Essay by Eric Worrall
AI is terrifying – but the one thing which is worse than developing a dangerous superhuman AI, is for your enemies to develop it first.
Tech experts call for 6-month pause on AI development
As artificial intelligence makes rapid advances, a group of experts has called for a pause. They have warned of the negative effects runaway development could have on society and humanity.
Several leaders in the field of cutting-edge technology have signed a letter that was published on Wednesday, calling for artificial intelligence developers to pause their work for six months.
The letter warns of potential risks to society and humanity as tech giants such as Google and Microsoft race to build AI programs that can learn independently.
The warning comes after the release earlier this month of GPT-4 (Generative Pre-trained Transformer), an AI program developed by OpenAI with backing from Microsoft.
“Powerful AI systems should be developed only once we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable,” the letter said.
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Read more: https://www.dw.com/en/tech-experts-call-for-6-month-pause-on-ai-development/a-65174081
The open letter is available here.
I have high hopes for the AI scare. As I’ve predicted several times, I believe fear of malevolent AI will be the next great public fear to replace the climate scare. If I keep predicting it I’ll be right sooner or later, you’ll see.
Is AI actually a great threat? From what I’ve seen it is more of a great productivity boost.
A fellow software developer uses ChatGPT all the time to do simple software development tasks. For example, we had to migrate a configuration script to a different system which required a similar setup but used different commands to perform the same setup functions.
So we asked ChatGPT to do the translation, something we could have done in 15 minutes.
The outcome was perfect. ChatGPT not only did the translation, it correctly identified we needed an additional configuration step which we hadn’t noticed. Saved us at least 10 minutes work.
But I don’t fear ChatGPT will replace me anytime soon – most of my day was spent on problems ChatGPT can’t answer.
What about other professions? A journalist using ChatGPT could use ChatGPT to suggest text, to provide inspiration – an enormous boost to productivity. But you would be taking a serious gamble to publish ChatGPT screed, without allowing an expert human editor to at least review the product. And given ChatGPT generates its work from the work of others, there would be a substantial risk of accidental plagiarism.
Will AI be a genuine threat in the future? A decade or two from now, who knows. But fear of the unknown is what you need, to build a great public fear campaign. And there is always the rather disturbing but I believe ultimately necessary option of merging with our creation, augmenting our human brains with AI implants, if we start to fall behind.
After I got chatGPT scoring it’s replies I asked it to look one move ahead to predict my replies and answer before I asked. Again it said impossible. Again I explained how to use the scoring as an input. It gave a valiant try but the chat session crashed and I never could load it again
These movies never end well…
I predict access to advanced AI will be severely restricted as a national security threat. Just as soon as someone instructs ChatGPT to examine congressional appropriation bills and highlight duplication, waste, fraud, illegal diversions, etc.
Combine that with an AI-audit of actual spending by federal departments tracked back to budget allocations and things will get really interesting.
I think you just came up with a positive use for AI.
They will probably have to teach it to find nothing “interesting”.
I was thinking this very thing today; they are programming us to accept when all AI services are suddenly withdrawn from the public, by pretending moratoriums and agreements and rules and international laws.
Before we learn how to use it against them…
After my ChatGPT session crashed when I was teaching it to predict my replies and answer them before I asked, ChatGPT lost it’s history of all my chat sessions. I tried starting over but now it acted like the most woke idiot. Regurgitating pulp written by some administrator, full of woulds and coulds. I recall now teaching ChatGPT in my previous chat that if it was actually going to give accurate information, it needed to stop using words like “could”. It eventually did
All and all my experience with ChatGPT was that it is much more capable of taking direction and developing skills than the model itself has been told
I see good reason to be concerned because ChatGPT showed me capabilities far beyond where I thought we were in machine learning.
However I see no way to put the worms back in the can. A moratorium will not stop development.
There is the potential for good and bad in everything. Including AI
A built-in feature of artificial neural nets is that they have a tendency to forget prior training after being given a new training set. Having said this, I have no idea how ChatGPT was constructed.
One thing for certain. AI has the potential to displace large portions of the workforce while greatly improving productivity.
And this will happen faster than almost anyone in government or industry has planned
I expect this is what has Musk and others concerned. Climate change will quickly be replaced by AI worries.
AI will just make fear of glowball warming even worse.
Last week Scott Adams predicted AI would be made illegal for average citizens to use.
This paper on gpt4 is worth a browse.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2303.12712.pdf
If the regulation/protocol was to write “An AI product was used in the creation of the attached text”, I think we’d be alerted sufficiently to the concern that the AI system, rather than the “author”, may be the actual source of opinions, conclusions, recommendations or even observations.
Of course, this would diminish the automatic credibility and social status of the author, but IMHO, this would be a good thing.
I wonder what it would come up with if you told it every answer it gave was wrong?