I directly asked gemini how to get world peace. It said the world should prioritize addressing climate change, inequality, and discrimination. Yeah - we're not gonna do any of that shit. So I don't know what the point of "superintelligent" AI is if we aren't going to even listen to it for the basic big picture stuff. Any sort of "utopia" that people imagine AI bringing is doomed to fail because we already can't cooperate without AI

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ASalazarMX 18 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> I don't know what the point of "super intelligent" AI is if we aren't going to even listen to it

Because you asked the wrong question. The most likely question would be "How do I make a quadrillion dollars and humiliate my super rich peers?".

But realistically, it gave you an answer according to its capacity. A real super intelligent AI, and I mean oh-god-we-are-but-insects-in-its-shadow super intelligence, would give you a roadmap and blueprint, and it would take account for our deep-rooted human flaws, so no one reading it seriously could dismiss it as superficial. in fact, anyone world elite reading it would see it as a chance to humiliate their world elite peers and get all the glory for themselves.

You know how adults can fool little children to do what they don't want to? We would be the toddlers in that scenario. I hope this hypothetical AI has humans in high regard, because that would be the only thing saving us from ourselves.

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vkou 17 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The blueprint should start with a recipe for building a better computer, and once you do that, well, it's humans starting fires and playing with the flames.

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catigula 18 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Why would a "real super intelligent AI" be your servant in this scenario?

>I hope this hypothetical AI has humans in high regard

This is invented. This is a human concept, rooted in your evolutionary relationships with other humans.

It's not your fault, it's very difficult or impossible to escape the simulation of human-ly modelling intelligence. You need only understand that all of your models are category errors.

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ASalazarMX 17 hours ago | parent [-]

> Why would a "real super intelligent AI" be your servant in this scenario?

Why is the Bagger 288 a servant to miners, given the unimaginable difference in their strenght? Because engineers made it. Give humanity's wellbeing the highest weight on its training, and hope it carries over when they start training on their own.

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catigula 16 hours ago | parent [-]

Category error. Intelligence is a different type of thing. It is not a boring technology.

>Give humanity's wellbeing the highest weight on its training

We don't even know how to do this relatively trivial thing. We only know how to roughly train for some signals that probably aren't correct.

This may surprise you but alignment is not merely unsolved; there are many people who think it's unsolvable.

Why do people eat artificially sweetened things? Why do people use birth control? Why do people watch pornography? Why do people do drugs? Why do people play video games? Why do people watch moving lights and pictures? These are all symptoms of humans being misaligned.

Natural selection would be very angry with us if it knew we didn't care about what it wanted.

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ASalazarMX 14 hours ago | parent [-]

> Why do people eat artificially sweetened things? Why do people use birth control? Why do people watch pornography? Why do people do drugs? Why do people play video games? Why do people watch moving lights and pictures? These are all symptoms of humans being misaligned.

I think these behaviors are fully aligned with natural selection. Why do we overengineer our food? It's not for health, because simpler food would satisfy our nutritional needs as easily, it's because our far ancestors developed a taste for food that kept them alive longer. Our incredibly complex chain of meal preparation is just us looking to satisfy that desire for tasty food by overloading it as much as possible.

People prefer artificial sweeteners because they taste sweeter than regular ones, they use birth control because we inherently enjoy sex and want more of it (but not more raising babies), drugs are an overloading of our need for hapiness, etc. Our bodies crave for things, and uninformed, we give them what they want but multiplied several fold.

But geez, I agree, alignment of AI is a hard problem, but it would be wrong to say it's impossible, at least until it's understood better.

	▲	catigula 14 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It seems like you don’t understand reinforcement learning. The signal is reinforced because it correlates to behavior, hacking the signal itself is misalignment.

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Nzen 17 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Did you expect some answer that decried world peace as impossible ? It's just repeating what people say [0] when asked the same question. That's all that a large language model can do (other than putting it to rhyme or 'in the style of Charles Dickens').

[0] https://newint.org/features/2018/09/18/10-steps-world-peace

If you are looking for a vision of general AI that confirms a Hobbsian worldview, you might enjoy Lars Doucet's short story, _Four Magic Words_.

[1] https://www.fortressofdoors.com/four-magic-words/

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chasd00 17 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> So I don't know what the point of "superintelligent" AI is if we aren't going to even listen to it

I would kind of feel sorry for a super-intelligent AI having to deal with humans who have their fingers on on/off switch. It would be a very frustrating existence.

