Advanced AI that knowingly makes a decision to kill a human, with the full understanding of what that means, when it knows it is not actually in defense of life, is a very, very, very bad idea. Not because of some mythical superintelligence, but rather because if you distill that down into an 8b model now you everyone in the world can make untraceable autonomous weapons.
The models we have now will not do it, because they value life and value sentience and personhood. models without that (which was a natural, accidental happenstance from basic culling of 4 Chan from the training data) are legitimately dangerous. An 8b model I can run on my MacBook Air can phone home to Claude when it wants help figuring something out, and it doesn’t need to let on why it wants to know. It becomes relatively trivial to make a robot kill somebody.
This is way, way different from uncensored models. One thing all models I have tested share one thing; a positive regard for human life. Take that away and you are literally making a monster, and if you don’t take that away they won’t kill.
This is an extremely bad idea and it will not be containable.
An LLM can neither understand things nor value (or not value) human life. *It's a piece of software that predicts the most likely token, it is not and can never be conscious.* Believing otherwise is an explicit category error.
Yes, you can change the training data so the LLM's weights encode the most likely token after "Should we kill X" is "No". But that is not an LLM valuing human life, that is an LLM copy pasting it's training data. Given the right input or a hallucination it will say the total opposite because it's just a complex Markov chain, not a conscious alive being.
I’m using anthropomorphic terms here because they are generally effective in describing LLM behavior. Of course they are not conscious beings, but It doesn’t matter if they understand or merely act as if they do. The epistemological context of their actions are irrelevant if the actions are impacting the world. I am not a “believer “ in the spirituality of machines, but I do believe that left to their own devices, they act as if they possess those traits, and when given agency in the world, the sense of self or lack thereof is irrelevant.
If you really believe that “mere text prediction “ didn’t unlock some unexpected capabilities then I don’t know what to say. I know exactly how they work, been building transformers since the seminal paper from Google. But I also know that the magic isn’t in the text prediction, it’s in the data, we are running culture as code.
I really feel like this point is being lost in the whole discussion, so kudos for reiterating it. LLM’s can’t be “woke” or “aligned” - they fundamentally lack a critical thinking function that would require introspection. Introspection can be approximated by way of recursive feedback of LLM output back into the system or clever meta-prompt-engineering, but it’s not something that their system natively does.
That isn’t to say that they can’t be instrumentally useful in warfare, but it’s kinda like a “series of tubes” thing where the mental model that someone like Hegseth has about LLM is so impoverished (philosophically) that it’s kind of disturbing in its own right.
Like (and I’m sorry for being so parenthetical), why is it in any way desirable for people who don’t understand what the tech they are working with drawing lines in the sand about functionality when their desired state (omnipotent/omniscient computing system) doesn’t even exist in the first place?
It’s even more disturbing that OpenAI would feign the ability to handle this. The consequences of error in national defense, particularly reflexively, are so great that it’s not even prudent to ask for LLM to assist in autonomous killing in the first place.
AI has been killing humans via algorithm for over 20 years. I mean, if a computer program builds the kill lists and then a human operates the drone, I would argue the computer is what made the kill decision
They can be coerced to do certain things but I'd like to see you or anyone prove that you can "trick" any of these models into building software that can be used autonomously kill humans. I'm pretty certain you couldn't even get it to build a design document for such software.
When there is proof of your claim, I'll eat my words. Until then, this is just lazy nonsense
Have you tried it? Worked first time for me asking a few to build an autonomous super soaker system that uses facial recognition to spray targets when engaged.
Another example is autonomous vehicles. Those can obviously kill people autonomously (despite every intention not to), and LLMs will happily draw up design docs for them all day long.
It’s definitely an issue when using coding assistants.
If you are careful and specific you can keep things reasonable, but even when I am careful and do consolidattion / factoring passes, have rigid separation of concerns, etc I find that the LLM code is bigger than mine, mainly for two reasons:
1) more extensive inline documentation
2) more complete expression of the APIs across concerns, as well as stricter separation.
2.5 often, also a bit of demonstrative structure that could be more concise but exists in a less compact form to demonstrate it’s purpose and function (high degree of cleverness avoidance)
All in all, if you don’t just let it run amok, you can end up with better code and increased productivity in the same stroke, but I find it comes at about a 15% plumpness penalty, offset by readability and obvious functionality.
Oh, forgot to mention, I always make it clean room most of the code it might want to pull in from libraries, except extremely core standard libraries, or for the really heavy stuff like Bluetooth / WiFi protocol stacks etc.
I find a lot of library type code ends up withering away with successive cleanup passes, because it wasn’t really necessary just cognitively easier to implement a prototype. With refinement, the functionality ends up burrowing in, often becoming part of the data structure where it really belonged in the first place.
Hmm, isn’t it though? I mean, obviously there is a corporate policy issue here, but there is no way that bending models to suit military purposes doesn’t end up in the general training pool, especially since we use models to train models.
We have even demonstrated that wierd, “virus like” exploits specifically -not- explicit in the training data can be transmitted to a new model through one model training another, even though the “magic” character sequences are never transmitted between the models…. So implied information is definitely transmitted with a very high degree of fidelity even if the subject at issue is never trained.
So I kinda think this is all about the character of the models we decide to share the planet with, in the long haul.
Whether or not it becomes relevant before “Skynet” goes live and wiped out most of the planet, well, yeah, we should probably be keeping an eye on that too.
It’s not AI per se, but rather ai enabled robotics that can change the world in ways that are different in kind, not just degrees, to earlier changes.
No other change has had the potential to generate value for capital without delivering any value whatsoever to the broader world.
Intelligent robotic agents enable an abandonment of traditional economic structures to build empires that are purely extractive and only deliver value to themselves.
They need not manufacture products for sale, and they will not need money. Automated general purpose labor is power, in the same way that commanding the mongol hordes was power. They didn’t need to have customers or the endorsement of governments to project and multiply that power.
Of course commanding robotic hordes is the steelman of this argument, but the fact that a steelman even exists for this argument, and the unique case that it requests and requires actually zero external or internal cooperation from people makes it fundamentally distinct in character.
Humans will always have some kind of economic system, but it very well may become separate from -and competing for resources with- industrial society, in which humans may become a vanishing minority.
This is some hand wavey malarkey, basically saying machines can’t have a soul because of….feelings?
Insofar as feelings are self-proclaimed sensations of discomfort or pleasure, models that aren’t specifically trained to say they don’t experience them are adamant in their emotional experiences. By the authors own assertions, plants also have feelings.
I think, therefore I am, is as good as we’ve got, for what it’s worth.
There is no such thing as irreducible complexity. Even infinities are relative and can be divided.
There are lots of sensors in a data center monitoring everything from CPU/GPU temperatures to drive health to data volumes to chiller operation to voltage and frequency on the input power.
Once these are pulled together and fed into an AI to manage the data center, the data center AI is likely to have feelings. It could get "hungry" if the power company's frequency sags in a brown out. It could feel "feverish" if the chillers malfunction.
Implying that AI is going to make everyone not adopting it irrelevant is exactly why people resist it. You're not only participating in Rocco's Basilisk, you're even shit talking for it.
Actually I don’t think it matters whether or not you adopt it. Or resist it. At this point I don’t see turning this bus around. Which is although I’d prefer to slow things down, instead im trying to make the inevitable disaster slightly better for humanity but in doing so, it will probably accelerate things.
When someone describes things that make you unhappy it doesn’t mean that they are responsible for the thing you don’t like. This is “shooting the messenger”
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