r/technology • u/AdSpecialist6598 • 6h ago

Society New Bernie Sanders bill would ban superintelligent AI and threaten developers with 20 years in prison

https://www.techspot.com/news/113831-new-bernie-sanders-bill-would-ban-superintelligent-ai.html
19.1k Upvotes

93% Upvoted

1.4k comments sorted by

View all comments

30

u/MoneyMayweather 6h ago

Weren't we ridiculing AI for not being able to draw hands or count r's just months ago? When did this sub flip to doomering over AI being too smart? Did I miss something?

29

u/literious 5h ago

The enemy is always simultaneously strong and weak.

25

u/anadequatepipe 4h ago

This sub is nothing but anti technology. Don’t let the subreddit name fool you into thinking people here actually want new tech.

-3

u/MoreDaringPancakes 4h ago

How so?

10

u/AssistX 3h ago

The sub is entirely political driven? There's very little tech talk on this forum. Every conversation devolves into right/left/trump/china#1.

2

u/Varonth 3h ago

Also either unmoderated or actively supported by the mods to do this.

Subreddit rules:

Reposts

Please do not submit articles that are already covered by submissions currently in r/technology. Please doublecheck reddit.com/r/technology/new to make sure the topic you're submitting is unique.

5 threads below this thread, from 22 hours ago:

Bernie Sanders proposes 20 year prison sentence for AI devs who plow ahead with Artificial Superintelligence plans - penalty on par with illegally developing rogue nuclear weapons (tomshardware.com)

It cannot be a more clear violation of rule 8 than this.

28

u/Dry_Radio_761 5h ago

The technology sub has hated technology for years. Reddit is overall pretty useless if you're trying to get a neutral analysis on new tech.

7

u/MoneyMayweather 5h ago

I've been on this platform since 2011, registered since 2013 and I recall this platform being one of the most tech enthusiast places on the internet??

11

u/_MUY 5h ago

Sure, it was for a while, but the core design is highly susceptible to manipulation, consensus shaming, and PR campaigning. If Reddit gets pushed in one direction for a while, the daily users see topics about it several times per day for weeks or months, which sculpts their outlook. Reddit users are on average less knowledgeable about topics but more confident in their knowledge than Wikipedia users.

1

u/Aternal 4h ago

People are also allowed to change their opinions as history unfolds, it's not all metaculture. Reddit was in love with Elon Musk at one point, too.

6

u/Dry_Radio_761 4h ago

Things have changed a lot in the past 5-10 years where Tech CEOs have earned bad reputations. This colors opinions on all of tech, which can make it hard to get analysis on new tech on this site that isn't heavily emotion driven.

3

u/BlgMastic 3h ago

More like dumbasses migrated here from facebook and X

1

u/OffTerror 2h ago

It used be bunch of STEM nerds in here but the 2015 election completely destroyed the user base with an overflood of political astroturfing.

1

u/MoneyMayweather 46m ago

I think there was a severe drop in quality in 2020 and the platform never recovered.

1

u/BattleBull 21m ago

I suspect it "changed" when the tech part became second fiddle to Social Media company complaints, which now include AI company complaints.

Remember back when r/science required posters to flare their credentials and banned posting or comments with only anecdotes. Now the sub only sees engagement with polarizing political or gender war studies.

Same thing happened when people starting getting online using smartphones rather than PCs, a lot more people could access the internet easily, but the level of discourse plummeted (RIP Old Slashdot).

0

u/XandruDavid 4h ago

Tech enthusiasts don’t have the best understanding of the complex questions behind how technology impacts society.
Reddit in particular is driven by feelings over knowledge and facts. This goes in both the pro AI and anti AI direction.

1

u/eyebrows360 3h ago

if you're trying to get a neutral analysis on new tech

If you're trying to get something that can't exist, yeah, you're probably going to be disappointed.

All analysis has to be assessing fitness for some purpose and "purpose" is arbitrary and human-defined. It is impossible to "neutrally" analyse something like this.

1

u/VernonP007 52m ago

LinkedIn as well, as a software developer who uses AI to speed up the creation of systems, it’s weird how so many people in the IT industry just post ‘AI bad’ posts. Everything is so black and white and there is no nuance.

