Re: Open letter urging to pause AI

Adeel, greetings.

The code of conduct applies to us all, including of course Dan B. But the point here is that Dan has not violated that code, whereas you have, first by directly insulting Dan by implying that his posts are dishonest or motivated by dark or sinister commercial forces, and then by continuing this thread of thinly veiled hostility when there is no reason for it. I am not an administrator of this group, but if I were you would now be banned from it.

Please find some more constructive way to contribute to the discussion.

Pat Hayes

On Apr 1, 2023, at 1:22 PM, Adeel <aahmad1811@gmail.com> wrote:


Hello,

That sounds like a legal speculation, or do you only selectively discriminate on group members and their backgrounds when you point that out?
Does the W3C code of conduct not apply to you after 25+ years of being here?

Thanks,

Adeel


On Thu, 30 Mar 2023 at 23:33, Dan Brickley <danbri@danbri.org<mailto:danbri@danbri.org>> wrote:
On Thu, 30 Mar 2023 at 20:59, Adeel <aahmad1811@gmail.com<mailto:aahmad1811@gmail.com>> wrote:
Hello,

You can't talk about regulation and compliance in this group, dan doesn't like it as google doesn't care about those things.

Rather, Google doesn’t delegate to me any permission to speak on its behalf on these matters, unsurprisingly enough. Google is also and organization of many thousand employees, with quite some range of views. I choose not to share several of mine here right now, but I am broadly in favour of sensible laws where they have some chance of working.

As in many situations it sometimes makes sense to treat a company as a kind of pretend person, and sometimes to look at it as a more complex system of forces and interests. Skim
https://www.wired.com/story/inside-google-three-years-misery-happiest-company-tech/<https://nam02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.wired.com%2Fstory%2Finside-google-three-years-misery-happiest-company-tech%2F&data=05%7C01%7Cphayes%40ihmc.us%7Cd884dfb499ef423f124f08db32ef753e%7C2b38115bebad4aba9ea3b3779d8f4f43%7C1%7C0%7C638159776297688875%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C3000%7C%7C%7C&sdata=akFFkIcIXEgvQWjOdtQO4QjZOzAjTOJ82zH1mJwAb%2Bo%3D&reserved=0> to see some of what bubbles beneath the surface.

This email list is just an email list. W3C no longer accords it “interest group“ status, as it did from 1999 when I migrated the older RDF-DEV list to W3C to form the RDF Interest Group on www-rdf-interest@ list. W3C doesn’t officially listen here even on RDF topics, let alone areas like modern AI and their social impact which aren’t obviously our core competency.

Having been here 25+ years I have some instincts about which topics will just fill up email inboxes with no ultimate impact on the world and benefit. Right now “something must be banned” threads on AI look to me to fall in that category.

Cheers,

Dan


Thanks,

Adeel

On Thu, 30 Mar 2023 at 20:22, adasal <adam.saltiel@gmail.com<mailto:adam.saltiel@gmail.com>> wrote:
It's out of the bottle and will be played with.

" .. being run on consumer laptops. And that’s not even thinking about state level actors .. "
Large resources will be thrown at this.

It was a long time ago that Henry Story (of course, many others too, but more in this context) pointed out that, as to what pertains to the truth, competing logical deductions cannot decide themselves.

I just had this experience, and the details are not important.


The point is that, in this case, I asked the same question to GPT-4 and perplexity.ai<https://nam02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fperplexity.ai%2F&data=05%7C01%7Cphayes%40ihmc.us%7Cd884dfb499ef423f124f08db32ef753e%7C2b38115bebad4aba9ea3b3779d8f4f43%7C1%7C0%7C638159776297688875%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C3000%7C%7C%7C&sdata=twBLGhgQjubMJb6eq223Hsx8kKJMs8Tiq7jMBfpFyPc%3D&reserved=0>, and they gave different answers.
Since it was something I wanted to know the answer to, and it was sufficiently complex, I was not in a position to judge which was correct.

Petitioning for funding for experts, i.e. researchers and university professors.
Although it is absurd to think they would have time to mediate between all the obscure information sorting correct from incorrect and, of course, a person can be wrong too.

Then there is the issue of attribution ...
At the moment, perplexity.ai<https://nam02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fperplexity.ai%2F&data=05%7C01%7Cphayes%40ihmc.us%7Cd884dfb499ef423f124f08db32ef753e%7C2b38115bebad4aba9ea3b3779d8f4f43%7C1%7C0%7C638159776297688875%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C3000%7C%7C%7C&sdata=twBLGhgQjubMJb6eq223Hsx8kKJMs8Tiq7jMBfpFyPc%3D&reserved=0> has a word salad of dubious recent publications; GPT -4 has a "knowledge cutoff for my training data is September 2021". It finds it difficult to reason about time in any case, but these are details.

Others in this email thread have cast doubt on Musk's motivation (give it time to catch up) and Microsoft (didn't care for any consequences by jumping in now).

So there are issues of funding and control -- calling on the state to intervene is appealing to the power next up the hierarchy, but can such regulations be effective when administered by the state?

That really just leaves us with grassroots education and everyday intervention.

Best on an important topic,


Adam

Adam Saltiel




On Wed, Mar 29, 2023 at 9:39 PM Martin Hepp <mfhepp@gmail.com<mailto:mfhepp@gmail.com>> wrote:
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.

Best wishes
Martin

---------------------------------------
martin hepp
www:  https://www.heppnetz.de/<https://nam02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.heppnetz.de%2F&data=05%7C01%7Cphayes%40ihmc.us%7Cd884dfb499ef423f124f08db32ef753e%7C2b38115bebad4aba9ea3b3779d8f4f43%7C1%7C0%7C638159776297845108%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C3000%7C%7C%7C&sdata=FCqp2o420lD%2FDJA%2BsW2xmUV1SL4eb4FqubE%2FFbQiwv0%3D&reserved=0>


On 29. Mar 2023, at 22:30, Dan Brickley <danbri@danbri.org<mailto:danbri@danbri.org>> wrote:



On Wed, 29 Mar 2023 at 20:51, ProjectParadigm-ICT-Program <metadataportals@yahoo.com<mailto: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/<https://nam02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.reuters.com%2Ftechnology%2Fmusk-experts-urge-pause-training-ai-systems-that-can-outperform-gpt-4-2023-03-29%2F&data=05%7C01%7Cphayes%40ihmc.us%7Cd884dfb499ef423f124f08db32ef753e%7C2b38115bebad4aba9ea3b3779d8f4f43%7C1%7C0%7C638159776297845108%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C3000%7C%7C%7C&sdata=n%2BG6aomh5Ad6qwdk9euMYmYvQFLs0dSYFMpwJ%2FquyPo%3D&reserved=0>


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/<https://nam02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fjaykmody.com%2Fblog%2Fgpt-from-scratch%2F&data=05%7C01%7Cphayes%40ihmc.us%7Cd884dfb499ef423f124f08db32ef753e%7C2b38115bebad4aba9ea3b3779d8f4f43%7C1%7C0%7C638159776297845108%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C3000%7C%7C%7C&sdata=2QEWpct5NS36zpwh2zyEISddXRBZMJeJtvMcQSJ8HME%3D&reserved=0>

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




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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