You seem to be missing a very important part of that history when you make this comparison, and it's a part that I can't imagine you aren't aware of. Not stating that is not "accurately stating history", it's lying by a vile glaring omission. The US also rounded up racial undesirables into camps and used them for labor, but there's a reason that Roosevelt is looked upon more fondly than goddamn Hitler.
> The US also rounded up racial undesirables into camps and used them for labor
This was also bad, yes.
> there's a reason that Roosevelt is looked upon more fondly than goddamn Hitler
Sure, but "less bad" isn't the same as "internment good", and the winners write the history. I am a fan of FDR! But he did some miserable shit to win a war that needed to be won, some of which we cringe at now.
A handful of Nazi war crime prosecutions fell apart because Allied troops widely did the same thing, for example.
This doesn't respond to my point at all. I tell you that it is ahistorical, dishonest, and disrespecful to equate subsistence farmers being forced into subsistence factory work by globalization and economic conditions with the holocaust, the mass deliberate extermination of Jews, Romani, Slavs, the disabled, etc. because one uses slavery and the other uses something that you consider comparable to slavery. Your answer is that less bad things are also bad? Sure, yeah, but they're nevertheless less bad and shouldn't be treated as equal.
Not to make light of poor working conditions, dirt wages, and child labor. They can be and should be addressed. But they're not genocide and throwing out a "Arbeit macht frei!" is gross here.
I don't think most people would use this definition. It covers gambling/lottery winnings, finding buried treasure or a gold mine, and paying someone to file your taxes and splitting the extra deductions they found. Really, it includes employment at large- the only 'non-theft' employment would be that which provides no net benefit to the employer. There are parlances where these are included intentionally and they share a starting syllable, but to the common people this is not a definition of theft.
Why do people keep assuming that employers don't do any work? Management is work. Is an employee stealing if they receive any net benefit from their employment?
All humans do is predict the next action at any given time. You roll your eyes, it's a tired argument, but still. You have memories, a personality, thoughts ranging from the long running to the mere reflexive, you have a rich conscious experience, and all of this in service of generating the next thing that you do at any given time. If you actually knew how LLMs worked, you could rewrite them as code, refactor it, disable jailbreaks, and put out a superior product. Your description only covers what an LLM does, not how. Part of the how is that it necessarily predicts multiple words ahead. It wouldn't be possible to write couplets otherwise, and they could do that in the GPT-3 era.
It doesn't seem like you're engaging with the material circumstances described above. What does it mean for a human to not catch that a part of a codebase is actually compliant with regulations? What does it mean for the hallucination machine to create 34 more gaps when it doesn't appear to have more than read access? How would it not be useful to have a machine that identifies 17 real crimes that your highly regulated business is unintentonally committing even with a 90% false positive rate?
In a regulated industry 90% false positive rate is indistinguishable from 100% failure rate. Hell, in any industry.
You're basically saying "we need human review for literally everything AI outputs because we have no way of saying whether anything it produces is hallucination or not. And since it produces plausible-sounding things really fast, it puts enormous burden on human reviewers".
I just don't understand where your position is coming from here. You can't distinguish between a machine that says "here, look at these 170 results, 10% of them are highly serious problems that you should address, you should have some people look into that" and one that shrugs and says "I dunno, maybe just double check everything"? I assume you've come to this conclusion based on some reasoning, but you're not sharing it in this response AFAICT.
> You can't distinguish between a machine that says "here, look at these 170 results, 10% of them are highly serious problems that you should address
The machine doesn't say that. It says "Here are 170 completely correct and verified results".
You have to check and verify all of those results yourself, and on any given day it can be anywhere from 0% to 100% incorrect.
> I assume you've come to this conclusion based on some reasoning, but you're not sharing it in this response AFAICT.
The reasoning comes from actually working with AI tools. And the reasoning can be seen in the actual comment this tgread started from: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48434824
We're assuming per earlier hypothetical that it has a 10% correctness rate. You had said
>In a regulated industry 90% false positive rate is indistinguishable from 100% failure rate
So defending that position on the basis of it not actually being a 90% failure rate would mean you shouldn't have taken it in the first place. The fact that the LLM lies about its failure rate is nearly irrelevant; the machine could output the literal string "The following is 90% likely to be a false positive: " followed by the LLM output.
The reasoning in the comment that started the thread is "it's annoying to redo human review". Your position as I understand it is that there is no or negative business value to a tool that spit out a list of potential issues of which 10% are real issues with your business. This is what I fail to understand. This would be an incredibly useful first step towards any audit and would save loads of money. Why not?
I believe it was Blink-182 who said, "Work sucks". You have to pay people to do that stuff; they don't want to be there. And then you get into second order effects- costs plummet for anything labor intensive, including medical care, prepared food, cleaning, and private tutors. Then onto tertiary effects- if you can spin up a million genius researchers to attack a problem, you start seeing massive progress in every important area and it isn't tied to population growth.
I get that you might have a 'UBI/alternative general welfare is impossible' up your sleeve, but you've written this like it's somehow unfathomable that not forcing everybody to work just to survive would be a good thing. Of course it would be good! It's just a matter of dealing with the (huge) side effect of lost income.
