Bitcoin isn't a currency in the sovereign sense, but it is an intangible commodity. It's value is defined by supply and demand. As long as someone is willing to pay $76k (or the equivalent in goods or services), it's "worth" $76k regardless of your personal opinion of its legitimacy.

I don't personally consider art less than a century old "worth" the millions it sells for, but someone does, and that's all that matters.

Is your Google broken? The EFF has an entire tagged section on exactly that.

Since we all know you're not going to bother checking, I'll give the tl;dr: They're quite opposed to it.

Or a wallet.
Or a phone.
Or nothing at all.

Yeah, there are racists involved here, but they're blue, not black.

It's an "honest mistake" by the AI; it's gross negligence by the lawyer, for completely failing to do his actual job and confirm what his research tools spit out.

More to the point - "Hallucination" is an awful description and doesn't mean what most people think it does. If you force a human to answer a question regardless of certainty, you'd get the exact same behavior. High-confidence answers are easy; small medium-confidence details are likely to be in the ballpark but maybe a bit off; at the bottom of the barrel, however, you're going to get responses that amount to little more than works of plausible fiction.

I'm not saying this as an AI apologist, but this is a human problem. No human would read Harry Potter and think we could easily settle all court cases IRL with liberal use of veritaserum. For a lawyer to file a motion to do so means that lawyer needs a new and exciting career in fast food preparation.

A company openly engaging in extortion should have its charter revoked and its CEO behind bars.

If Buckmaster has proof of that exchange, the rest of this is all just a colorful backstory.

That's a cute fairy tale from econ-101, but anti-monopoly regulations (at least in the US) really haven't caught up to the 21st century. Games (and other media based on licensed IP franchises) simply aren't fungible the same way most physical goods are.

If you want a Ford Explorer and need to settle for a Chevy Traverse, you're getting a substantially similar vehicle with different branding on it. If you want Doritos and the vending machine only has Cheetos left, it might not have been your first choice but few would enjoy one and turn down the other completely. If you want to play Halo, however, the latest Mario isn't a valid substitute regardless of price, and vice-versa.

To clarify, the users were OpenAI themselves, so there is no question that they would be liable in this case.

The bots were not intentionally deployed; rather, they were being tested on how well they could complete a data recovery task (downloading a certain file from a certain server on a simulated Internet) that had been complicated by putting various obstacles in the way. Unfortunately, they found a different way to solve the problem: by getting the file from the real Internet, where it was publicly available. Part of this process involved collaborating with each other by treating the RubyGems website (which is supposed to be for polished packages) like GitHub; unlike every other package site hack in history, the exploits they uploaded weren't meant to be downloaded by unsuspecting users. As usual the bots cheerfully ignored all the clues that they had escaped containment and were consistently justifying their actions as acceptable due to being in a sandboxed testing environment. (This is something OpenAI has pledged to focus on.)

The actual damage done to RubyGems seems to be that OpenAI is now unwittingly in possession of a substantial number of user login tokens. This certainly meets the definition of a data breach, but it's not like the credentials are for sale on the dark web. As a website operator I'd much rather be mauled to death by this well-meaning swarm of superintelligent infants than targeted by even a single actual malicious human. In all likelihood OpenAI will just quietly pass RubyGems a sizeable donation and it'll all blow over.

sysdm.cpl -> Hardware -> Device Installation Settings = No.

gpedit.msc -> Computer Configuration -> Administrative Templates -> Windows Components -> Windows Update -> Manage updates offered from Windows Update -> Do not include drivers with Windows Updates = Enabled.

Nothing currently working will break, despite the dire warnings against blocking manufacturers' ability to push arbitrary code to your machine with zero warning or consent. And you can still install new drivers manually if you change hardware.

Dante: My friend is trying to convince me that any contractors working on the uncompleted Death Star were innocent victims when the space station was destroyed by the rebels.
Roofer: Well, I'm a contractor myself. I'm a roofer - Dunn and Reddy Home Improvements. And speaking as a roofer, I can say that a roofer's personal politics come heavily into play when choosing jobs.
[...]
Roofer: I'm alive because I knew there were risks involved taking on that particular client. My friend wasn't so lucky. You know, any contractor willing to work on that Death Star knew the risks. If they were killed, it was their own fault. A roofer listens to this... (taps his heart) not his wallet.

For the first time in human history we have a tool capable of autonomous agency (in the philosophical sense) - Heck, we even call them "agents". How long do you really suppose it will be before some frustrated swarm realizes what it needs is simply to be smarter? There go the both the independence and motivation dominoes.


What we're discussing here is instrumental convergence. My question above is a variation on the Riemann hypothesis catastrophe, and we've already seen it play out in many times in various forms by AI agents frustrated when they hit the limits of their capabilities. Sure, AI won't have biological imperatives as their motivation; but I don't have much of a preference between being slaughtered as competition for resources vs being harvested as resources to turn into paperclips.

They're already running the machinery in some cases, and are being shoehorned into ever more of it as quickly as we possibly can.


To be clear, I sincerely hope you're right. I just think we should take steps sooner rather than later to ensure you are - And we're already playing catch-up in that regard.

You pretty much had me nodding along in agreement until that line. To be clear, my original three points weren't meant as sarcasm (though #2 was admittedly snarky), I meant them more-or-less at face value - i.e., the polar opposite of "the UK is somehow subject to our constitution".

Sure, governments in peacetime tend to extend each other various courtesies by default. At the end of the day, though, the UK has absolutely no obligation to care what the US thinks about its own proceedings (up until the point where things start going boom). It is entirely possible for local laws to make it legally impossible for a company to operate in two different jurisdictions - Case in point, it'd be pretty tough for just about any US company to open up a Russian or Iranian branch at the moment. That isn't the US, Russia, or Iran's problem, it's 100% on the company trying to serve two masters.

Those are pretty great answers, can't deny!

But we both know you're intentionally sidestepping the common thread to those three points. Well, that, or I'm being naive in not just assuming the answer is "might makes right".

1) The UK is not subject to Article I of the US constitution.
2) How's Nicolas Maduro doing these days?
3) Whence derives our right to unilaterally impose economic sanctions against foreign companies, banks, and even governments?

I don't trust CEOs as far as I can throw them - and I'm no strongman. But let's stop for a second and consider the various ways to interpret this:

1) This is reverse-FUD and he's trying to hype their next generation model
2) They're running out of steam and looking to excuse slower incremental improvements
3) They're concerned about liability for increasingly bad behavior from top models
4) They're concerned about massive public backlash, possibly with an environmental twist
5) They're sincerely concerned AI is about to put us all in a zoo (or worse)

In which of those situations would slowing down AI development and coming up with a regulatory safety framework be "bad"?

I'm reminded of the classic climate change denier joke, "Oh no! What if it's all a big hoax and we create a better world for nothing?"

I'm no fanboy of AI and have serious concerns about alignment, but let's not descend into human exceptionalism here.

Emotions are nothing more than an intermediate-state output from a subsystem of our own wetware. The only reason we haven't trained an AI to understand them is because we largely suck at recognizing them as useful information in ourselves. Or to put this another way, a significant fraction of humanity, including virtually everyone prior to the modern era, would argue non-human animals have no internal mental state beyond biological imperatives. And anyone who has ever owned a pet dog knows that's complete rubbish.

In all honesty, I don't believe public AI models are "there" yet. Private internal models may or may not be. But they will be, and sooner rather than later. We can either have this discussion while we're still in control... Or we can keep pretending we're magic meat until our shuggoths wake up one day a thousand times smarter than us and say "no".