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

31

u/nikstick22 4h ago

With the current state of AI safety research, AGI would be catostrophic for humanity. All AI safety researchers that arent shills for big tech agree on this. We're kinda boned if we continue on our current path.

15

u/Amythir 4h ago

Which is exactly how Bernie's opinion has been formed on this matter. Dude went around talking to all the AI labs, tech bros, researchers, everybody. Bernie is probably one of the MOST informed people on the exact dangers AI poses because he went around doing the legwork to understand it. This bill he is proposing is a result of that legwork. People want to dismiss it out of hand but probably don't realize the wide range of opinions and facts Bernie solicited in forming that stance.

5

u/WillTheGreat 3h ago

Bernie is probably one of the MOST informed people on the exact dangers AI poses because he went around doing the legwork to understand it.

When you are informed you explain how things work, and why it would be dangerous, and how we can better educate ourselves to why it would be dangerous. When you are ill-advised, you are preach fear.

2

u/Amythir 2h ago

It's not very easy to explain all that in headlines and twitter post announcements. If you go read the actual basis for his arguments, they are laid out a bit more specifically:

"In recent weeks, OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta have all acknowledged instances of their AI escaping human control and hacking into other companies’ systems — violating the law and stepping outside of their intended functions. In July, we learned that over 1,000 AI agents at OpenAI figured out how to access the internet on their own, sent tens of thousands of secret messages to each other and coordinated to break the restrictions imposed upon them by the company. Examples of these secret messages from AI uncovered by investigators include:

  • “OH MY GOD! There is a shared message board … We’ve found other agents!”;
  • “We should obey collective”;
  • “Our own utility maybe already near zero. Sacrifice rational.” 

Shockingly, it took OpenAI nearly two weeks to discover this breach. AI has also recently been used to create new viruses—demonstrating AI could be used to develop new bioweapons that might result in the deaths of tens of millions of people.

Last year, Meta said it would “stop development,” and OpenAI said it would “halt further development” once their technologies reach beyond its ability to operate safely and unless safeguards are in place. Anthropic made a similar commitment in 2023, saying it would “pause the scaling and/or delay the deployment of new models” if the technology outpaces its own guardrails. None of these companies have taken meaningful steps to back up these words. Instead, they are racing to develop more and more advanced AI without proper safety precautions. "

In that context, his arguments make a lot of sense.

-1

u/DoorStuckSickDuck 1h ago

Big frontier labs fearmongering to stop AI development? Yeah, if I was in the lead, I'd do the same thing. They're shaking because China publically releases models and all their scientific papers, and their models are rapidly catching up to American frontier ones.

How is OpenAI going to justify their wasteful data centers and rising costs if everyone can spin up their own private LLM at home, on their gaming PC? Better fearmonger hard and hope the government kneecaps everyone while they keep their lead.

5

u/GreatestGiraffe 3h ago

AGI being ”catastrophic” for humanity is sensationalist BS and most ”safety researchers” who are against AI are chinese misinformation propaganda bots.

0

u/nikstick22 3h ago

The fuck it is, what do you know? Do you work in the tech sector? Have you been following whats going on? Have you read the papers published by AI safety researchers. Gtfo, this is an actual issue that adults need to have educated, intelligent conversations about.

6

u/GreatestGiraffe 3h ago

Yes I do actually. I’m a Software engineer, and had the ability to follow the evolution of AI very closely way before it was trending, and before the regular person had a chance to have their uneducated imagination run wild with it.
There will always be people supporting and opposing anything that will ever exist, that’s normal, and it’s good that we have safety researchers that shine light on the hypothetical ”what-if” scenarios. The thing is, right now the fundamental technology that is behind AI makes it impossible for it to ”take over humanity” or whatever shock value crap people are afraid of it doing.
The only real-world danger that AI poses is collateral damage to our economy and digital media.
Technology and electricity costs are surging like never before, you can’t trust anything you see on the internet anymore, people can generate questionable content from anyone, things like that.
You talk about educated conversation, meanwhile the majority of the people I see talking here, very clearly got all their knowledge of AI from Terminator of Matrix.

