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

    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?

            • 🇾 🇪 🇿 🇿 🇪 🇾@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.

          • 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.

              • 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.