cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/10961870
To Stop AI Killing Us All, First Regulate Deepfakes, Says Researcher Connor Leahy::AI researcher Connor Leahy says regulating deepfakes is the first step to avert AI wiping out humanity
When people say “AI are going to kill us all” they are either
A) ignorant on how Artificial Neural Networks work and their limitations
Or
B) they have just been handed a very large bag of cash to help large corporations monopolize the AI market.
Or C) Actually understand that alignment is a very hard problem we probably won’t be able to solve in time.
We should probably tease apart AGI and what I prefer to call “large-scale computing” (LLMs, SD, or any statistical ML approach
AGI has a pretty good chance of killing us all, or creating massive problems pretty much on its own. See: instrumental convergence.
Large-scale computing has the potential to cause all sorts of problems too. Just not the same kinds of problems as AGI.
I don’t think he sees LSC as an x-risk. Except maybe in the sense that a malicious actor who wants to provoke nuclear war could do so a bit more efficiently by using LSC, but it’s not like an LSC service is pulling a “War Games”.
What he’s proposing is:
- Since AGI is an extinction risk…
- and the companies pursuing it are pushing LSC along the way…
- and some of the problems caused by LSC will continue to be problems with AGI…
- and we have zero international groundwork for this so far…
- then we should probably start getting serious about regulating LSC now before AGI progress skyrockets as quickly as LSC did
And why not? LSC already poses big epistemic/economic/political/cultural problems on its own, even if nobody had any ambitions toward AGI.