Why? There are numerous technologies we have ignored or abandoned for numerous reasons. Many of the benefits of AI is "requires less humans", but in an age where we question what work people could possibly do in the future, human labor isn't that hard to find.
If the amish can do what they do for whack religious reasons, people could manage it with ai for cultural and social reasons. And I never saw an amish person starve to death. And that is if people don't get pissed enough to start burning stuff down and instead try to be peaceful hippie homesteader types.
But notably the amish don't preclude the rest of us from existing. Some subset of humans could turn their attention away from AI but it would presumably still exist and continue to be developed.
I can't think of any economically beneficial technologies that we've collectively ignored. If you manage to come up with a counterexample then that's an opportunity to make some money for yourself. It's a fundamentally unstable state given our economic system.
Supersonic passenger aircraft were operated profitably and no longer exist.
There’s levels of R&D required for many technologies where the question goes beyond could this be profitable to what are the risk vs reward that this specific project will succeed.
Until the oil shocks, and until “normal” planes became faster.
I happen to know a couple older and very wealthy people, and they say that even though Concorde was a lot of fun when it was a novelty, they now prefer to have a couple more hours flight and enjoy a 777 premium cabin rather than the cramped Concorde interior.
Anyway, the proof is in the pudding: if no one but national carriers ever bought and operated Concorde or Tu-144 at scale, it's not because of some Amish-like sentiment in the flight industry, but simply because that didn't make sense money-wise.
> Supersonic passenger aircraft were operated profitably
Were they? IIRC joint project by British and French national airlines, they expected to sell loads, hardly anyone wanted to buy the planes, the two airlines kept them flying out of government embarassment.
Sure, the regulation that guarded against externalizing certain costs might well have been the only thing precluding profitability. Importantly it wasn't some shared cultural value leading to voluntarily leaving money on the table. Rather the regulator imposed it.
We are able to effectively regulate things like the operation of massive aircraft, eugenics, the dumping of toxic waste, or the refinement of nuclear material. But there are also plenty of things that we can't effectively regulate for purely practical reasons.
Were they? Did Concorde provide return on investment? When was the break-even expected? Sure, if we look at it as R&D subsidized by governments of UK and France, then yet, it was profitable.
In particular, the problem with it was that it could not get to supersonic speeds over urban areas, which significantly limited routes where it made sense, and the range was not good enough to cover longer distances.
But after accounting for maintenance & etc were they more profitable than sinking the equivalent amount of money into something else, such as slower aircraft? Notably there are currently efforts to develop new supersonic passenger liners.
And even if we did manage to limit/cull hardware development, what would keep people from continuing to find ever more efficient models runnable on contemporary hardware?
Bleeding edge models are putting the desk-job competencies of multiple professional fields into something with as many parameters as a single large rodent has synapses.
Because "we" embodies a hugely diverse set of beings with different wants, needs, goals, and priorities. Not to mention different morality and ethics.
So sure, let's say you get 95% of the world to not use or work on LLMs. 5% is still enough to build something that brings forth the End Times.
That's the old checklist trope of "Your idea won't work because: [x] it requires that everyone in the world agrees to do something, all at the same time."
> There are numerous technologies we have ignored or abandoned for numerous reasons.
Are there? Nukes are a thing. Chemical weapons are a thing. Cluster bombs are a thing. Biological weapons are a thing. What is not a thing that shouldn't be? We say certain things should not be a thing, but then behind the scenes we made them a thing anyway.
On chemical weapons, most large state actors have got rid of them. Not because of any moral reasons, though, but simply because they don't actually work all that well in modern conventional warfare. This is then framed as an ethical issue, but you only need to look at where the same countries stand on e.g. landmines to realize how much bullshit it all is.
Conversely, where you do still see chemical weapons used, it's usually asymmetric conflicts where "just gas the rebels" actually works much of the time and is much cheaper than other options. Big guys can afford the other options though, someone like Assad, not so much.