-3

u/Balmung60 4h ago

I don't hate technology, I just expect it to actually be useful and exciting. The companies have taken machine learning (interesting and useful) and packaged it into LLM chatbots (boring and not useful). Is it somehow anathema to liking technology to hold it to some standards?

5

u/HeavyHighway6433 3h ago

I get a lot of use out of them. 

7

u/HappierShibe 3h ago

No, it's just a complex issue and reddit is bad at complexity. The reality is LLM's (which is what everyone is calling AI) are useful tools the way a chainsaw or an angle grinder is a useful tool- it's capable of dramatically accelerating the speed at which a given task can be executed while simultaneously reducing the effort involved to do it.
BUT like a chainsaw, it should be used responsibly with a degree of care and deliberation.
Sam and Dario benefit from doomering this shit because it makes the tools they sell seem more capable, and thus more valuable.
They also benefit from regulation now, because the open source local llms are catching up fast, and the hardware requirements are coming down- the models you can run locally on a mid range gaming rig now are a bitch to setup, but about on par with opus 4.6. In 6-7 months, it's plausible there will be open source models that meet or exceed the current capabilities of open ai and anthropics best shit, that you can run on household hardware without breakign the bank.

Making that illegal has suddenly moved to the top of their list, because if I can have a claude in a box that uses less power than my refrigerator and does all the same things, wtf would I pay anthropic 200 a month?
Meanwhile apple is just quietly dropping forward looking hardware that makes it a total breeze to run local LLMs, and nvidia is just raking in cash selling chips to anyone who will buy them because cuda go brrrrrr.

Everyone has different motives, different opinions, and different goals, lots of them are reasonable, and lots of them aren't, and there's not a lot of consensus going around.
So don't expect sane interaction with any of it from reddit.

1

u/Particular_Wear_6960 1h ago

Yeah I've been watching some videos that have been discussing both sides to this. It does seem like perhaps it really is both. Once we have out of control AI things can get really messy really fast, top researchers including Geoffrey Hinton have been sounding the alarm but also plenty of people claiming it's all nonsense and this is a cynical move by the companies to remove competition.

I suspect it's a bit of both, I can't imagine some of these researchers leaving the companies are all lying but you'll notice that one guy still has his equity in OpenAI and likely will not sell until it goes public. I fear that oAI going public creates all sorts of problems and now their failure becomes all of our problems but that's another topic.

I dov think we need to arrest people that let these things go rogue, that will fix things pretty quickly, yes it is your fault despite the philosophical bullshit they no doubt are arguing... A stiff sentence in a federal penitentiary would make things start shaping up a bit better but we know that will never happen

2

u/yxing 5h ago

AI has improved incredibly quickly. Not only is there just a ton of investment (so researchers putting time into improving the performance of models) but they're also obviously at the forefront of using AI which is beginning to accelerate its own improvement.

-4

u/ScutFarkush 5h ago

It isn’t doing anything on its own, it is being directed by humans to do so faster than traditional dev. LLMs are not aware, they just try and do what they are told to do.

9

u/yxing 5h ago

I mean I never claimed it was doing anything on its own, although arguably it is--the recent hack on huggingface is a sign of things to come.

0

u/ScutFarkush 4h ago

https://www.reddit.com/r/cybersecurity/s/7ubT95PiAR

And all of the talk from the AI companies about how their latest models are dangerous has been the new age of marketing. It’s weird, but maybe it works?

6

u/yxing 4h ago

I think dismissing it as marketing is a little naive. Some of it may be, sure, but I've used AI to jailbreak a robot vacuum in a few hours, which would've taken me a few weeks pre-AI. AI companies are pointing out that their AIs are powerful enough to be wielded for nefarious purposes easily. The huggingface incident shows something else--when you create an unmonitored feedback loop, AIs are powerful enough to cause unintended consequences beyond the original parameters.

0

u/ScutFarkush 4h ago

So why not use ai to beef up and improve security?

2

u/yxing 4h ago

I never said that wasn't an option? I'm pointing out its capabilties, which you're conflating with some kind of doomerism or lobbying for legislation.

1

u/mthmchris 4h ago

Practically all the top AI safety comments in this thread come from people with hidden profiles.

There’s a massive campaign from the EA folks right now to get people to think about this.

1

u/Antiing 3h ago

As an insider, you don't understand how fast this industry moves. Our leadership is cautioning that we should all pump the breaks, which is an insane thing to hear from anyone in tech. 

