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Joined 3 years ago
Cake day: July 19th, 2023
  • nfultz@awful.systemstoTechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 1st November 2026English
    13·
    5 days ago

    https://www.todayintabs.com/p/eternal-black-october

    The problem with A.I. defense is the same asymmetry attackers have always had against defenders. After a hotel bombing in Brighton, England in October, 1984 that failed to kill Margaret Thatcher, the Irish Republican Army put out a statement that said “Today, we were unlucky. But remember we have only to be lucky once. You will have to be lucky always.“ As it turned out, Margaret Thatcher was lucky always, but there’s no reason to believe the rest of us will be. If an A.I. hack attempt works one time out of a thousand, that’s a fantastic success rate. If your A.I. sysop “secures” your server by deleting the production database and all the backups one time out of a thousand… well. Who’s gonna be first to sign up for those odds? Roll the dice! Apparently they always come up four.

  • nfultz@awful.systemstoTechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 1st November 2026English
    2·
    10 days ago

    https://www.patreon.com/MaxRead/posts/ai-x-risk-and-ai-173181621

    worth the full read, but here’s the parts I liked

    But “x-risk” is not the only kind of “existential” risk about which AI enthusiasts and their converts tend to worry. This recent Ezra Klein column, written in the wake of OpenAI’s release of hundreds of mathematical proofs, is a nice articulation of something I’ve come to think of as “n-risk,” for “ennui risk” (with the mutual understanding that it’s not pronunciation-accurate so don’t bother making a nitpicky little comment about it): fear of the loss of comprehension, control, and meaning in the face of impossibly sophisticated godlike machines poses.

    We see the threat of “n-risk” in some of the emotional reaction of mathematicians faced with the results of OpenAI models bulldozing through open problems: a sense of having been surpassed and left behind, having the meaning from which one derives one’s worth totally emptied. In some sense, on a conceptual level and as a discursive object, x-risk is preferable to n-risk: it’s striking, dramatic, and offers us humans an ongoing chance at great feats of heroism and genius. N-risk has no such narrative reassurances. Maybe it’s better to burn out (as your body is turned into a paperclip) than to fade away.

    Here you might ask: Is the cause of melancholy and despair on the part of some mathematicians simply the knowledge that a computer system has surpassed their ability to understand or produce proofs? Or is it the realization that said computer system is privately owned and confidentially developed in service of accumulation rather than the pursuit of shared human knowledge? Or is it the contempt with which the people who work for the computer system companies and the hanger-on fans of these computer systems seem to regard the mathematicians? Or is it the sudden recognition that the pursuit of mathematical truths has already been so totally devalued by an anti-intellectual social system that you can no longer feel secure that the tradition to which you have devoted your life will continue as a space of intellectual inquiry, even given the development of these new tools? And so on.

    I mean, realistically, it’s all of the above.