{"id":233339,"date":"2023-04-17T12:00:18","date_gmt":"2023-04-17T11:00:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=233339"},"modified":"2023-06-20T05:51:12","modified_gmt":"2023-06-20T04:51:12","slug":"pausing-ai-developments-isnt-enough-we-need-to-shut-it-all-down","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2023\/04\/pausing-ai-developments-isnt-enough-we-need-to-shut-it-all-down\/","title":{"rendered":"Pausing AI Developments Isn’t Enough–We Need to Shut It All Down"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

(Al Jazeera)<\/p><\/div>\n

29 Mar 2023 – <\/em>An open letter<\/a> published today calls for \u201call AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4.\u201d<\/p>\n

This 6-month moratorium would be better than no moratorium. I have respect for everyone who stepped up and signed it. It\u2019s an improvement on the margin.<\/p>\n

I refrained from signing because I think the letter is understating the seriousness of the situation and asking for too little to solve it.<\/p>\n

Read More: <\/b>AI Labs Urged to Pump the Brakes in Open Letter<\/i><\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The key issue is not \u201chuman-competitive\u201d intelligence (as the open letter puts it); it\u2019s what happens after AI gets to smarter-than-human intelligence. Key thresholds there may not be obvious, we definitely can\u2019t calculate in advance what happens when, and it currently seems imaginable that a research lab would cross critical lines without noticing.<\/p>\n

Many researchers steeped in these issues<\/a>, including myself, expect<\/a> that the most likely result of building a superhumanly smart AI, under anything remotely like the current circumstances, is that literally everyone on Earth will die. Not as in \u201cmaybe possibly some remote chance,\u201d but as in \u201cthat is the obvious thing that would happen.\u201d It\u2019s not that you can\u2019t, in principle, survive creating something much smarter than you; it\u2019s that it would require precision and preparation and new scientific insights, and probably not having AI systems composed of giant inscrutable arrays of fractional numbers.<\/p>\n

Without that precision and preparation, the most likely outcome is AI that does not do what we want, and does not care for us nor for sentient life in general. That kind of caring is something that could in principle<\/i> be imbued into an AI but we are not ready <\/i>and do not currently know how.<\/i><\/p>\n

Absent that caring, we get \u201cthe AI does not love you, nor does it hate you, and you are made of atoms it can use for something else.\u201d<\/p>\n

The likely result of humanity facing down an opposed superhuman intelligence is a total loss. Valid metaphors include \u201ca 10-year-old trying to play chess against Stockfish 15\u201d, \u201cthe 11th century trying to fight the 21st century,\u201d and \u201cAustralopithecus<\/i> trying to fight Homo sapiens<\/i>\u201c.<\/p>\n

To visualize a hostile superhuman AI, don\u2019t imagine a lifeless book-smart thinker dwelling inside the internet and sending ill-intentioned emails. Visualize an entire alien civilization, thinking at millions of times human speeds, initially confined to computers\u2014in a world of creatures that are, from its perspective, very stupid and very slow. A sufficiently intelligent AI won\u2019t stay confined to computers for long. In today\u2019s world you can email DNA strings to laboratories that will produce proteins on demand, allowing an AI initially confined to the internet to build artificial life forms or bootstrap straight to postbiological molecular manufacturing.<\/p>\n

If somebody builds a too-powerful AI, under present conditions, I expect that every single member of the human species and all biological life on Earth dies shortly thereafter.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s no proposed plan <\/i>for how we could do any such thing and survive. OpenAI\u2019s openly declared intention<\/a> is to make some future AI do our AI alignment homework. Just hearing that this is the plan<\/i> ought to be enough to get any sensible person to panic. The other leading AI lab, DeepMind, has no plan at all.<\/p>\n

