I'd argue that it's not even corporations anymore of which we should try to hold accountable. It's very clear who is making these calls as the players involved (Musk, Zuckerberg, Altman, Amodei, Thiel, Karp, Luckey, Langley, Nadella, Bezos, Pichai, Tann, etc) want nothing more than to be in the limelight and "preach" to the masses that they know best. They're more brazen year over year as they gain confidence in their unchecked power and continued accrual of wealth. The more money the more disconnected from reality and the stronger assumptions they build. And they have zero compassion. All of these people are dangerous to humanity individually, but when you start to realize how many have emerged and have no filter or checked powers publicly that becomes a truly terrifying thing.
I've recently started reading "End Times Fascism" [0] and it truly encompasses where we are at, how we got here and the bleak future we may be in for if we don't get in front of this now. But this book definitely highlights a lot of what some of the tech community has been seeing and hand waving about for years. The worn out trope that we should hold corporations accountable doesn't work. We should hold the people at the top accountable like other nations do because if they want the limelight then they should bear the responsibility that comes with abuses. The US is becoming a caste system by design. National surveillance, erosion of access to resources for personal compute, bought and paid for politicians and laws that don't apply to the wealthy.
Imagine: you start working at the company with a good will towards them. As you learn more and see more decisions, you slowly realize how bad it is. Now you've already contributed. Then you leave.
It might be possible to build everything with this goodwill and that's how we'd still end up with a torment nexus even if you immediately drop it.
What I'm saying is, at one point you have to break the company fully.
I'm not sure what more we need to wait for, if the claim "10% it ends humanity" is not enough.
There is a lot more to it, an assumption is being made that somehow its easy to classify a company being god or bad and same for people. In reality, everyones life experiences shape them differently, the moral compass of right and wrong isn't same for everyone. Leaving that aside people are not just managing their feelings alone, more than often they are responsible for other people in the family as well and the impact of decision can have far reaching impact. Making a decision when you are single vs with kids and a mortgage are two different things.
Good people can be in tough position where even when they do not agree they may not have much of an option but to keep going.
Potentially. If we could put a precise probability on it, we could maybe make an informed decision on whether we want to play that Russian roulette as a species.
But the reality is that experts' probabilities for human extinctions vary wildly, with the lab leaders at 20%-30% and these researchers at >10% (he didn't state how much higher...), LeCun at <0.01% and the other two godfathers of AI, Bengio and Hinton at >10%.
And this decision to take our shot is not taken in a democratic way by humanity as a whole, but by a few companies racing as fast as possible.
So as long as no one can put an upper bound on the extinction risk, development must be globally shut down.
I am no fan of AI, but am hoping the solar and battery storage manufacturers are using it to assist in developing higher efficiency panels and cheaper energy storage (materials research, faster testing cycles, more experimentation, etc).
Both technologies I believe are the grim reapers of Big Oil. Once Big Oil falls (and petrostates), then we can see environmental recovery begin.
You can definitely use statistical modelling to advance science and RnD. I'm not seeing a general language model applications in this spaces. I also don't know anything about solar panel or battery manufacturing.
If anything, LLMs siphoning GPUs make doing this research harder as they're not available.
It's bad that a few people are making such a gamble on behalf of billions. That could work if climate change were literally an asteroid about to strike the Earth and AI was the only thing that could figure out how to alter it's course before then. But it doesn't really work when climate change will unfold as a catastrophe over the next few centuries. Because then it becomes a decision the entire planet should be making over time, not a few tech billionaires and their friends in government.
There’s game theoretical reasons why a single actor can’t stop it in isolation. To avoid it they need to coordinate, which is more or less what they are proposing.
What if those chants are prompts? "Make no mistakes", "My Grandma used to love this", "fix this and don't break anything else". Sometimes you have to keep chanting for a while until you get the results.
There are sources claiming AI is Abominable Intelligence and something completely different from the Machine Spirit. But it seems to me that this is how it feels to be a tech priest.
I was thinking about this line a lot. Because yes, "not all bots" and "not in all cases".
But what gives them the right to do whatever with the sites if they claim it's for security purposes? They are not law enforcement. Moreover, other bots are missing from the docs which they clearly state on the same page. How many other bots of theirs are ignoring robots.txt?
I think we should hold Google to a higher standard than some random blogger (me).
...Because law enforcement does not have the interest, reach, or time to investigate every single cybercrime, and if they do it won't be timely - it will be after the fact, punishing the criminals, and not preventing harm.
Google is in a unique situation to protect their users, and they also want to avoid serving search results that are malicious (yes, I know about their ads problem) - so they are proactive about scanning for sites that are malicious so they can avoid sending users to them.
Man, Google is catching strays from all directions. I recently posted an article about their bot behaviour [0], only to be drowned in other more pressing issues.
To comment on this one: as long as there is no backlash from their real customers (those that buy ads) nothing will change.
Yes. Their reputation is taking on the reputation of projects they support. If they want to keep good reputation, they should watch over their sponsored projects.
Do we generally feel like they have a good reputation these days though? Like I don't know what people say on Twitter now I guess, but I do remember when they were advertising Elon speaking at their conference at the height of the Government Efficiency saga, and it really dawned on me that something like public sentiment is kinda low priority for them.
And for what its worth (very little), I have worked at this point at various YC startups over close to a decade now, and it can't help but be a quite negative signal to me as non-CEO, lowly dev worker. I get that they have a bunch of successes under their belt, and this is near superstition on my part, but the heuristic of staying away from YC companies has made me a much happier employee.
The reputation thing is not an exact science. They might not care and then it might completely sink them one day. It's generally good to have good reputation and I think IT is losing it fast.
I thought the reputation that mattered to YC was for taking on could-be-very-profitable startups, and making them (statistically) much more profitable.
Also, might your argument require that YC's leaders eventually gain access to a time machine, so they could advise their earlier selves against supporting projects which later proved disreputable?
No, what's done is done. You can achieve a lot with bad reputation too. But maybe one day the stream of startups or even the stream of money will dry up. As I said earlier, it's not an exact science and you never know when bad reputation will bite you.
I keep stumbling over different Google bots in my logs. So today I'm looking at each and every Googly eye that takes a look at my site. Because when you stare at me, I'll stare back.
You have the right and the means to define what Google is allowed to do on your site, whether the Google traffic you face is extensive or you'd like to opt-out of AI training (check Google Other). Sadly, using robots.txt is not enough, Google admits that some of their bots will not respect the rules.
We should hold corporations valued in billions to a higher standard than a single person trying to care for their family.
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