Shetetl-Optimized, February 22, 2023
I still remember the 90s, when philosophical conversation about AI went around in endless circles—the Turing Test, Chinese Room, syntax versus semantics, connectionism versus symbolic logic&#….
I hope watermarking will be part of the solution going forward, although any watermarking scheme will surely be attacked, leading to a cat-and-mouse game. Sometimes, alas, as with Google’s decadeslong battle against SEO, there’s nothing to do in to a cat-and-mouse game except try to be a better cat.
Mostly my reaction has been: how can anyone stop being fascinated for long enough to be angry?
My purpose, in this post, is to ask a more basic question than how to make GPT safer: namely, should GPT exist at all?
As I’ve explained, the AI-safety movement contains two camps, “ethics” (concerned with bias, misinformation, and corporate greed) and “alignment” (concerned with the destruction of all life on earth), which generally despise each other and agree on almost nothing. Yet these two opposed camps seem to be converging on the same “neo-Luddite” conclusion—namely thatgenerative AI ought to be shut down, kept from public use, not scaled further, not integrated into people’s lives— leaving only the AI-safety “moderates” like me to resist that conclusion.
If I disagree (for now) with the shut-it-all-downists of both the ethics and the alignment camps—if I want GPT and other Large Language Models to be part of the world going forward—then what are my reasons? Introspecting on this question, I think a central part of the answer is curiosity and wonder.
We now know that, by tying up nuclear power in endless bureaucracy and driving its cost ever higher, on the principle that if nuclear is economically competitive then it ipso facto hasn’t been made safe enough, what the antinuclear activists were really doing was to force an ever-greater reliance on fossil fuels. They thereby created the conditions for the climate catastrophe of today. They weren’t saving the human future; they were destroying it. Their certainty, in opposing the march of a particular scary-looking technology, was as misplaced as it’s possible to be. Our descendants will suffer the consequences.
Unless, of course, there’s another twist in the story: for example, if the global warming from burning fossil fuels is the only thing that staves off another ice age, and therefore the antinuclear activists do turn out to have saved civilization after all.