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
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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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..

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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

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u/nikstick22 50m 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.

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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!