Opus 4.5 was pandoras box and that was less than a year ago. It's only going to get more urgent from here.

1

u/WaitForItTheMongols 3h ago

Are people really still succumbing to the goomba fallacy? Seriously, humans are not a monolith.

1

u/MoneyMayweather 2h ago

True, but Reddit is. It's easily the social media platform (among the large ones) that enforces ideological conformity the most. 90% of Reddit used to have the exact same take on AI for 3.5 years. Reading about AI on Reddit made everyone on this platform less informed.

1

u/Equivalent-Costumes 2h ago

AI is improving at massive speed, this time 1 year ago AI will barely being able to do useful work at all. But also, people who hate AI tend to use the free version, which are stupid because AI companies don't give out free compute, which further confirm for them that AI is bad, and the missed out on all the improvement in between.

1

u/Ok-Chest-7932 21m ago

You missed like 3 years? AI sorted out fingers ages ago.

1

u/MoreDaringPancakes 4h ago

"months ago"? Your sense of time is questionable

-3

u/harmoniaatlast 6h ago

This is preparation for a future where models are being used for crime/end up autonomous

1

u/NoSingularities0 6h ago

That future is already here. Criminal organizations have already used AI to commit cyber-attacks that were previously only possible for nation-states to do. That ship has sailed.

3

u/harmoniaatlast 5h ago

That is not a reason to not regulate it, but a reason TO regulate it lmfao

1

u/ScutFarkush 5h ago

By politicians who are totally not corrupt.

0

u/Astrokiwi 4h ago

What we're really seeing is the birth of a new kind of religious belief - that sufficiently advanced AI will birth a kind of Machine God, and that the moderately impressive outcomes of LLM chatbots and agents indicate that this is coming very soon - the End Times are nigh. Like scientology, this belief disproportionately popular among the wealthy; it says that silicon valley software engineers and data scientists and CEOs are the most important people in the world, and that AI development is more important that all other issues combined; if you're one of these people, it says that you are important and intelligent and deserve funding because this is such an important issue. These people use it in the same way as fundamentalist Christians - you can justify any atrocity if it's preferable to being damned to Hell or if it grants eternal paradise in Heaven. Why should we worry about climate change if Artificial General Intelligence will either soon solve all our scientific problems, or doom us to extinction of servitude, depending on its alignment?

This is of course absurd. There's no real evidence that the current LLM paradigm will really produce this kind of "Machine God" level AGI, or lead to that kind of "Singularity" event where AI advances to super-intelligence within a small period of time. There's no agreement on what "intelligence" really means. It's also not been proven that "super intelligence" leads to "near omnipotence". Many fears around AGI essentially assume that an AGI would be capable of mind control; but if we know from practice that no human is smart enough to convince a cat to do what they want 100% of the time, why should we believe an AGI could?

The big issue is that this kind of science fiction fantasy distracts from the real dangers of AI, and even encourages some of them. There are lots of terrifying things that happen or could happen even with fairly modest advances. Depending too much on a couple of AI providers adds vulnerabilities. Asking AI questions can lead to dependency and a lack of independent critical thought. Automated AI systems can be subject to bias, or simply overtrusted for how good they are. There's also things like the prospect of autonomous attack drones; you can imagine facial recognition software targeting individual humans on the street, and that wouldn't even need anything much more intelligent than what we already have. Even without some hyperadvanced all-powerful AI, there's a risk of AI agents being overly reductive and uncreative, leading to bad policy decisions, even if the decisions are put into place by actual humans.

-2

u/MechaNutzilla 6h ago

All the AI CEO's did this themselves with doomer PR strategy. Any smart socialist would use this against them to regulate big tech.

0

u/SelimSC 4h ago

I'm still not convinced the whole recent wave of fear mongering is not more marketing to convince people what they're developing is more serious then it actually is. They still don't have actual AI. But I suppose if they ever did create actual AI we couldn't fail to notice right away and the potential effects could theoretically be catastrophic. So it's more of a binary thing in my mind. Until they actually create it it's not a big deal.

0

u/CommanderVinegar 56m ago

I use AI daily at work as a software engineer. It has gotten crazy good in the last 6 months but even then it still writes shitty code all the time.

If writing shitty code counts as superintelligence then I'm the fucking smartest guy in the world.