Thread

1. edot · 1791067681 · focus · HN ↗

   Absolutely based. Finally someone of stature in the industry calling this whole fear overblown. Bill Gates sounded like a nontechnical goofball in his Ezra Klein interview where he basically just screamed that the Terminator is real.

   There are lots of real worries (government use to suppress the people with minimal manpower or popular support, brainrot and fake news, unemployment due to the belief that LLMs can replace people, education collapse, etc.) we should instead be looking at. This whole rogue AI shtick is tiresome.

   1. Barrin92 · 1791070504 · focus · HN ↗

      >Bill Gates sounded like a nontechnical goofball in his Ezra Klein interview where he basically just screamed that the Terminator is real.

      I saw that episode too and he genuinely looked completely out of it, even in terms of his temperament and how he was coming at Klein for putting common questions in front of him, some people are genuinely starting to lose it.

      I also found the whole debate about cyber-security and 'rogue' software so bizarre because dangerous malware isn't a new thing, and it's often dangerous not because it's intelligent but just the opposite, because it's tiny, viral and fast. Which describes everything that kills humanity in far larger numbers than anything complex, big and intelligent

      1. jswelker · 1791071216 · focus · HN ↗

         Wasn't Bill Gates mostly just saying terrorists could use AI to build a bioweapon? That sounds legit to me.

         1. Barrin92 · 1791074084 · focus · HN ↗

            terrorists can also use annas archive, scihub and equipment they order on Alibaba to build bioweapons and I don't see him losing his mind over those

            if you're trying to build a bioweapon shockingly enough the bottleneck is... the laboratory work. What on earth is 'legit' about stringing words together that sound scary, you can't just iterate 'ai bioweapon cyber' in a sentence over and over as if that adds up to actual evidence for an increased risk of any threat. well tbf you can technically because apparently it freaks a lot of podcast listeners out

            1. jswelker · 1791078953 · focus · HN ↗

               As a thought experiment imagine you have a biochemical PhD expert on the phone with you giving you step by step instructions on how to grow some dangerous biotoxin, giving you feedback in real time and helping you troubleshoot. Would you be more successful with this expert than you'd be on your own?

               Now imagine anyone can call that expert for free at any time.

               Maybe the AI isn't quite there with biology knowledge yet (doubtful), but it is a matter of time.

               How is that not a real risk?

               1. rubikscube09 · 1791081152 · focus · HN ↗

                  not an expert but because i assume you need the physical resources to do it in the first place?
               2. Marha01 · 1791101650 · focus · HN ↗

                  > As a thought experiment imagine you have a biochemical PhD expert on the phone with you giving you step by step instructions on how to grow some dangerous biotoxin, giving you feedback in real time and helping you troubleshoot. Would you be more successful with this expert than you'd be on your own?

                  I think there is some difference of degree, but not of kind. A determined terrorist can relatively easily find many ways to kill people en masse today, no AI needed. The bottleneck is usually the actual physical execution in the real world, not theoretical knowledge.

                  1. sdthjbvuiiijbb · 1791104952 · focus · HN ↗

                     >The bottleneck is usually the actual physical execution in the real world, not theoretical knowledge.

                     And the interest or willpower too. People fall into a kind of reductive Good vs Evil mode of thinking, with "terrorists" being of course a kind of shadowy mass of pure evil lurking in the darkness. But actual real life terrorists are people too and I'd wager few of them are actually interested in trying to end humanity.

                     1. tancop · 1791114496 · focus · HN ↗

                        The only terrorists who wanted to end the world were Aum Shinrikyo as far as I remember. Everyone else is fighting for a cause that benefits their people - some good like kicking out colonial oppression, some evil like fascism or Islamism, some of them in between like various ethnic conflicts.

                        Even the religious extremists don't really want to take over the world and destroy everyone who doesn't convert. That's just a way to gain support from a conservative nation. A lot of them are motivated by revenge for wars that destroyed their country and want to make sure it never happens again.

                        Their methods are wrong no doubt, and not very effective, but the reasons they do it are good. And a person like that will never release a deadly bio weapon. We should worry more about incel mass shooter types who believe everyone is evil.

                        1. jswelker · 1791125818 · focus · HN ↗

                           Exactly. I am more worried about a Beavis-and-Butthead lone wolf incel type making something that kills a thousand people and then scale that up across 4chan or whatever. Not human extinction but still very bad.
                  2. pixl97 · 1791134546 · focus · HN ↗

                     The issue with the direction of technology is it tends to make things that were once very hard to impossible. This is why there are bumper stickers mocking Libertarians by saying things like "legalize recreational plutonium".

                     If we are not careful and suddenly release tools with far more capabilities than we expect you go from "smart" people being able to do it, to some angsty teenager being able to pull it off in their bedroom.

                     The current issue with AI is we are squirting out new models faster than we can complete long term testing on them. We'll find new model capabilities long after they've been in the field. Just assuming safety is how you catch cancer from your food dye, or how you change the atmosphere around you and start burning down your planet. Now just imagine that involving intelligence and doing with a few percent of the worlds GDP to make it happen.

               3. Barrin92 · 1791143095 · focus · HN ↗

                  you don't even need to make it a thought experiment, we have real world cases of this. Anthrax cultivation is easy enough that a first year biology student can do it, but it's in practice so dangerous and difficult to aerosolize without the correct equipment that nobody does it. The information to easily produce many bioweapons is online, the internet and instant global communication already democratized knowledge, why are terrorists still driving trucks into crowds?

                  Plans for 3d printed weapons are publicly available, same argument was made then, if everyone can download a blueprint for a gun, are we all going to get gunned down? Hasn't happened. There's two errors in this Bill Gates argument. One is thinking terrorists don't already have PhDs, secondly overrating intelligence because that's the only thing they're good at, and when they think of terrorists they just think of their own inflated egos, but turned evil. Which isn't how real terrorists operate

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