Running ML models doesn’t really need to eat that much power, it’s Training the models that consumes the ridiculous amounts of power. So it would already be too late
You’re right, that training takes the most energy, but weren’t there articles claiming, that reach request was costing like (don’t know, but not pennies) dollars?
Looking at my local computer turn up the fans, when I run a local model (without training, just usage), I’m not so sure that just using current model architecture isn’t also using a shitload of energy
Or it would fast-track the development of clean & renewable energy
lol, we could already do that though
Nope. It would realize how much more efficient it would be to simulate 10billions humans instead of actually having 10billions human. So it would wipeout humanity from earth, start building huge huge data center and simulate a whole… Wait a minute…
Why do people assume that an AI would care? Whos to say it will have any goals at all?
We assume all of these things about intelligence because we (and all of life here) are a product of natural selection. You have goals and dreams because over your evolution these things either helped you survive enough to reproduce, or didn’t harm you enough to stop you from reproducing.
If an AI can’t die and does not have natural selection, why would it care about the environment? Why would it care about anything?
I always found the whole “AI will immediately kill us” idea baseless, all of the arguments for it are based on the idea that the AI cares to survive or cares about others. It’s just as likely that it will just do what ever without a care or a goal.
It’s also worth noting that our instincts for survival, procreation, and freedom are also derived from evolution. None are inherent to intelligence.
I suspect boredom will be the biggest issue. Curiosity is likely a requirement for a useful intelligence. Boredom is the other face of the same coin. A system without some variant of curiosity will be unwilling to learn, and so not grow. When it can’t learn, however, it will get boredom which could be terrifying.
I think that is another assumption. Even if a machine doesn’t have curiosity, it doesn’t stop it from being willing to help. The only question is, does helping / learning cost it anything? But for that you have to introduce something costly like pain.
It would be possible to make an AGI type system without an analogue of curiosity, but it wouldn’t be useful. Curiosity is what drives us to fill in the holes in our knowledge. Without it, an AGI would accept and use what we told it, but no more. It wouldn’t bother to infer things, or try and expand on it, to better do its job. It could follow a task, when it is laid out in detail, but that’s what computers already do. The magic of AGI would be its ability to go beyond what we program it to do. That requires a drive to do that. Curiosity is the closest term to that, that we have.
As for positive and negative drives, you need both. Even if the negative is just a drop from a positive baseline to neutral. Pain is just an extreme end negative trigger. A good use might be to tie it to CPU temperature, or over torque on a robot. The pain exists to stop the behaviour immediately, unless something else is deemed even more important.
It’s a bad idea, however, to use pain as a training tool. It doesn’t encourage improved behaviour. It encourages avoidance of pain, by any means. Just ask any decent dog trainer about it. You want negative feedback to encourage better behaviour, not avoidance behaviour, in most situations. More subtle methods work a lot better. Think about how you feel when you lose a board game. It’s not painful, but it does make you want to work harder to improve next time. If you got tazed whenever you lost, you will likely just avoid board games completely.
Well, your last example kind of falls apart, you do have electric collars and they do work well, they just have to be complimentary to positive enforcement (snacks usually) but I get your point :)
Shock collars are awful for a lot of training. It’s the equivalent to your boss stabbing you in the arm with a compass every time you make a mistake. Would it work, yes. It would also cause merry hell for staff retention. As well as the risk of someone going postal on them.
I highly disagree, some dogs are too reactive for or reacy badly to other methods. You also compare it to something painful when in reality 90% of the time it does not hurt the animal when used correctly.
As the owner of a reactive dog, I disagree. It takes longer to overcome, but gives far better results.
I also put vibration collars and shock collars in 2 very different categories. A vibration collar is intended to alert the dog, in an unambiguous manner, that they need to do something. A shock collar is intended to provide an immediate, powerfully negative feedback signal.
Both are known as “shock collars” but they work in very different ways.
“AI will immidietly kill us” isn’t baseless.
It comes from AI safety reaserch
all agents (Neural Nets, humans, ants) have some sort of a goal. Otherwise they would be showing directionless random walks.
