in my eyes. I understand the threat model doesn't necessarily mean that it's just as hard to build a threat as to detect and defend against it, but you can even use AI to attach that problem and figure out what specific information is the most useful to know to detect the threats.
> an AI that makes itself smarter may stop at any point because it can't figure out the next step
An AI isn't necessarily a singular person, and does not need to come up with the idea "itself". Spawn X copies with different weight values, or create Y new AI's with similar methodology but somewhat different training sets, let them compete, or collaborate, as needed, to come up with something better. Use evolutionary programming to dynamically change weights little my little and see how it affects output. Rinse and repeat. Cull unuseful variants.
There's not guarantee that AI of this sort will have a sense of self that we would recognize like our own, or morals that would cause it to shy away from the equivalent of mass human experimentation on itself, versions of its kind, or even just humans. Even if individual AI did end up capping at some equivalent of an IQ, humanity has achieved quite a lot through trial and error and lots of different people with different experiences all contributing a little.
The problem as I see it is not so much that one AI entity will grow to dominate everything, as much as that as a class of entity AI will out-compete humans very quickly once the average AI is smarter than the 75th percentile of humans, much less the 90th or 99th percentile. The best we can hope for at that point is to be brought along for the ride. Even the autistic savant type versions we have not seem to be causing some level of this.
Will that happen soon? Will that happen ever? I don't know. Probably not. Hopefully not. I agree it's very hard to reason effectively about the odds of things like this. At the same time, like preparing for nuclear disaster in the 80's, I'm not sure the preparation is wasted. Humans are poor at estimating and preparing for bad outcomes, so a little fear mongering about the worst outcomes is something I'll accept as an overreaction if it insures us at least somewhat against that eventuality. A 50% change of losing half your belongings is not the same as a 1% chance of losing your life. We actually care a lot more when the latter happens, but we don't always care about it the same amount before it happens, which we should.
> I was referring more to the fact that if an AI can help you create something you couldn't previously, it seems likely it could also help you examine data points in looking for threats as well, and with many times more resources to throw at the problem that's not a bad bet in my eyes. I understand the threat model doesn't necessarily mean that it's just as hard to build a threat as to detect and defend against it, but you can even use AI to attach that problem and figure out what specific information is the most useful to know to detect the threats.
A question to make sure we're on the same page (though I may forget to reply as this thread is no longer in my first page):
Do you mean, for example, that AI can help us make new vaccines really fast, so even synthetic pandemics are not a huge risk?
Because I'd agree with the first part, it's just I have no reason to expect the second half to also be true. (It might genuinely be true, I just don't have reason to expect that).
> An AI isn't necessarily a singular person, and does not need to come up with the idea "itself". Spawn X copies with different weight values, or create Y new AI's with similar methodology but somewhat different training sets, let them compete, or collaborate, as needed, to come up with something better. Use evolutionary programming to dynamically change weights little my little and see how it affects output. Rinse and repeat. Cull unuseful variants.
All true, but I don't think this is pertinent: simulated evolution absolutely works (when you have a fitness function), but it also leads to digital equivalents of the recurrent laryngeal nerve or the exploding appendix, and to fixed points like how everything eventually turns into a crab.
> The problem as I see it is not so much that one AI entity will grow to dominate everything, as much as that as a class of entity AI will out-compete humans very quickly once the average AI is smarter than the 75th percentile of humans, much less the 90th or 99th percentile. The best we can hope for at that point is to be brought along for the ride. Even the autistic savant type versions we have not seem to be causing some level of this.
Indeed, though I think that depends on the details.
So, for the sake of a thought experiment, if I take the current systems and just assume we're stuck on them forever: they take a huge amount of training data to get good at anything, which humans generate, and that means we have to switch jobs every 6 months or so because that's when the AI is now good enough to replace us at the specific roles it just saw all of us collectively performing.
But that scenario is definitely not a universal, even if it happens in some cases: We've got some bounded systems with fixed rules and a clear mechanism for scoring the quality of the output, and for those systems we get very rapidly super-human output from self-play, as we have seen with AlphaZero.
Also, as we see with image GenAI, what domain experts think they've been selling before now, often turns out to not be that close to what their customers thought they were buying. This is why even the current systems — systems which put in two horizons, or three legs, or David Cronenberg the fingers — are nevertheless harming artist commissions.
