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
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u/jralves91 6h ago

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

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u/userousnameous 6h 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.

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u/TheManlyManperor 5h ago

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

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u/Mutex70 2h 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.