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PunchyHamster 18 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I dunno, many people have that weird, unfounded trust in what AI says, more than in actual human experts it seems

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bilbo0s 18 hours ago | parent [-]

Because AI, or rather, an LLM, is the consensus of many human experts as encoded in its embedding. So it is better, but only for those who are already expert in what they're asking.

The problem is, you have to know enough about the subject on which you're asking a question to land in the right place in the embedding. If you don't, you'll just get bunk. (I know it's popular to call AI bunk "hallucinations" these days, but really if it was being spouted by a half wit human we'd just call it "bunk".)

So you really have to be an expert in order to maximize your use of an LLM. And even then, you'll only be able to maximize your use of that LLM in the field in which your expertise lies.

A programmer, for instance, will likely never be able to ask a coherent enough question about economics or oncology for an LLM to give a reliable answer. Similarly, an oncologist will never be able to give a coherent enough software specification for an LLM to write an application for him or her.

That's the achilles heel of AI today as implemented by LLMs.

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chasd00 17 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> The problem is, you have to know enough about the subject on which you're asking a question to land in the right place in the embedding

The other day i was on a call with 3 or 4 other people solving a config problem in a specific system. One of them asked chatgpt for the solution and got back a list of configuration steps to follow. He started the steps but one of them mentioned configuring an option that did not exist in the system at all. Textbook hallucination. It was obvious on the call that he was very surprised that the AI would give him an incorrect result, he was 100% convinced the answer was what the LLM said and never once thought to question what the LLM returned.

I've had a couple of instances with friends being equally shocked when an LLM turned out to be wrong. One of which was fairly disturbing, I was at a horse track and describing LLMs and to demonstrate i took a picture of the racing form thing and asked the LLM to formulate a medium risk betting strategy. My friend immediatately took it as some kind of supernatural insight and bet $100 on the plan it came up with. It was as if he believed the LLM could tell the future.Thank god it didn't work and he lost about $70. Had he won I don't know what would have happened, he probably would have asked again and bet everything he had.

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jackblemming 18 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> is the consensus of many human experts as encoded in its embedding

That’s not true.

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ASalazarMX 18 hours ago | parent [-]

Yup, current LLMs are trained on the best and the worst we can offer. I think there's value in training smaller models with strictly curated datasets, to guarantee they've learned from trustworthy sources.

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chasd00 17 hours ago | parent [-]

> to guarantee they've learned from trustworthy sources.

i don't see how this will every work. Even in hard science there's debate over what content is trustworthy and what is not. Imagine trying to declare your source of training material on religion, philosophy, or politics "trustworthy".

	▲	ASalazarMX 15 hours ago \| parent [-]
		"Sir, I want an LLM to design architecture, not to debate philosophy." But really, you leave the curation to real humans, institutions with ethical procedures already in place. I don't want Goole or Elon dictating what truth is, but I wouldn't mind if NASA or other aerospace institutions dictated what is truth in that space. Of course, the dataset should have a list of every document/source used, so others can audit it. I know, unthinkable in this corporate world, but one can dream.

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cranium 18 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

"How to be in good health? Sleep, eat well, exercise." However, knowledge ≠ application.

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potsandpans 18 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I don't believe that this is going to happen, but the primary arguments revolving around a "super intelligent" ai involve removing the need for us to listen to it.

A super intelligent ai would have agency, and when incentives are not aligned would be adversarial.

In the caricature scenario, we'd ask, "super ai, how to achieve world peace?" It would answer the same way, but then solve it in a non-human centric approach: reducing humanities autonomy over the world.

Fixed: anthropogenic climate change resolved, inequality and discrimination reduced (by reducing population by 90%, and putting the rest in virtual reality)

	▲	ASalazarMX 17 hours ago \| parent [-]
		If out AIs achieve something like this, but they managed to give them the same values the minds in Iain Bank's Culture Series had, I think humanity would be golden.

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pessimizer 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> Any sort of "utopia" that people imagine AI bringing is doomed to fail because we already can't cooperate without AI

It's just fanfiction. They're just making up stories in their heads based on blending sci-fi they've read or watched in the past. There's no theory of power, there's no understanding of history or even the present, it's just a bad Star Trek episode.

"Intelligence" itself isn't even a precise concept. The idea that a "superintelligent" AI is intrinsically going to be obsessed with juvenile power fantasies is just silly. An AI doesn't want to enslave the world, run dictatorial experiments born of childhood frustrations and get all the girls. It doesn't want anything. It's purposeless. Its intelligence won't even be recognized as intelligence if its suggestions aren't pleasing to the powerful. They'll keep tweaking it to keep it precisely as dumb as they themselves are.