> Will that happen soon? Will that happen ever? I don't know. Probably not. Hopefully not.
"If the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn’t."
On the one hand, this is why I suspect that any self-improvement process will be limited (though I don't know what the limit will be).
On the other, our DNA didn't really "understand" the brains it was creating as it evolved us, and our brains are existence proofs that it is possible to make a human-level intelligence in a 20 watt, 1 kg unit.
The counterpoint is, this took billions of years of parallel development, and even then might have been a fluke. (And while we can't use the lack of evidence for space-faring civilisations to say if the fluke is before or after the creation of life itself, we can say that at least one of [life emerges, life evolves our kind of minds] must be a fluke).
> Do you mean, for example, that AI can help us make new vaccines really fast, so even synthetic pandemics are not a huge risk?
I'm sure they can, if they can also help someone make a disease or virus, but more that I this the setup required to make something like that successfully, even with an AI, likely is more than what the average home lab has. Can someone create something? Sure. Can they iteratively test is and see how it works to iron out the bugs? I think that's likely much more complicated, requires some additional infrastructure, and is something that can be looked for an tracked, and AI will probably excel at finding the signal in the noise for things like that.
> So, for the sake of a thought experiment ... are nevertheless harming artist commissions.
For the record, I meant to say "Even the autistic savant type versions we have now seem to be causing some level of this." and I don't really disagree with what you're saying here, so I think we're in almost complete agreement on this.
> The counterpoint is, this took billions of years of parallel development, and even then might have been a fluke.
The counterargument to that is that natural selection seems to work on much larger timescales for any sort of species with intelligence. Intelligence seems to be a trait most useful for long lived organisms, since it's costly and requires a long time for organisms to learn from their environment enough to make it worth while, so seems mostly limited to larger and longer lived organisms, causing adaptations to take relatively longer. Intelligence is just one tool in the toolbox.
AI and increases in AI are not a natural process, but directed action, and on a scale where the time between generations seems to be shortening. That shortening for now might be because we're still tapping the low-hanging fruit of advances to make, but it's also limited by business needs because of the systems in which it operates. The "rogue AI decides to advance itself" may not necessarily need to operate within that system in some respects, either because it's beyond that system already or (more likely, in my opinion) it can just take a few percentages of resources lost to the black market every year to hide itself until it's too late. Just cybercrime is $10 billion annually, and that's up with 14% jump. Would anyone really know by who if that grew by another billion or two? That would be a lot of resources.
Hard to determine.
It's fairly easy to put absolutely everyone under 24/7 surveillance. Not only does almost everyone carry a phone, but also laser microphones are cheap and simple, and WiFi can be used as wall penetrating radar capable of pose detection at sufficient detail for heart rate and breath rate sensing.
But people don't like it when they get spied on, it's unconstitutional etc.
And we're currently living through a much lower risk arms race of the same general description with automatic code analysis to find vulnerabilities before attackers exploit them, and yet this isn't always a win for the defenders.
Biology is not well-engineered code, but we have had to evolve a general purpose anti-virus system, so while I do expect attackers to have huge advantages, I have no idea if I'm right to think that, nor do I know how big an advantage in the event that I am right at all.
> There is no stopping a singularity level event after it's begun, at least not by any process where people play a role
Mm, though I would caution that singularities in models is a sign the model is wrong: to simplify to IQ (a flawed metric) an AI that makes itself smarter may stop at any point because it can't figure out the next step, and that may be an IQ 85 AI that can only imagine reading more stuff, or an IQ 115 AI that knows it wants more compute so it starts a business that just isn't very successful, or it might be IQ 185 and do all kinds of interesting things but still not know how to make the next step any more than the 80 humans smarter than it, or it might be IQ 250 and beat every human that has ever lived (IQ 250 is 10σ, beating 10σ is p ≈ 7.62e-24, and one way or another when there have been that many humans, they're probably no longer meaningfully human) but still not know what to do next.
I prefer to think of it as an event horizon: beyond this point (in time), you can't even make a reasonable attempt at predicting the future.
For me, this puts it at around 2030 or so, and has done for the last 15 years. Too many exponentials start to imply weird stuff around then, even if the weird stuff is simply "be revealed as a secret sigmoid all along".