An aside: None of this danger depends on whether or not AIs are or can be conscious; it\u2019s intrinsic to the notion of powerful cognitive systems that optimize hard and calculate outputs that meet sufficiently complicated outcome criteria. With that said, I\u2019d be remiss in my moral duties as a human if I didn\u2019t also mention that we have no idea how to determine whether AI systems are aware of themselves\u2014since we have no idea how to decode anything that goes on in the giant inscrutable arrays\u2014and therefore we may at some point inadvertently create digital minds which are truly conscious and ought to have rights and shouldn\u2019t be owned.<\/p>\n

The rule that most people aware of these issues would have endorsed 50 years earlier, was that if an AI system can speak fluently and says it\u2019s self-aware and demands human rights, that ought to be a hard stop on people just casually owning that AI and using it past that point. We already blew past that old line in the sand. And that was probably correct<\/i>; I agree <\/i>that current AIs are probably just imitating talk of self-awareness from their training data. But I mark that, with how little insight we have into these systems\u2019 internals, we do not actually know.<\/i><\/p>\n

If that\u2019s our state of ignorance for GPT-4, and GPT-5 is the same size of giant capability step as from GPT-3 to GPT-4, I think we\u2019ll no longer be able to justifiably say \u201cprobably not self-aware\u201d if we let people make GPT-5s. It\u2019ll just be \u201cI don\u2019t know; nobody knows.\u201d If you can\u2019t be sure whether you\u2019re creating a self-aware AI, this is alarming not just because of the moral implications of the \u201cself-aware\u201d part, but because being unsure means you have no idea what you are doing and that is dangerous and you should stop.<\/p>\n

On Feb. 7, Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, publicly gloated<\/a> that the new Bing would make Google \u201ccome out and show that they can dance.\u201d \u201cI want people to know that we made them dance,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

This is not how the CEO of Microsoft talks in a sane world. It shows an overwhelming gap between how seriously we are taking the problem, and how seriously we needed to take the problem starting 30 years ago.<\/p>\n

We are not going to bridge that gap in six months.<\/p>\n

It took more than 60 years between when the notion of Artificial Intelligence was first proposed and studied, and for us to reach today\u2019s capabilities. Solving safety<\/i> of superhuman intelligence\u2014not perfect safety, safety in the sense of \u201cnot killing literally everyone\u201d\u2014could very reasonably take at least half that long. And the thing about trying this with superhuman intelligence is that if you get that wrong on the first try, you do not get to learn from your mistakes, because you are dead. Humanity does not learn from the mistake and dust itself off and try again, as in other challenges we\u2019ve overcome in our history, because we are all gone.<\/p>\n

Trying to get anything <\/i>right on the first really critical try is an extraordinary ask, in science and in engineering. We are not coming in with anything like the approach that would be required to do it successfully. If we held anything in the nascent field of Artificial General Intelligence to the lesser standards of engineering rigor that apply to a bridge meant to carry a couple of thousand cars, the entire field would be shut down tomorrow.<\/p>\n

We are not prepared. We are not on course to be prepared in any reasonable time window. There is no plan. Progress in AI capabilities is running vastly, vastly ahead of progress in AI alignment or even progress in understanding what the hell is going on inside those systems. If we actually do this, we are all going to die.<\/p>\n

Read More: <\/b>The New AI-Powered Bing Is Threatening Users. That\u2019s No Laughing Matter<\/i><\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Many researchers working on these systems think that we\u2019re plunging toward a catastrophe, with more of them daring to say it in private than in public; but they think that they can\u2019t unilaterally stop the forward plunge, that others will go on even if they personally quit their jobs. And so they all think they might as well keep going. This is a stupid state of affairs, and an undignified way for Earth to die, and the rest of humanity ought to step in at this point and help the industry solve its collective action problem.<\/p>\n

Some of my friends have recently reported to me that when people outside the AI industry hear about extinction risk from Artificial General Intelligence for the first time, their reaction is \u201cmaybe we should not build AGI, then.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hearing this gave me a tiny flash of hope, because it\u2019s a simpler, more sensible, and frankly saner reaction than I\u2019ve been hearing over the last 20 years of trying to get anyone in the industry to take things seriously. Anyone talking that sanely deserves to hear how bad the situation actually is, and not be told that a six-month moratorium is going to fix it.<\/p>\n

