Re: Open letter urging to pause AI

On Thu, 30 Mar 2023 at 20:59, Adeel <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/
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> 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, 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 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> 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/
>>>
>>>
>>> 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
>>>
>>>