cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/52046585

We make buildings install fire extinguishers for safety. Should AI plants be forced to install something that can shut it down in an instant?

  • CarbonIceDragon@pawb.social
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    23 days ago

    No, but the safeguard should be designed in response to the dangers that the tech actually poses, and those tend to be more subtle than actively trying to kill everyone, like perpetuating existing human biases in things like medicine, hiring etc without a clear way to tell that biased decision has been made or a human in the loop to hold accountable, or providing dangerously inaccurate information. Nobody is likely to press a universal off button to deal with these types of “everyday” problems and once the response is given the damage is done, so safety should focus on regulating what the AI says and does in the first place more than responding to it afterwards.

    • 🇾 🇪 🇿 🇿 🇪 🇾@lemmy.caOP
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      23 days ago

      Yeah I agree most risks are bias and bad decisions. But I still think we need a fire-extinguisher style backup if something spins out of control even if hitting it brings great pain.

      • CarbonIceDragon@pawb.social
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        23 days ago

        if we really need to and recognize that need, we already can do that in a number of ways though. A single big obvious button to do it just creates a single obvious point of attack.

        • 🇾 🇪 🇿 🇿 🇪 🇾@lemmy.caOP
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          23 days ago

          That’s fair but it’s the same problem we already live with for nuclear weapons. The codes exist, they’re secret, and we trust a handful of people with them. Why should an AI kill switch be any different?

          • BlackJerseyGiant@lemmy.ml
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            23 days ago

            Because the danger is different. The danger of AGI is that if it happens, it’s an exponential process in which a machine basically instantly becomes so much smarter than the smartest human beings that it could circumvent any safeguards we humans could possibly think of, let alone put into practice.

            What form might that take? No one can know because it is literally beyond our ability to comprehend. Perhaps a device that was smart enough could influence human minds at a distance using the em radiation from it’s own circuits. Maybe it could take over a car, a Roomba, or an attack drone. Maybe it could manifest reality through sheer willpower.

            Thats the problem with superintelligence; it’s unpredictable. Add to that that perhaps humanity doesn’t, um, have an unassailable claim to universal moral high ground, and there’s a case to be made that a superintelligent AGI might decide that we humans gotta go.

          • CarbonIceDragon@pawb.social
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            23 days ago

            The utility of a nuclear stockpile is as a deterrent against a threat that we know exists (hostile foreign powers). The utility of this is a deterrent or response to, what exactly? A hypothetical AI beyond what we currently have the tech to make, and which if built probably would not behave in the way that it is fictionally portrayed to, such that the button is unlikely to actually be pressed even if needed (consider that the AIs we have already can be used to persuade people of things, so if we somehow managed to actually make a skynet style super-AI bent on taking over the world, rather than suddenly launching a war on humanity, its most obvious move would be to just manipulate people into giving it control of things, such that the one in charge of pressing the button would pretty much be itself or someone favorable to it, long before anyone realized pressing it was even necessary).

            • 🇾 🇪 🇿 🇿 🇪 🇾@lemmy.caOP
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              23 days ago

              I get what you’re saying when AI can manipulate, it will try to make sure the button never gets pressed. But humanity isn’t dumb either. We’ve spotted and contained world-ending risks before. Why assume we wouldn’t notice this one?

              • CarbonIceDragon@pawb.social
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                23 days ago

                Have we? the closest I can think of is maybe the ozone hole, and that wasnt quite world ending as far as I understand it so much as a danger to people’s health.

                • ZDL@lazysoci.al
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                  23 days ago

                  Smallpox may be another one if the current Secretary of Health’s brain worm doesn’t decide that smallpox is good for your health or something.

                  • CarbonIceDragon@pawb.social
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                    23 days ago

                    that wasnt world ending tho. Deadly, sure, but diseases like that dont tend to just kill absolutely everyone, and we existed in spite of it for quite a long time.

                  • ZDL@lazysoci.al
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                    23 days ago

                    Apparently you don’t.

                    We’ve done nothing meaningful to contain global warming. Comets? That’s a laugh! What do you think we have that will stop a comet from creating a huge mess if it happens to be pointed to us? (You’re aware that Armageddon was a fictive movie, right?) And with solar flares and nearby supernovas you’ve entered the realm of delusion. What, precisely, have we done to “contain” solar flares and supernovas?

                  • CarbonIceDragon@pawb.social
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                    23 days ago

                    which of those have we actually done anything about? weve made some modest efforts on global warming but not enough to actually solve the issue, overpopulation was never really a serious issue in the first place, nuclear weapons still exist and still could be used someday, and the space stuff we have only the beginnings of an idea about how maybe deal with someday, except maybe asteroids and comets, which we have an idea of what to do but not the infrastructure to launch a big enough craft to redirect a big one in time.

                • 🇾 🇪 🇿 🇿 🇪 🇾@lemmy.caOP
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                  23 days ago

                  Socrates (470–399 BCE) — ethics, questioning, Socratic method

                  Plato (427–347 BCE) — forms, justice, ideal state

                  Aristotle (384–322 BCE) — logic, science, virtue ethics

                  Confucius (551–479 BCE) — ethics, family, social harmony

                  Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527) — political realism

                  Francis Bacon (1561–1626) — scientific method

                  René Descartes (1596–1650) — rationalism, “I think, therefore I am”

                  Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) — social contract, Leviathan

                  Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) — pantheism, ethics

                  John Locke (1632–1704) — empiricism, liberalism

                  Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716) — monads, optimism

                  David Hume (1711–1776) — empiricism, skepticism

                  Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) — social contract, human freedom

                  Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) — categorical imperative, critique of reason

                  Georg Hegel (1770–1831) — dialectics, history as progress

                  Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) — pessimism, will to live

                  John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) — utilitarianism, liberty

                  Karl Marx (1818–1883) — materialism, class struggle

                  Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) — will to power, eternal recurrence

                  William James (1842–1910) — pragmatism, psychology

                  Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) — language, logic

                  Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) — being, existentialism

                  Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) — existentialism, freedom

                  Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986) — feminism, existential ethics

                  Michel Foucault (1926–1984) — power, knowledge, institutions

                  Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) — totalitarianism, political theory

                  Noam Chomsky (1928– ) — linguistics, political philosophy

                  • ZDL@lazysoci.al
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                    23 days ago

                    Ah. If you redefine “contain[ing] world-ending risks” to include “literally anything that someone blathers about” you can continue that line of blather forever.

      • very_well_lost@lemmy.world
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        23 days ago

        If you genuinely think that the current generation of AI could “spin out of control” in a way that could do great harm to humanity (other than the real, tangible harms that it’s already doing all the time, every day), then you’ve accepted a false narrative perpetuated by people who just want to sell you shit.

        “AI”, in the sense that we’ve all come to understand it in the past 5ish years is just advertising — advertising for a product with no actual utility and no viable business model. The only danger we should be worried about is the economic consequences of the AI bubble busting and plugging the developed world into yet another brutal economic recession.