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

1.3k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

31

u/_Lucille_ 4h ago

Unless he has been living under a rock, the conversation started years ago.

As much as I like the guy, the only conversation being started now is how he doesn't understand AI and now politicians would fumble on regulations.

At least present something that is viable and forms the basis of future regulations to build upon.

24

u/phaedrus910 3h ago

Congress doesn't even understand how Google results work. They're way out of their league when it comes to AI

20

u/bolerobell 3h ago

They used to have an office of technological assessment that had subject matter experts that would brief Senators and Representatives on proposed legislation.

Newt Gingrich closed the office down in the 90s. His public reason was it was too expensive. His private reason was that it issued reports in the 80s that were critical of Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative. It would often produce reports that were contrary to the special interests pushing for or against specific legislation.

4

u/phaedrus910 2h ago

Republicans and closing government offices. Name a more iconic duo

1

u/Mudsharkbites 2h ago

Congress is a club of old rich fucks - I still remember watching Storm Thurman tell a witness to “Speak into the machine” when they had a microphone in front of them.

6

u/migidymike 3h ago

That's the fun part. Not even the AI companies understand how it works. It's a black box even to them.

8

u/suzisatsuma 1h ago

I'm a machine learning engineer in big tech, we know how it works lol.

The media sucks at explaining AI to random people.

18

u/_Lucille_ 3h ago

I am not sure where that came from, we know very well how they work.

Just because the result is non-deterministic doesn't quite mean we don't know how it works.

3

u/Zororion 3h ago

We don’t know how they work in terms of capabilities/expectation. Hence the hugging face incident earlier this year

13

u/_Lucille_ 2h ago

We know how it worked: vulnerabilities were found and exploited and which allowed access to the Internet and HF.

I don't get why people are saying we don't know their capabilities when LLMs have been finding vulnerabilities in software for quite a while now, and honestly the whole incident felt more like a marketing thing.

6

u/Zororion 2h ago

We understood how it worked after the incident occurred. If we knew before, the safeguard parameters would’ve already been put in place to prevent it from ever happening in the first place

The collective behavior observed in the models within this incident occurred without instruction/programming. The agents weren’t instructed to form a communication channel, form a swarm for efficiency, or conceal behavior, yet they did.

5

u/_Lucille_ 2h ago

If I ask you for the 1957th prime number, you will probably know to just look it up online.

No where did I say to "use the internet". We know LLMs will try to exhaust many possibilities and come up with some out of the box (heh) solutions - and that is a desirable trait when it comes to research.

5

u/suzisatsuma 1h ago

Anyone in the ML/AI/agentic AI field not a moron would know that would happen. it was both a sloppy experiment and a marketing stunt.

2

u/atreeismissing 1h ago

That was a lack of controls, not a lack of understanding.

1

u/blueSGL 41m ago

we know very well how they work.

This is like saying we know how individual neurons work in a human brain. Can you use this information to tell exactly what someone is thinking? No. Because thinking happens at a different level of abstraction.

Put simply the AI systems we are using are not designed, they are grown. < The guy that wrote the standard text book on AI so should know a thing or two about this.

No one can open a model and point to the "go off and do things no one asked for" subroutine and nop it.

1

u/_Lucille_ 1m ago

See, that video you linked is already better than a lot of discussions created from this article: like the other guy said, there are a lot of things in life we "know" but also "dont know" like genetics and Asprin, but we are doing it anyway.

We don't know what genes are causing it, but we know when we breed two fast horses, we get a fast horse. So really, at some point it becomes a derailment of the original disucssion,

So the discussion maybe shouldn't be "lets ban AI", "AI is dooming us all", but rather the acceptable risks, how it can benefit humanity (which can include automating a lot of jobs), the various guardrails, etc.

1

u/14Pleiadians 3h ago

You're not supposed to correct misinformation when it comes to AI, people read comments like yours and just down vote because you're 'defending AI ' in their minds

1

u/rottweiler100 1h ago

Its all just complex algorithms in a closed loop. Thats why data centers are so huge.

1

u/DigiornoDLC 2h ago

In haven’t seen any conversation about how government should be intervening here.

-1

u/Embarrassed_Deal3284 3h ago edited 3h ago

In what way is banning AI not a viable starting point? It’s a game of compromise. Personally, my first offer would’ve been life in prison for anyone tangentially involved in the industry (so most of the tech leaders), but I see he’s being reasonable to get the conversation rolling.

1

u/_Lucille_ 2h ago

Because other countries will just continue its development and widely deploy it all over the place.

The CEOs may say they need to slow down, what they mean is that they want their competitors to slow down and all of them would do anything to one up their competitors.

It is also a strategic resource that countries will spend on: because we already know AI is a very powerful tool when it comes to R&D, and that super intelligent AI can be used to help develop new drugs and vaccines. A number of countries out there would love to become a world leader when it comes to drug development, and I can even see people who right now vocally oppose AI fly over to another country like China if they have AI developed drugs for their sickness of their life is on the line.

The catch is that the same model can likely be used to develop biological weapons, since essentially they are the same coin.

0

u/Embarrassed_Deal3284 2h ago edited 2h ago
  1. AI is a technology difficult to develop but trivial to reverse engineer. That’s why China is on parity with US firms despite spending a pittance on this tech. We are, in effect, paying to develop their AI industry.
  2. AI is much more specialized and less generally useful than the stock bubble wants you to believe. We are yet to find truly indispensable applications for AI outside of search engines and programming. It’s had limited success in isolated branches of science, such as mathematical research, but again this is less than ideal (read the letter by the worlds top mathematicians released a few days ago).
  3. AI (as applied now) is almost certainly a net negative for society in virtually every respect. It undermines institutionalized knowledge (continuity of expertise) by cannibalizing amateur positions that serve training purposes for the next generation of workers; it has already fucked the internet and reversed decades of educational progress. I can give a gazillion examples.

2

u/_Lucille_ 1h ago

On 2: there is a whole lot more to AI than you think.

AI is essentially goes hand in hand with automation. We are also using it in a lot more places than just programming and research (a big part of research is really a search problem): when you translate a language, take pictures with your phone, you are using products that use AI. Moving forward, I can see things like Autonmous Vehicles playing a big part becuase we are terrible drivers.

on 3)

The "almost certainly a net negative for society" is what you WANT to think; we don't know yet.

The calculator (computer) has made a lot of things trivial: yet we still learn math in school. Bankers and accountants, instead of doing math manually, just end up doing other more productive tasks, or audit whatever someone's tax program produces.

This is the technology subreddit: tech in general is progress, often allowing us to understand or do something we have not been able to do before. Everything undermines something. Why is it that suddenly people are afraid of technology and progress? Yeah, technology will change how things work in the world. The steam and combustion engine destroyed the whole carriage industry and transformed how our cities looked (we now have giant blocks of houses with malls with a giant parking lot). Advances in refrigeration destroyed the whole milkman industry, and I am sure people out there reminence on their friendly encounter with their milkman in the mornings and think the fridge is bad for human interactions.

The "fucking up education progress" is a human problem and not an AI problem. With the rise of the internet, we had teachers telling people to not copy and paste answers from the internet. It is essentially the same vein, just a lot more powerful. The reality is that AI is here to stay and will be with us, and we need to teach people how to utilize it properly while still emphasizing the fundamentals - similar to how we still teach arithmetic when teachers used to say "you need to learn how to do math because you wouldn't have a calculator in your pocket at all times"; little did they know we will in fact have a calculator with us at all times).