Re: Open letter urging to pause AI

st 29. 3. 2023 v 22:45 odesílatel Martin Hepp <mfhepp@gmail.com> napsal:

> I could not agree more with Dan - a “non-proliferation” agreement nor a
> moratorium of AI advancements is simply much more unrealistic than it was
> with nukes. We hardly managed to keep the number of crazy people with
> access to nukes under control, but for building your next generation of AI,
> you will not need anything but brain, programming skills, and commodity
> resources. Machines will not take over humankind, but machines can add
> giant levers to single individuals or groups.
>

[not sure the cross post etiquette here, so I'll reply all once]

NPT worked quite well with the nuclear arms race, past Able Archer, whole
classes of missiles (ie Pershing II) were destroyed, checked, verified.
This was done even though host countries were enemies, after Regan
recognized that in a nuclear war there are no winners (mutually assured
destruction).  In fact they might have almost reduced it to very low
numbers in Reykjavik had Reagan not insisted on the Star Wars program,
which anyway failed.  So these things can work.

However the AI race is quite different.  There is no mutually assured
destruction.  Just a hand wavy precautionary principle.  And this time it's
companies that have been left behind (e.g. Tesla) and want 6 months to
catch up.  Poor countries will benefit alot from this, by coming up to the
state of art with information services, in fact they may soon have an edge
given that they are able to produce cheaper electricity than western
competitors.

AI will change the way we interact online, and therefore, as people.

A lot of work at the W3C has been to create standards around structured
data.  In particular to create standards for determining URIs in data.  And
also giving meaning to those URIs.  Some of the benefits of that are made
redundant if machines can figure most of it out.

Elon bought twitter from jack dorsey and is now saying that he cant stop
the bots or the propaganda.  That's funny, because jack dorsey went over to
nostr, and nostr has been extremely effective in stopping bots.  We need an
open platform where humans and bots can work together without being
controlled by a company, and nostr is probably it.  Hopefully also Solid
will be another way to do this, when it's ready for a wider audience..

It seems clear that AI will help information society progress faster.  As
Dan says, there's no way you can put it back in a bottle.  In this case
trying to slow it down will just make others do it faster.  I'm excited, we
should embrace it!


>
> Best wishes
> Martin
>
> ---------------------------------------
> martin hepp
> www:  https://www.heppnetz.de/
>
>
> On 29. Mar 2023, at 22:30, Dan Brickley <danbri@danbri.org> wrote:
>
> 
>
>
> On Wed, 29 Mar 2023 at 20:51, ProjectParadigm-ICT-Program <
> metadataportals@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>> This letter speaks for itself.
>>
>>
>> https://www.reuters.com/technology/musk-experts-urge-pause-training-ai-systems-that-can-outperform-gpt-4-2023-03-29/
>>
>>
>> I may not want to put it as bluntly as Elon Musk, who cautioned against
>> unregulated AI which he called "more dangerous than nukes", but when Nick
>> Bostrom, the late Stephen Hawking, and dozens, no hundreds of international
>> experts, scientists and industry leaders start ringing the bell, is is time
>> to pause and reflect.
>>
>> Every aspect of daily life, every industry, education systems, academia
>> and even our cognitive rights will be impacted.
>>
>> I would also like to point out that some science fiction authors have
>> done a great job on very accurately predicting a dystopian future ruled by
>> technology, perhaps the greatest of them all being Philip K. Dick.
>>
>> But there are dozens of other authors as well and they all give a fairly
>> good impression what awaits us if we do not regulate and control the
>> further development of AI now.
>>
>
> I have a *lot* of worries, but the genie is out of the bottle.
>
> It’s 60 lines of code for the basics,
> https://jaykmody.com/blog/gpt-from-scratch/
>
> Facebook’s Llama model is out there, and being run on consumer laptops.
> And that’s not even thinking about state level actors, or how such
> regulation might be worded.
>
> For my part (and v personal opinion) I think focussing on education,
> sensible implementation guidelines, and trying to make sure the good
> outweighs the bad.
>
> Dan
>
>
>
>>
>> Milton Ponson
>> GSM: +297 747 8280
>> PO Box 1154, Oranjestad
>> Aruba, Dutch Caribbean
>> Project Paradigm: Bringing the ICT tools for sustainable development to
>> all stakeholders worldwide through collaborative research on applied
>> mathematics, advanced modeling, software and standards development
>>
>