Given that the arrival of this stuff has been compared to nuclear weapons already the question is whether or not the same mechanisms that kept us from annihilating the planet would hold there too.
I am not sure that it will.
But a balance duopoly tends to be better than a monopoly and if there are multiple poles then so much the better.
I'm past the point where I believe that any of these a-holes is in it 'for the good of humanity', their behavior so far can be extrapolated safely to what they will be like when they are in the control of what effectively would be the largest private arsenal ever created.
For a while I thought the AI doomers were off their meds and too paranoid but I'm coming around to the fact that they may have a point: we are rapidly approaching a point of no return, if we are not already past it and the people in charge are exactly the wrong people to be in charge at such a point in time.
> If the position is that one of these models will go out of control and destroy humanity then why would having two such models be safer than one?
Models don't go out of control, they generate totally harmless tokens. The people directing the models go out of control. The owners of the single powerful model are seriously tempted to go rouge and they're going to do it, sooner or later.
Two or more competing groups force the development of defensive capabilities which require strong models too. In addition, offensive capabilities in possession of different competing groups introduce the option of MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) which is a form of defense that doesn't require defensive capabilities. Worked with nukes.
I never quite realized this until just reading this and now it has come into sharp focus. Incredible.
I've spent years trying to convince my director to have our org invest in documentation and monitoring to no avail. Now he is telling us to spend dedicated time on monitoring and documentation so that agents can better diagnose and fix bugs. He is doing this because his boss is mad that our org isn't "agentic" enough.
Except... because we underinvested in the past we have a bunch of services where the institutional knowledge is gone and people are having AI write the documentation...
The technology to prevent plague was beyond the population at the time.
"Just use basic hygiene" is useless to a population who has no understanding of what that means.
It was a real virus that had very high mortality.
This makes it a serious counterpoint for people who argue such things can't be created in future.
"The AI designed killer virus using new science turned out to be not that easily transmitted, basic dynamically reprogrammable mrna implants easily prevents it, shame about the 95% who died"
What I am saying is that it is meaningless to use the plague as evidence for such a death toll of a virus in the future since conditions which are no longer present were a prerequisite for its death toll.
Are they straw men if they are specific scenarios presented by widely read commentators? A straw man is when you misrepresent somebody's position to knock it down.
But if Noah Smith wrote about a scenario where 90% of the population is killed by a virus created by some teenagers with an AI... it isn't a straw man to attack that scenario.
I am a father. I am an extremely involved parent and spend a ton of time with my son.
I also would go absolutely insane if we didn't have any childcare for him. It is better for my ability to function as a good parent that I can hand him off to somebody else for a period of time. It is not the case that every couple has a member who is built to be a stay-at-home-parent.
> The government does not need a warrant to record you in public spaces.
This is not true. The question is whether you have a "reasonable expectation of privacy." If you do, then the government needs a warrant. This is why the government can't tap a payphone without a warrant even though it is in public.
It is true that a single police officer can post up somewhere and scan license plates without a warrant. The difference here is scale. The question of whether scale affects a "reasonable expectation of privacy" has never been addressed by the supreme court, though it has been raised before and discussed in concurring opinions.
> This is not true. The question is whether you have a "reasonable expectation of privacy." If you do, then the government needs a warrant. This is why the government can't tap a payphone without a warrant even though it is in public.
"Reasonable expectation of privacy" covers things like restrooms. Not highways, streets, parking lots, etc. This isn't relevant for Flock.
"Reasonable expectation of privacy" covers whatever the public believes is reasonable. The original case creating this doctrine was about phone booths.
Like, if people were genuinely doing a thing that had such a large probability of killing all humans... they should all be in prison. Heck, vigilanteism would start to look compelling. I do not understand how somebody can really think "well this is likely to doom all of us so we need to get there as fast as possible because we are, without evidence, the most capable people of controlling this thing."
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