I was thinking an apt analogy might be making stock -- you filter out all the solid food you don't want to keep in the liquid.
And it's a doubly-good analogy, because I have occasionally gotten that confused in real-life as well. Twice in the past ten years I've had a stock boil away for three hours, and then set a colander in the sink and poured it through, only to watch my beautiful stock swirl down the drain because motor-memory made me forget that I wasn't draining pasta but should have put the colander in a bowl...
TL;DR, one of the main scientists and Nobel Prize winners for his work on the Kuru disease and discovery of prions, Carleton Gajdusek, was also bringing home (essentially kidnapping) young boys from his expeditions, in theory to experiment with how well they could adapt to Western civilization, but in practice to sexually abuse them. And the NIH department that was funding him basically knew it and didn't care.
I don't think it counts as brute forcing unless you're resorting to trying every possible solution. And clearly the LLM didn't do that here, because there would be near-infinite possible solutions.
I don't think we can really call "trying lots of different ideas for an extended period" "brute-forcing," unless we use that term for lots of humans who have struggled with hard math problems for years.
Wild that we accept that OpenAI didn't want to deal with the social/political fallout of people realizing that their tool was responsible for flooding the internet with misinformation and bigotry?
Sure, now that all seems quaint, but I can definitely see how a fledgling AI company would care about their reputation.
Look up how the wireless radio helped spread European fascism.
It's not about "the people can think this but can't think that", it's "how does this new communication platform change the existing political culture and how will we adapt?"
> The problem isn't that AI could never be capable of causing real world damage. It is that there is absolutely no fucking path towards human extinction.
I think the "humanity will go extinct" discussion is a silly strawman being propagated either to try to spread fear, as the article suggests, or to make the anti-AI folks look silly, but it detracts from your first point which is that it may be "capable of causing real world damage."
We can be worried about real damage without having to defend the idea that every one of the planet's humans will die.
> "superhuman AI is unlikely to be much of a match against severing fiberoptic cable"
I think that the realistic scenarios all involve humans with an intent to do harm -- creating bio-weapons, finding vulnerabilities in infrastructure -- and using AI to help, so "severing the fiberoptic cable" doesn't apply.
Not to be too pessimistic, but it strikes me that in a worst case scenario, severing a cable might scale to severing global digital communications which is itself a massive worst case scenario even if we removed AI from the picture.
If the worst case outcome is we have to even temporarily shut down global shipping, banking, transport, health services, communications and national infrastructure to contain a self-propagating misaligned AI that can evolve itself and work its way into any sufficiently large computer system to escape humans preventing it from finishing its task, that seems like something we should be trying very hard to avoid.
Or you could argue that the super intelligence will turn us into a pet of some kind. Then the risk is we think we are controlling it while we are really the super intelligence's lap dog.
That is an argument that at least makes sense.
The super intelligence as homicidal maniac just doesn't make sense. There is less intelligent wildlife all around us and we mostly completely ignore it. We have more interesting things to do with our time as intelligent beings than carry out a bird or rabbit genocide.
It almost seems like the projection of some kind of paranoid delusion about change.
I tried following an authentic Southern pickled watermelon rind recipe, and they were so sickly sweet I couldn't stomach them.
I should try again sometime with a regular cucumber pickle recipe, just replacing cucumbers with watermelon rinds, but I don't think my family wants to humor me again.
Pickled savoury watermelon is something i discovered not that long ago and it really surprised me. It's amazing. I otherwise don't care much about watermelon but pickled it gets so much flavor. I know many people who can't handle it because it "doesn't taste how it looks".
I'm a software engineer turned public middle school science teacher.
At the moment, I would never encourage any of my students to go into software engineering. It seems to me that's rapidly becoming a field where a small competitive handful will be making millions and everyone else will be unemployed.
That said, I have no problem teaching some programming. We're going to be making autonomous greenhouses soon, with windows that open or whatever, and they'll be using Scratch to program their micro:bits.
Anything that empowers you to do stuff is a good thing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbosail
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