On March 16, my partner sent me this email. (She later gave me permission to excerpt it here.)<\/p>\n

\u201cNina lost a tooth! In the usual way that children do, not out of carelessness! Seeing GPT4 blow away those standardized tests on the same day that Nina hit a childhood milestone brought an emotional surge that swept me off my feet for a minute. It\u2019s all going too fast. I worry that sharing this will heighten your own grief, but I\u2019d rather be known to you than for each of us to suffer alone.\u201d<\/p>\n

When the insider conversation is about the grief of seeing your daughter lose her first tooth, and thinking she\u2019s not going to get a chance to grow up, I believe we are past the point of playing political chess about a six-month moratorium.<\/p>\n

If there was a plan for Earth to survive, if only we passed a six-month moratorium, I would back that plan. There isn\u2019t any such plan.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s what would actually need to be done:<\/p>\n

The moratorium on new large training runs needs to be indefinite and worldwide. There can be no exceptions, including for governments or militaries. If the policy starts with the U.S., then China needs to see that the U.S. is not seeking an advantage but rather trying to prevent a horrifically dangerous technology which can have no true owner and which will kill everyone in the U.S. and in China and on Earth. If I had infinite freedom to write laws, I might carve out a single exception for AIs being trained solely to solve problems in biology and biotechnology, not trained on text from the internet, and not to the level where they start talking or planning; but if that was remotely complicating the issue I would immediately jettison that proposal and say to just shut it all down.<\/p>\n

Shut down all the large GPU clusters (the large computer farms where the most powerful AIs are refined). Shut down all the large training runs. Put a ceiling on how much computing power anyone is allowed to use in training an AI system, and move it downward over the coming years to compensate for more efficient training algorithms. No exceptions for governments and militaries. Make immediate multinational agreements to prevent the prohibited activities from moving elsewhere. Track all GPUs sold. If intelligence says that a country outside the agreement is building a GPU cluster, be less scared of a shooting conflict between nations than of the moratorium being violated; be willing to destroy a rogue datacenter by airstrike.<\/p>\n

Frame nothing as a conflict between national interests, have it clear that anyone talking of arms races is a fool. That we all live or die as one, in this, is not a policy but a fact of nature. Make it explicit in international diplomacy that preventing AI extinction scenarios is considered a priority above preventing a full nuclear exchange, and that allied nuclear countries are willing to run some risk of nuclear exchange if that\u2019s what it takes to reduce the risk of large AI training runs.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s the kind of policy change that would cause my partner and I to hold each other, and say to each other that a miracle happened, and now there\u2019s a chance that maybe Nina will live. The sane people hearing about this for the first time and sensibly saying \u201cmaybe we should not\u201d deserve to hear, honestly, what it would take to have that happen. And when your policy ask is that large, the only way it goes through is if policymakers realize that if they conduct business as usual, and do what\u2019s politically easy, that means their own kids are going to die too.<\/p>\n

Shut it all down.<\/p>\n

We are not ready. We are not on track to be significantly readier in the foreseeable future. If we go ahead on this everyone will die, including children who did not choose this and did not do anything wrong.<\/p>\n

Shut it down.<\/p>\n

__________________________________________<\/p>\n

Eliezer Yudkowsky <\/a>is a decision theorist from the U.S. and leads research at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute. He’s been working on aligning Artificial General Intelligence since 2001 and is widely regarded as a founder of the field.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original – time.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

29 Mar 2023 – An open letter published today calls for \u201call AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4.\u201d I refrained from signing because I think the letter is understating the seriousness of the situation and asking for too little to solve it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":232129,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3078],"tags":[1733],"class_list":["post-233339","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-artificial-intelligence-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence-ai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/233339","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=233339"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/233339\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":233342,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/233339\/revisions\/233342"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/232129"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=233339"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=233339"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=233339"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}