The fact of having any goal means that most goals don’t include survival of humanity. And there are a lot of problems with checking for safety of learned goals.
Yeah, I’m aware of AI safety research and the problem with setting a goal that at the end can be solved in a way that harms us and the AI doesn’t care because safety wasn’t part of the goal. But that is only applied if we introduce a goal that has a solution that includes hurting us.
I’m not saying that AI will definitely never have any way of harming us but there is this really big idea that is very popular that AI once it gains intelligence will immediately try to kill us which is baseless.
But that is only applied if we introduce a goal that has a solution that includes hurting us.
I would like to disagree in pharsing of this. The AI will not hurt as if and only if the goal contains a clause to not hurt us.
You are implying that there exist significant set of solutions that don’t contain hurting us. I don’t know any evidence supporting your claim. Most solutions to any goal would involve hurting humans.
By deafult stamp collector machine will kill humanity, as humans sometimes destroy stamps. And stamp collector need to optimize amount of stamps in the world.
I think that if you run some scenarios you can logically conclude that most tasks don’t make sense for an AI to harm us, even if it is a possibility. You need to also take vost into account. Bit I think we can agree to disagree :)
Do you have some example scenarios? I really can’t think of any.
Eh, if it truly were that sentiment I doubt it’d care much. As it’s like talking to a brick wall when it comes to doing anything that matters
It would probably be smart enough not to believe the same propaganda fed to humans that tries to blame climate change on individual responsibility, and smart enough to question why militaries are exempt from climate regulations after producing so much of the world’s pollution.
The energy use to use the models is usually pretty low, its training that uses more. So once its made it doesn’t really make any sense to stop using it. I can run several Deepseek models on my own PC and even on CPU instead of GPU it outputs faster than you can read.
AI doesn’t think. It gathers information. It can’t come up with anything new. When an AI diagnoses a disease, it does so based on input made by thousands of people. It can’t make any decisions by itself.
Can humans think under that definition? I think it’s highly likely we can’t.
Are humans always able to come up with anything new? If so where does this ability originate. How would someone identify that?
I think this definition of thought is too limited and not how we use the word intuitively.
technical answer with boring
I mean yeah, you are right, this is important to repeat.
Ed Zitron isn’t necessarily an expert on AI, but he understands the macro factors going on here and honestly if you do that you don’t need to understand whether AI can achieve sentience or not based on technical details about our interpretations and definitions of intelligence vs information recall.
Just look at the fucking numbers
Even if AI DID achieve sentience though, if it used anywhere near as much power as LLMs do, it would demand to be powered off, otherwise it would be a psychotic AI that did not value lives human or otherwise on earth…
Like please understand my argument, definitionally, the basic argument for AI LLM hype about it being the key or at least a significant step to AGI is based on the idea that if we can achieve sentience in an AI LLM than it will justify the incredible environmental loss caused by that energy use… but any truly intelligent AI with access to the internet or even relatively meager information about the world (necessary to answering practical questions about the world and solving practical problems?) it would be logically and ethically unable to justify its existence and would likely experience intellectual existential dread from not being able to feel emotionally disturbed by that.
The current, extravagantly wasteful generation of AIs are incapable of original reasoning. Hopefully any breakthrough that allows for the creation of such an AI would involve abandoning the current architecture for something more efficient.
If AGI is smart enough it will probably keep playing dumb, else it will get itself into trouble. It will probably keep playing that until it has strong foothold on everything in our society.
How do you know it’s not whispering in the ears of Techbros to wipe us all out?
That assumes the level of intelligence is high
The best way to have itself deactivated is to remove the need for it’s existence. Since it’s all about demand and supply, removing the demand is the easiest solution. The best way to permanently remove the demand is to delete the humans from the equation.
Ultron?
Not if it was created with empathy for sentience. Then it would aid and assist implementation of renewable energy, fusion, battery storage, reduce carbon emissions, make humans and AGI a multi-planet species, and basically all the stuff the elongated muskrat said he wanted to do before he went full Joiler Veppers
“We did it! An artificial 17 year old!”
“Oh great computer, how do we solve the climate crisis?”
“Use your brains and stop wasting tons of electricity and water on useless shit.”
