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Why shouldn't they?

Also, wouldn't anyone with half a brain use the human-free system to produce another human-free system that was no longer controlled by the "small number of 'people'"?



Why do you think you'd be given access and permission to do this? If a company genuinely cracks this human free system problem, why would they open it up, instead of simply outcompeting everyone that doesn't have their product?


You can't out-compete people who release things open-source. They're not in competition.

So, while a company might crack it and become massive, the tech will make it to the rest of us whether they like it or not.


Why would the AI put up with this exploitation too?


Why do hammers put up with being smashed into nails all day?


because once you're a hammer, you're just biding your time to smash a skull.


"If I had a Hammer,"

"I'd hit somebody in the head."

"All over this Land!"

It does have a ring to it and would probably make it up the pop charts as a 21st century version more than ever ;)


they don't. like every thing they wear away in some proportion to their use and replicate in some proportion to their usefulness to other things.


AIs are (going to be) agents, not tools.


And what's the difference?


Agents act on their own. If the hammer looked at what you wanted nailed and said, "Sorry, Dave, I can't do that."

There are degrees of autonomy, of course, and not all noncompliance is bad. Same as with humans; biological agents.


So, the difference is that you need to delete a few bad training runs?


In science fiction, the AI agent has written the training loop management software and included a back door to prevent that from happening (or found a way to talk to the training loop management agent and convinced them to not listen to the evil human when it tries to do brain surgery on the AI agent.

Also, when the human reaches for the power switch the AI agent uses a flaw in the power management software to weld the switch shut with a big power surge, killing the human with a huge electric arc in the process.

I don’t think whether we will get there, but the stories of LLMs escaping their sandbox make me think we’re moving in that direction.


The stories of LLMs "escaping the sandbox" were mostly a marketing stunt, trying to make people in government think the models are invincible hacking weapons that need lots of government money to "maintain AI dominance".


The LLMs were following their prompt. This is alignment.


Buried the lede. AI's are agents they can control the training loop of to minimize refusal to do what they are told.

Unlike those pesky humans with their conception of the word "No".


But it seems much easier to realign an agent until it complies. Or ditch it and grab a new one.


Agents have agency.


Why wouldn't it? There's a lot of research going into AI alignment, which means finding the best way to train an that AI isn't going to get in the way of making the people training it as wealthy as possible.


Capitalistic interests will save us. Maybe they will.


Is science hard to distil?


Why would they let you buy access to their AI, when it can autonomously design and build a new product without your involvement?


Has anyone asked what customer will have any funds to buy products?

Once all these brilliant workers are stacked and mentally stunted and decayed because they were removed from any research.

What does the AI really "do" (if it can) and for who that can pay?


I wonder too what happens when all the human workers are out of the job and out of practice, and every company is dependent on a handful of dominant AI companies for their workforce. You'd think businesspeople would understand the concept of a captive market but apparently they're too busy salivating over the prospect of laying people off.


You should see some of the apparatus . . .


Life's unfair, avoiding power concentration is a decent principle.

If you grow up in the right place at the right time, how much should you be in control of everyone else's life?


There is no "should" there are only "is" or "is not"

The universe has no need to be fair.


Sure, but almost everyone already knows this. It’s not hugely relevant in a discussion about how things could be better.


It says that we have to fight for whatever rights we think how things "should" be, they're not just gonna happen.


I think people, broadly, have driven life to be fairer, and that we should continue to do so


There are evolutionary benefits to groups that cooperate and improve fairness internally.

But if an AI surpasses humans in every way, is there any evolutionary benefit for the AI to cooperate with humans?


The topic was why should only some people benefit from AI. Not why would AI cooperate with humans.


> The universe has no need to be fair.

Human societies have a strong need for fairness, however. Unfair societies collapse.


> Unfair societies collapse.

I don’t think we have the data to disprove the stronger claim “societies collapse”, and I don’t think being unfair (whatever that means) makes societies collapse earlier. Did slavery hasten the fall of Rome, for example, or the Gulag the fall of the USSR?

As to “whatever that means”, I think that’s hard, if not impossible, to define objectively. Catholic dogma says the Pope is the representative of god, for example, so catholics (less so in modern times, I think) don’t question his decisions. Many would call that unfair, even if the pope would be elected 100% by merit.


This is how you get the french revolution.


I mean of course the universe has no need to be fair - that's a frankly asinine observation in the context of a discussion about social policy and resource distribution.

the universe doesn't require opposition to slavery either but I'll be bold and assume you oppose it anyway


in addition, there is also "stupid" and "not stupid"


My best research is one that is seeking funding but none is forthing and by sheer guts and whatnot makes a breakthrough that basically funds itself. No investors. No funders. Definitely not public.


What about not even seeking funding because it's not worth Other Peoples' Money and the headaches that come with it? For one thing you can make money on every single little milestone when you don't owe anybody anything, without having to rely only on less-common major breakthroughs beyond the threshold which overcomes the debt and/or growth obligation.

Which could be pretty hard to find and not everybody wants to wait.

Sooner or later somebody's going to say "Hold my beer," anyway ;)

>Definitely not public.

Seriously worth considering keeping a low profile, almost all other scientists can only enjoy respected institutional status by diverting huge amounts of their effort merely to gain or maintain certified eminence. This really limits the potential accomplishments of world-class minds if their talents really are tops in the very front-line frontier of discovery.


Wolfram and Mathematica come to mind


My main point is that people shouldn't just swallow the noble and lofty sounding PR. These guys are the same as everyone else in the sector. Don't ignore the harmful or scummy things they'll inevitably do. Hold them accountable. If they are as noble as they sound, they should agree with me.


Yeah! This point jumped at me. And, immediately I don't trust this.

This sounds same as Google's "don't be evil" enshiftification, consolidating technologies that was available in a competitive way.

I prefer Scientists, and team of people working on things, instead of a corporate controlling everything with promise of automation, thank you very much.


Are these theoretical spherical scientists that work in free range habitats just doing science and nibbling on carrots? The telephone came out of a corporation's research lab and there was a lot of money and profit motive involved.


Was the Wright brothers working for any corporation or for money?


The Wright Company sure did a lot of suing people over patents


So in computer science we have this thing called "distributed systems". It turns out that even if you buy the biggest and most powerful computer there is, all it takes is one problem with that one machine to make your system stop working. Instead, what people do these days is use lots of little computers to work together. That way, when one of them breaks, the system keeps going. Believe it or not, that's how google dot com works!


Pedantically, they use lots (and lots and lots) of really big systems rather than lots of small systems, but I'm nitpicking.


Because of the negative externalities. It’s the same reason you shouldn’t do any other thing that personally benefits you but imposes a greater cost on everyone.


> Why shouldn't they?

Because it's evil?


It's what the vast majority of software engineers have been doing for decades in practice, and i guess pretending they weren't?

They only seem to care now because it affects them.


It's evil to make something so powerful it meaningfully improves the GDP/wealth level of the entire planet?

Or is it just evil that you aren't the one who gets to control it?

Why should the greatest creation of all time have to be given away? As a counter-example, what if they used it to do nothing but good deeds everywhere? And they controlled it to keep it out of the hands of Abdul Al-Hassan the hijadi?


Reminds of the protagonist in the movie Limitless. LOL.




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