Tim O’Reilly forwarded a wonderful article in regards to the OpenAI cleaning soap opera to me: Matt Levine’s “Money Stuff: Who Controls Open AI.” I’ll skip most of it, however one thing caught my eye. Toward the top, Levine writes about Elon Musk’s model of Nick Bostrom’s AI that decides to show the world to paperclips:
[Elon] Musk gave an instance of a man-made intelligence that’s given the duty of selecting strawberries. It appears innocent sufficient, however because the AI redesigns itself to be more practical, it would resolve that one of the best ways to maximise its output can be to destroy civilization and convert your complete floor of the Earth into strawberry fields.
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That will get me, however not in the way in which you assume. It’s personally poignant, for causes totally completely different from the AI-doomerism cults that Musk, Bostrom, and others are propagating.
When I used to be a graduate scholar at Stanford, I used to be driving round with a pal by way of the limitless maze of parking tons and strip malls in that nondescript a part of Silicon Valley the place Sunnyvale, Santa Clara, and Cupertino come collectively. My pal identified the window and stated, “That’s where my father’s farm was.” I requested what his father grew; it was very troublesome to think about a farm at that location. He grew strawberries. And what occurred to the farm? His father misplaced it when he was put right into a World War II internment camp for Japanese. An actual property investor ended up with it. My pal’s father ultimately dedicated suicide. The farm turned a car parking zone.
This will get me again to an argument that I’ve made in older Radar articles: Our fears of AI are actually fears of ourselves, fears that AI will act as badly as people have repeatedly acted. We don’t want AI to show the world into strawberries any greater than we want it to show the world into parking tons. We’re already turning the world into parking tons, and doing so with out regard to the human value. We’re already spewing CO2 at a fee that can quickly make the world uninhabitable for all however the few who can insulate themselves from the results. If we’re going to resolve these issues, it received’t be by way of know-how. It’s by way of discovering higher people than Elon and, I concern, Sam Altman. We don’t have an opportunity to resolve the AI downside if we will’t resolve the human downside. And if we don’t resolve the human downside, the AI downside is irrelevant.