The CEO of that company that sold rides on an unsafe submersible to view the wreck of the Titanic (namely Stockton Rush, CEO of OceanGate, which killed 5 people when the submersible imploded) responded to concerns about the safety of his operation by claiming that the critics were motivated by a desire to protect the established players in the underwater-tourism industry from competition.
The point is that some companies are actually reckless (and also that some users of powerful technology are reckless).
> claiming that the critics were motivated by a desire to protect the established players in the underwater-tourism industry from competition.
At this point I suspect a great amount of reasonable engineering criticism has come from people who can't even name any of those "established players in the underwater tourism industry", let alone have a favorable bias towards them.
My point is that spending $50 billion training an AI is a reckless thing to do, so OpenAI and its competitors need to be stopped.
It's reckless because the AI might turn out to be better at planning and better at reality than our most capable institutions (e.g., the FBI and the military) so there would be no way to stop it from doing whatever it wants, and there is no plan that anyone has published or proposed that might prevent the AI from wanting something incompatible with continued human survival.
And most things are incompatible with continued human survival if enough optimization pressure is applied to bringing the thing about, so it is unlikely we will get lucky and the AI ends up wanting something compatible with continued human survival.
If someone somewhere comes up with a viable plan before the end, then the labs could probably be persuaded to follow the viable plan (so we would be saved) because the leaders of the labs understand at some level that what they are doing is very dangerous, and they don't want to be killed, but it is unlikely that anyone anywhere is going to come up with a viable plan in time, so the labs are going to stick with the clearly inadequate plans they have now.
The reason I think it is unlikely that anyone anywhere is going to come up with a viable plan is that MIRI (then called the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence) starting the search for a viable plan in about 2002 and the 2 people at MIRI (Yudkowsky and Soares) with the most experience in this search both say it is unlikely that anyone is going to come up with a plan before the end unless there is a multi-decade moratorium on AI research and on very large training runs.
I'd be interested in hearing an expanded take on GPLs presence in this list.
The first and third elements are intuitive and confirm my own biases/believes, but the freedom/GPL entry confuses me, as I do see GPL fulfilling that purpose (arguably in a highly opinionated, perhaps sub-optimal way).
If anyone could share their perspective here I'd appreciate it.
The usual "GPL is anti-freedom" argument is that it restricts what someone is allowed to do with the source code, meaning it is less free than MIT or BSD style licenses.
I don't agree with that, but that is what the person is saying.
What's absurd, in my opinion, is lumping GPL advocacy in with two other tropes which are intended to restrict the sharing of information and knowledge, where GPL promotes it.
I see that sentiment largely coming from developers who, I think, misunderstand the freedom that the GPL is protecting.
The GPL focuses on the user's freedom to modify any software they are using to better suit their own needs, and it does a great job of it.
The people saying that it is less free than bsd/mit/apache are looking at it from a developer's perspective. The GPL does deliberately limit a developer's freedom to include GPL code in a proprietary product, because that would restrict the user's freedom to modify the code.
You're misreading the comment. It's not that "for your safety" always implies tyranny, it's that tyrants always prefers to say that they're doing things for your safety.
Even that doesn't agree with reality. Some tyrants prefer to say they're doing things for your freedom, your money, or your rights. (In fact, you know what, it's silly to expect tyrants to stay consistent.)
It's well known that the TSA does jack-all for security. A "POSIWID" analysis reveals that its primary purpose is the normalization of tyranny in the broader public by ritual public humiliation.
Others have already pointed out that the TSA is a joke, and US nuclear regulation is so dysfunctional that we've lost all ability to create new reactors, and it's setting back our ability to address global warming by decades.
But seriously, if you paid attention over the last decade, there was so much shit about big tech that people said were going to lead to tyranny/big brother oversight, and yet the closest we have ever gotten to tyranny is by voting in a bombastic talking orange man from NYC that we somehow believed has our best interests in mind.
> But seriously, if you paid attention over the last decade, there was so much shit about big tech that people said were going to lead to tyranny/big brother oversight
To be fair, the big tech controls the behavior of the people now. With social media algorithms and by pressuring everyone to live in social media. Existence of the many companies depends on the ads on (NAMEIT) platform. Usually the people with most power don't have to say it aloud.
While there is some truth to being exposed to certain stimuli through products that you actually use that may cause you to do things like buy shit you don't need, that behaviour is intrinsic to people, and big tech just capitalizes on it.
