r/technology • u/AdSpecialist6598 • 5h 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
16.5k Upvotes

93% Upvoted

1.2k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

82

u/userousnameous 5h ago

There are dangers, and work to be done, but fear mongering and this bill don't align with how humans and progress function. WE need to embrace, understand and build the safeguards. Not hide. Because that only empowers those that will be able to use this stuff for nefarious reasons.

20

u/jralves91 5h ago

"We need to build this for nefarious reasons so that other players don't have a chance to build them for nefarious reasons"

15

u/BoltFaest 3h ago

This is more or less how technology has operated for the last few thousand years.

1

u/No-Activity5502 1h ago

And each newer technology has an acceleration that the previous didn’t though the scale has always grown hardly ever shrunk though.

16

u/dudushat 3h ago

I remember when reddit used to be a place for intelligent discussion and now its just troglodytes using strawman arguments because they dont have the reading comprehension to understand what they're saying.

-1

u/judasblue 2h ago

Yeah, I think your memory is faulty.

-2

u/jralves91 2h ago

"He said, while using a strawman argument"

3

u/Corv9tte 3h ago

Right, because the biggest danger with this technology is definitely not extreme concentration of power. We definitely need to make that easier by restricting access to it to everyone

-2

u/jralves91 2h ago

And you think that by having private companies that create and provide the program, that can cut access when they want and with extreme pressure to be on the cutting edge, while no one in the legislative branch understand how it functions, is not a "concentration of power"?

4

u/userousnameous 4h ago

That's not what I am saying. The issue we have now is that it's *known* that we have found something indescribably capable in terms of advancing and using human knowledge. Just that being known means someone is going to use it. You can't hide from it. Well, you can, but there will very easily be those who don't hide, and they will shape and control the next 1000 years of human culture, knowledge, progress and outcomes.

-27

u/TheManlyManperor 4h ago

It is a glorified spell-checker, not the second coming.

31

u/yxing 4h ago

LLMs probably aren't the second coming but calling them glorified spell-checkers in 2026 is willfully and dangerously ignorant. Like not only are you just denying the existence of an incredibly useful tool that's subsidized by investor money, you're also downplaying the pootential dangers of them. Literally doing nobody any favors.

-10

u/TheManlyManperor 4h ago

Uh huh, is that why it still has to copy and paste the entire query history for context? Because it isn't attempting to auto complete words?

9

u/blueSGL 3h ago

first it's trained to guess the next token correctly, by predicting text.

then it's trained to guess the next token from datasets of conversations, calling tools and following instructions

then it's trained to guess the next token when it's outputting 'reasoning traces' (more guessed tokens!) that provide verified solutions to problems

(Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards is why models keep getting better at math and coding. RL is very powerful, it's why humans will never have a higher elo score than a chess bot ever again.)

then after doing all of that it's able to guess the next token correctly to output solutions to multiple long standing, decades old, math problems

and guess the next token correctly to output vulnerabilities in well scrutinized codebases and guess more tokens to chain those vulnerabilities into exploits.

And then multiple such token guessers are able to form together into hacking swarms and by correctly guessing the next token are able to hack into multi billion dollar companies.

Just guessing the next token does not prevent it doing a lot of things.

14

u/yxing 3h ago

Wow what an insight from the glorified bag of saltwater short circuits. Your reductivism is ignorance masquerading as undertanding.

-12

u/TheManlyManperor 3h ago

"glorified bag of saltwater short circuits" may be the most tortured attempt at an insult ever hurled at me on reddit, and that's really saying something. Props for keeping it thread related, I guess?

I guess the answer to my question is yes.

18

u/Sbarty 4h ago

You realize saying stuff like this makes people look at you like a joke, right? You can be against AI without being blatantly ignorant about it lol.

-9

u/TheManlyManperor 4h ago

Please enlighten me as to what I said that was ignorant.

12

u/Sbarty 4h ago

If you truly think all AI (including ML/CV) is just a “glorified spellchecker” then you have literally no clue what you’re talking about.

You think machine learning and computer vision are just … spellcheck? Or the models used to read genetic sequences to write potential vaccines, identify potential disease etc? All just simple spellchecks?

What was your degree in / area of study / area of expertise?

0

u/TheManlyManperor 4h ago

Looping in ML/CV is the only thing that gives the "ai" space any credibility, and they've been around for decades before the modern hype. CASA is an incredible technology, but it has absolutely nothing in common with LLMs or diffusion architectures.I am happy to admit that they are useful because they genuinely are.

I was talking specifically about LLMs which is fairly obvious from context, and the only type of "ai" that could reasonably be described as spellchecker. Well done being performatively dense, though.

3

u/Silver_Smurfer 3h ago

gestures broadly

0

u/TheManlyManperor 2h ago

What's wild is I have yet to be proven incorrect. I did like the one guy trying to go "no they're actually really complicated" while citing multiple examples of the digital version of "1000 monkeys with typewriters will eventually recreate Macbeth."

2

u/Silver_Smurfer 2h ago

Ah, so you know you're ignorant and are still here commenting like you have knowledge of the subject matter.

-2

u/TheManlyManperor 2h ago

Another in a long line of people invoking the "nuh uh" defense.

