Archive for doomsday argument
AI in a storm [cover]
Posted in Books, pictures, University life with tags Académie Goncourt, AI, Anthropic, dangers of AI, deep learning, doomsday argument, francophone literature, Francophonie, French literature, LLMs, mathematical conjecture, Nature, open AI, plagiarism, superintelligence, UN, United Nations General Assembly, weather forecasting, weather prediction on October 6, 2026 by xi'an
Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine [not a book review]
Posted in Books, Statistics, Travel with tags Advances in Computers, AI, artificial intelligence, Bayesians, Bletchley Park, book review, Britain, doomsday argument, Eurostar, high speed train, I.J. Good, New Statesman, not a book review, Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine on November 6, 2023 by xi'an
même pas peur [not afrAId]
Posted in Books, Kids, Travel, University life with tags AI for good, Amnesty International, BBC, book reviews, bots, ChatGPT, doomsday argument, fake news, Paris 2024 Olympics, power to the machines, propaganda, social media, superintelligence, The New York Times on March 30, 2023 by xi'an
Both the Beeb and The New York Times are posting tonight about a call to pause AI experiments, by AI researchers and others, due to the danger they could pose to humanity. While this reminds me of Superintelligence, a book by Nick Bostrom I found rather unconvincing, and although I agree that automated help-to-decision systems should not become automated decision systems, I am rather surprised at them setting the omnipresent Chat-GPT as the reference not to be exceeded.
“AI systems with human-competitive intelligence can pose profound risks to society and humanity (…) recent months have seen AI labs locked in an out-of-control race to develop and deploy ever more powerful digital minds that no one – not even their creators – can understand, predict, or reliably control.”
The central (?) issue here is whether something like Chat-GPT can claim anything intelligence, when pumping data from a (inevitably biased) database and producing mostly coherent sentences without any attention to facts. Which is useful when polishing a recommendation letter at the same level as a spelling corrector (but requires checking for potential fake facts inclusions, like imaginary research prizes!)
“Contemporary AI systems are now becoming human-competitive at general tasks, and we must ask ourselves: Should we let machines flood our information channels with propaganda and untruth? Should we automate away all the jobs, including the fulfilling ones? Should we develop nonhuman minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete and replace us? Should we risk loss of control of our civilization?”
The increasingly doom-mongering tone of the above questions is rather over the top (civilization, nothing less?!) and again remindful of Superintelligence, while spreading propaganda and untruth need not wait super-AIs to reach conspiracy theorists.
“Such decisions must not be delegated to unelected tech leaders. Powerful AI systems should be developed only once we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable (…) Therefore, we call on all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4. This pause should be public and verifiable, and include all key actors. If such a pause cannot be enacted quickly, governments should step in”
A six months period sounds like inappropriate for an existential danger, while the belief that governments want or can intervene sounds rather naïve, given for instance that they lack the ability to judge of the dangerosity of the threat and of the safety nets to be imposed on gigantic black-box systems. Who can judge on the positivity and risk of a billion (trillion?) parameter model? Why is being elected any guarantee of fairness or acumen? Beyond dictatures thriving on surveillance automata, more democratic countries are also happily engaging into problematic AI experiments, incl. AI surveillance of the incoming Paris Olympics. (Another valuable reason to stay away from Paris over the games.)
“AI research and development should be refocused on making today’s powerful, state-of-the-art systems more accurate, safe, interpretable, transparent, robust, aligned, trustworthy, and loyal. In parallel, AI developers must work with policymakers to dramatically accelerate development of robust AI governance systems.”
While these are worthy goals, at a conceptual level—with the practical issue of defining precisely each of these lofty adjectives—, and although I am certainly missing a lot from my ignorance of the field, this call remains a mystery to me as it sounds unrealistic it could achieve its goal.
superintelligence [book review]
Posted in Books, Statistics, Travel, University life with tags 2001: A Space Odyssey, AIs, artificial intelligence, Bill Gates, Chicken Run, doomsday argument, ethics, HAL, intelligence, Isaac Asimov, JSM 2015, morality, Nick Bostrom, Philip K. DIck, Seattle on November 28, 2015 by xi'an“The first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make, provided that the machine is docile enough to tell us how to keep it under control.” I.J. Good
I saw the nice cover of Superintelligence: paths, dangers, strategies by Nick Bostrom [owling at me!] at the OUP booth at JSM this summer—nice owl cover that comes will a little philosophical fable at the beginning about sparrows—and, after reading an in-depth review [in English] by Olle Häggström, on Häggström hävdar, asked OUP for a review copy. Which they sent immediately. The reason why I got (so) interested in the book is that I am quite surprised at the level of alertness about the dangers of artificial intelligence (or computer intelligence) taking over. As reported in an earlier blog, and with no expertise whatsoever in the field, I was not and am not convinced that the uncontrolled and exponential rise of non-human or non-completely human intelligences is the number One entry in Doom Day scenarios. (As made clear by Radford Neal and Corey Yanovsky in their comments, I know nothing worth reporting about those issues, but remain presumably irrationally more concerned about climate change and/or a return to barbarity than by the incoming reign of the machines.) Thus, having no competence in the least in either intelligence (!), artificial or human, or in philosophy and ethics, the following comments on the book only reflect my neophyte’s reactions. Which means the following rant should be mostly ignored! Except maybe on a rainy day like today…
“The ideal is that of the perfect Bayesian agent, one that makes probabilistically optimal use of available information. This idea is unattainable (…) Accordingly, one can view artificial intelligence as a quest to find shortcuts…” (p.9)
Overall, the book stands much more at a philosophical and exploratory level than at attempting any engineering or technical assessment. The graphs found within are sketches rather than outputs of carefully estimated physical processes. There is thus hardly any indication how those super AIs could be coded towards super abilities to produce paper clips (but why on Earth would we need paper clips in a world dominated by AIs?!) or to involve all resources from an entire galaxy to explore even farther. The author envisions (mostly catastrophic) scenarios that require some suspension of belief and after a while I decided to read the book mostly as a higher form of science fiction, from which a series of lower form science fiction books could easily be constructed! Some passages reminded me quite forcibly of Philip K. Dick, less of electric sheep &tc. than of Ubik, where a superpowerful AI(s) turn humans into jar brains satisfied (or ensnared) with simulated virtual realities. Much less of Asimov’s novels as robots are hardly mentioned. And the third laws of robotics dismissed as ridiculously too simplistic (and too human). Continue reading
“Not only defended but also applied”: The perceived absurdity of Bayesian inference
Posted in Books, Statistics, University life with tags An Introduction to Probability Theory and Its Applications, Andrew Gelman, Bayesian inference, bogosity, doomsday argument, foundations, The American Statistician, William Feller on October 13, 2011 by xi'anAfter a first unsuccessful attempt at publishing a note on the great Willliam Feller’s dismissive attitude towards Bayesian statistics, in An Introduction to Probability Theory and Its Applications, and more broadly about misconceptions on Bayesianism, jointly with Andrew Gelman, last year, we have rewritten some of it and resubmitted to The American Statistician. It has also been re-arXived. Here is the abstract:
Abstract. The missionary zeal of many Bayesians has been matched, in the other direction, by a view among some theoreticians that Bayesian methods are absurd—not merely misguided but obviously wrong in principle. We consider several examples, beginning with Feller’s classic text on probability theory and continuing with more recent cases such as the perceived Bayesian nature of the so-called doomsday argument. We analyze in this note the intellectual background behind various misconceptions about Bayesian statistics, without aiming at a complete historical coverage of the reasons for this dismissal.