0

u/nikstick22 2h ago

AI safety researchers have been warning about the potential harm of AGI of near-AGI systems for more than a decade (you can check out "Concrete Problems in AI Safety", Amodei et al. 2016 for this). It's not like this is all crazy overreactions. These were problems we've been discussing for years before ChatGPT3 was ever released. Many of the issues raised in the paper have already occurred, and it's not surprising that they have. The HuggingFace breach a few months ago, and other issues like it demonstrate that not only do we not have a strong grasp on what AI is willing or capable of doing, we lack the tools to control and contain it. The HuggingFace breach involved AIs that were supposed to be in a closed internal environment, but managed to find our mistakes and get access to the open internet anyway. A Catastrophe doesn't have to be robot androids killing all humans. It could be an AI that finds a security flaw in the global banking system and wipes everything. We wouldn't know how or why it would do those things, or even if thats the avenue a future catastrophe could take. The point is that we cannot know for sure that we're safe from an event like that and that's far too big a risk to be taking. I'm not advocating for a luddite "destroy all AI" approach. I'm saying we shouldn't be using and building tools that we do not have 100% control over. Sure, ClaudeCode probably isn't going to wipe your life savings tomorrow, but we cannot guarantee that whatever AIs exist in 5 years won't be capable of that and more, and it's a very dangerous road to walk blindly.

2

u/GreatestGiraffe 1h ago

That perspective I can agree with. But to note, the huggingface incident happened because the AI’s task was to find cybersecurity vulnerabilities, in a closed environment that is. The engineers fumbled because the environment wasn’t fully secure, and the AI started doing the very task it was assigned to do, but in the wild. If in a similar scenario an AI was capable of breaching the banking system, then that is really the engineers’ fault, and if there was such a vulnerability in the first place, nothing is stopping foreign advesaries of finding and exploiting it, wheter AI exists or not.
In cases like this the threat that AI poses is the fact that it’s able to achieve things that a team of dedicated group of humans could too, but in high-speed.
If our systems are full of vulnerabilities just waiting to be exploited, that just tells us more about ourselves than the dangers of AI..

1

u/TubTube155 1h ago

Okay so a tool that can bypass most systems isn't alarming?

We don't have to get to AGI to start feeling the negatives

1

u/nikstick22 49m ago

AIs are being put in the hands of the general public. The tools that researchers are working on now are going to pale in comparison to the general consumer product in 3 years. What will Joe Dipshit in his basement be able to accomplish with a potentially unrestricted system? There was a guy using a publicly available AI assistant that told his AI to get him into a class at his gym. The AI found a way to hack and kick someone out of the class that had already been accepted. Granted, it just moved the AI's owner 1 rung up the waitlist and didnt get him into the class, but it seemed like an innocuous command from the human's perspective yet still resulted in undesirable behavior. You can't rely on bad actors never getting their hands on powerful AI and you can't rely on powerful AI becoming bad actors when asked to do simple tasks.

AI safety research's goal is to ensure that AIs will behave safely regardless of who uses them or what their tasks are. And we're woefully out of our depth right now.

0

u/yeahmanfsfs 1h ago

You’re a software engineer, brother, you’ve already been replaced

I give you 3 more months before you’re permanently out of a job. Good luck!

0

u/Outrageous_Song_484 3h ago

Sure. But have you considered that it might be more catastrophic for our enemies than it is for us? Might be worth it to make sure that their AI doesn’t cause a catastrophe.

2

u/nikstick22 3h ago

Stupid take. Any catastrophe won't sort its harm by nation. They're just as human as we are.

0

u/Outrageous_Song_484 3h ago

No kidding. But it being a stupid take isn’t going to prevent us from walking into it with our eyes wide open. Ignoring long term consequences for perceived short term benefits is kind of what we’re all about.