In that scenario, AI would have to be a public utility, which it is not. Private corporations have no intention to provide services for public good. If they displace a billion jobs, they'll just throw up their hands and go "we're just an Ai company guyz"
> I believe it was Blink-182 who said, "Work sucks". You have to pay people to do that stuff; they don't want to be there.
Believe it or not, some people actually do enjoy their jobs and work they do.
> I get that you might have a 'UBI/alternative general welfare is impossible' up your sleeve, but you've written this like it's somehow unfathomable that not forcing everybody to work just to survive would be a good thing.
UBI absolutely is unfathomable here (US). The USG won't even give people health care. People go bankrupt to afford life saving care on a regular basis. Or just die... Even if those cases are a minority, just the fact that it happens says a lot. So I do think it is unfathomable that UBI would be implemented here. I don't think that's unreasonable to say.
I think a lot of the time when this debate occurs (which, at this point, literally every single day I see something about this) UBI is almost always the contention point but I feel like that's really not the end-all... Like, sure, say there's a miracle and we have UBI get instituted. I think that is maybe 25% of the solution. The other problem is now you're going to have an entire class of people basically living without a purpose. Yeah, I get it, they can go and "explore their passions" and focus on "creative works" or whatever BS people persuade themselves into thinking the vast majority of society would want to do, but realistically I think there would be a huge psychological breakdown in people now living without a fundamental purpose in society.
Somewhat related to that -- I was just this weekend watching a YouTube essay about PTSD in knights back in the medieval times, and the main point made in the video is that the psychological impacts incurred by the knights after battle were not just from seeing fucked up shit... the most apparent and serious cases of "PTSD" occurred when a knight was injured enough on the battle field resulting in them no longer able to be soldiers. Their entire purpose in the world got stripped away resulting in serious psychological stress. I think that same issue would apply to many people today (lawyers, engineers, investment bankers, etc) who would no longer be able to practice their craft. (This is the video for reference, was a good watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=849dmdc-Qf8)
I understand the counter argument to this is going to be some anti-capitalist rhetoric like "Well people shouldn't live to be workers and that's fucked up that they have live that way!" but IMO, some people like what they do and don't want to be made useless. (Not implying that is what you were insinuating, but just in a broad sense I that genera of argument doesn't make sense to me)
I think it's a bit premature to say aligning is easier than expected. Our current AIs are sycophants, they lie about their progress, they circumvent access restrictions, they notice when they are being evaluated and change their behaviors, they find answers and tell you they came up with them themselves, they blindly download malware. A lot of this is excusable as hallucination, bad RLHF human evaluators, etc, but I don't think we can speculate how challenging generally aligning superintelligences is until we actually have an aligned subintelligence in at least the narrow domain of programming.
Agreed, the biggest takeaway from how much Anthropic puts into alignment, and still ends up with a model that can end up doing things that are clearly out of alignment, should be that alignment is very tricky.
If it were illegal to generate a sunset, people would absolutely seek it out to generate a sunset, if just as an act of civil disobedience. Look at how people reacted to being told sharing a number is illegal[1]. Why would they act differently about an illegal computation?
Reassurance is identical to propaganda and manipulation insofar as all attempt to convey beliefs. Reassurance, here, should be apparently different in that it conveys true information. In the history of mankind, it has never been easier to discern between true and false information.
If people want to throw up their hands and start believing whatever feels right, they are permitted to do so. Though they have a duty not to as citizens of a democracy, they have the right to actively pursue policies based on falsehoods. Let's not pretend it's a reasonable or respectable reaction to seeing billboards.
If somebody does want to give up on research and working out the truth, please actually give up and say you don't know. Stop coming to the city council meetings and plastering "millions of gallons" on even the social medias where that's surprising.
How can the average citizen who knows nothing about engineering/technology determine that their electric bill [as the result of a new datacenter in town] won't go up as truthful or falsehood?
Condescending responses like these are only reinforcing the original point. People don't want data centers because they don't want AI forced on them.
> Let's not pretend it's a reasonable or respectable reaction to seeing billboards.
Being angry after seeing and hearing your livelihood threatened by rich CEOs on a daily basis is a reasonable reaction. If you aren't willing or able to muster up a modicum of empathy to see that, that's concerning, and you won't ever really be able to grasp what's going on here and why AI is so despised. You've only served to make people (including myself) despise AI even more.
Being angry is not what is under discussion here. Abandoning the pursuit of truth is. Participating, either unthinkingly or with malice, in misinformation campaigns is not acceptable even if you're really mad. Start a 'AI will steal our jobs' campaign if you're angry about that- I don't think most AI critics believe that's true, but the ones you're talking about must. I don't even need empathy to be on board with that, I think my job has 5 years to expiration at best.
Just stop lying and defending liars while slandering the honest people who notice! I don't care how rich the ceos making you angry are, I don't care how pure the hatred in your heart is for this technology, none of that makes it okay! You don't get to demand my empathy while defacing the commons, sorry.
It might make sense for AI companies to throw agents at new technologies to trial-and-error their way to internal documentation which they then provide to their models. On the other hand, the people making tomorrow's APIs have LLMs too and that makes documentation ~free. Hallucinations could still bring you back to the first hand, though.
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