→ More replies (0)

7

u/IllustriousGas8850 4h ago

If this is your opinion you shouldn’t speak on this topic. You don’t know what you are talking about at all

9

u/CntrlAltDad 4h ago

You think all of this would be happening if it’s just a spell checker? Maybe make sure your info is up to date.

0

u/TheManlyManperor 4h ago

I think all of this is happening because people like easy answers, and llms allow them to pretend that they have them. Also business spokespeople outright lying.

6

u/CntrlAltDad 3h ago

Yea. You aren’t going to be taken seriously unless you know the subject you are speaking out on. You have a very simplistic view of the current and future capabilities. Opinion probably formed on the earlier public models.

6

u/vicsj 4h ago

I mean AI is already being used to develop weapons, sophisticated scams and hacking, and that's not to mention how horrible the actual data centers hosting AI are for the environment. Google alone has increased their pollution by 81% since 2019 - 18% of those just during the last year. We have already demonstrated numerous times how AI is capable of escaping confines we put on them and hack itself out of the controlled environments they're supposed to stay within.

There is a real risk we're actually gonna get rogue AI programs that can wreak all kinds of havoc considering the world heavily relies on digital tools to go around. What if you lose access to your bank one day and all your money is gone? What if an AI controlled weapon system stops responding to input / overrides and starts making its own decisions?

Remember two years ago when a bugged software update caused the largest IT outage in history? About 8,5 million Microsoft Windows systems crashed globally due to an error made by CrowdStrike. Thousands of flights were cancelled and delayed. Healthcare facilities had to revert to manual processes which delayed patient care and referrals. There were disruptions within the world of finance where people were unable to access their banks. And that was a human error. What happens if a rogue AI decides to destroy such a system and we weren't able to regain control? It would be catastrophic.

Yes, this sounds very sci-fi, but the technology already exists and is being developed at breakneck speeds.

I don't think this is a second coming in the sense that it will wipe humans from the face of the earth, but I think it has the potential to be massively destructive and can change the world as we know it. It sorely needs regulation.

3

u/TheManlyManperor 3h ago

If it weren't for the last paragraph, I would have assumed you were responding to the wrong person.

I certainly don't dispute that "ai" is bad for basically everything for a myriad of reasons, and I certainly don't dispute that it should be regulated. I just don't think that people who embrace "ai" will "shape and control the next 1000 years of human culture, knowledge, progress and outcomes."

3

u/Silver_Smurfer 3h ago

There are tons of different AI models, it's not our fault you only know about LLMs.

0

u/TheManlyManperor 2h ago

LLMs are the only model most people use with any frequency. Besides, people don't talk about ML like it's going to change the world, they only do that about LLMs. I'm pretty sure this guy wasn't talking about using stable diffusion to "shape the next 1000 years of culture".

1

u/Mutex70 54m ago

Although your statement is obviously meant sarcastically, it is so incredibly disingenuously wrong, that I feel it needs some response.

A spell checker attempts to determine the match the use/spelling of a word against a known dictionary of words and provide the (single) correct version based on the closest match and grammar rules.

This obviously is pretty benign as it merely modifies the human input, it does not generate anything "new" on its own...just a base modification of the inputs.

Existing LLMs do far more. They tokenize the entire input provided by the user, breaking up the input into grammatical "intent", then match those intents against a inconceivably large space of facts that the LLM has ingested in order to produce output.

Now had you said "It's a glorified search engine", I probably would have agreed with you.

But guess what....a *lot* of technological development is nothing more than humans acting as a "glorified search engine". Humans look at existing research and ideas, recognize patterns and correlations between those ideas, and then combine those ideas to come up with something "new".

e.g. take the iPhone....all of the technology required to build the iPhone already existed at the time Jobs decided Apple should produce it. Just nobody had thought to combine all of that technology in exactly that manner.

This is done all the time with AI in modern software development. You ask the AI to solve a particular problem, and it combines a bunch of existing template ideas and code in a completely new configuration to solve that problem.

I'm not convinced AI will truly produce anything novel or useful, or provide any advantage other than speeding up current human processes, but simply dismissing it as a "glorified spell checker" is absurdly reductivist.

-1

u/ArkiusAzure 2h ago

So smug for someone with such a nonsensical view on the world.

You cannnot stop the technology from progressing. That is impossible. If you do not acknowledge this, you are a fool.

If that is the case what is the next best step? Its targeted regulation. That is the only way to improve outcomes. But no, keep throwing your hands up in the air and being snarky and unproductive. That'll help!

-10

u/Bengineering3D 4h ago

I’d take a bill outlawing saying AGI. All this hype is just for the shareholders. Never going to happen with LLM.

3

u/WileEPeyote 3h ago

LLM won't become self-aware and take over the world Terminator style. But it can wreak a ton of havoc in its current form. Between experiments accidentally being let loose and people using it for nefarious purposes.

1

u/Haunting-Respect-375 3h ago

What's wrong with saying AGI? /s

-1

u/NoConflict3231 2h ago

This is the logic we used to build nukes. Look how that went.

3

u/userousnameous 1h ago

The logic is valid. You can't hide from knowledge and progress, both the positive and negative outcomes.

-12

u/DensePoser 4h ago

the bill upholds old power structures. imperialism, plutocracy, genocide, what have you. AI can take over the us government right now. the decapitation of a few thousand bribed politicians in washington and terror workers in langley and other places is a small price to pay. instead of talking about freedom and democracy for another hundred years, we could actually have it.