I'm baffled that people expressing your opinion don't understand what they're advocating for. Current generation smartphones are able to run AI models, people have managed to run very large models (even if slowly) via streaming from disk. The math for the underlying implementation is relatively trivial.
Abandoning this technology means a cult-like extremist shift in culture against computers, or a global surveillance state of unprecedented scale and invasiveness. Not even getting into how much it requires us to give up on science, given the shared computational needs.
Watch, very soon this is going to politically divide. They’re sowing the seeds right now with “antiai” campaigns.
The right will for a change be for it but will be able to be talked into regulation because you know “small government” and all only when convenient. The left will bitch and moan about fairness and copyright and automation and UBI, they’ll be the doomers and worldwar chicken littles. The Uniparty will be for it, but only against the public having anything good.
What will be funny to me is that normal tech people outside the frontier model companies are about to find themselves without a home on this topic.
You realize 1) There were no personal threats, you're being deceptive here and 2) Bushmaster threatened Bubeck (of OpenAI) first? Bushmaster redacted 90% of their conversation to stir up as much FUD as possible, but you can review Bubeck's later statements to fill in what actually happened.
From the statement:
I said that if OpenAI released its result in the way proposed I would go public with what happened.
Translation: If you release this result, I will go public with my concerns that you plagiarized my work.
The reply was, “Why would you ruin your career?” I replied that I am an academic, and asked why he thought going public would ruin my career.
Translation: Typically, making unfounded accusations of plagiarism will ruin your career. Why would you do that to yourself?
Bushmaster then redacts 90% of what Bubeck says next (because it would detract from the narrative he's trying to portray) and only includes the most inflammatory line.
The reply was, “If you don’t want me to be nice, then I don’t have to be nice.”
Translation: You were the closest person to solving the problem. Even though we solved it and you didn't, we offered you to give you the Millennium prize and put your name on the paper, so long as you remove your coauthor (who works at Anthropic). We offered you this because we're being nice. Since you don't want to be nice (by accusing us of doing things we did not do), we're not going to be nice (and offer you the prize/co-authorship of the paper).
When you fill in the context, it's clear: 1) there is no personal threat like you claim and 2) this is hardly a threat, on a scale of threats you can make, this scores a 1.5 out of 10.
For context: Bushmaster is pissed at OpenAI because they sniped a problem he was toiling on for the past year, so during this conversation I believe emotions are quite heated.
I don't claim this interpretation is 100% accurate, but if you disagree, do reply with a better one yourself.
> Translation: You were the closest person to solving the problem. Even though we solved it and you didn't, we offered you to give you the Millennium prize and put your name on the paper, so long as you remove your coauthor (who works at Anthropic). We offered you this because we're being nice.
So nice of them to give an ultimatum where the paper will be published in an academically dishonest way no matter what you choose.
I actually misworded this. OpenAI did not ask to remove a co-author, they only invited Buckmaster as a coauthor and not Alpöge. Having Alpöge (an Anthropic employee) on an OpenAI paper is bad optics, so they only wanted Buckmaster.
And how is it bad optics? Seems to me it would be a good look, where OpenAI would appear magnanimous and interested in fairness rather than craven and sociopathic. Which is how they look now, regardless of your attempts to distract from this.
We don't need every country to pace the frontier, just a certain few. And yes, I believe it's possible and the prior art is nuclear non-proliferation. Non-proliferation wasn't perfect, of course, but it was good enough (so far) to pull back from the brink of extinction.
Prove it. Your systems hack and/or abuse other systems and you can't seem to even observe it happening much less do anything about it. Why should we believe your claims when they depend on an ability you don't actually have?
Sure. These are the other sides of the coin. I've been medicated for years and unmedicated for years. Currently I'm in a ~10yr unmedicated stretch. Do I have frustrating moments, embarrassing easily avoidable failures, and so on? Yes. Do I sometimes lose many hours to a task and forget to eat? Yes. But I'm also kinder, more playful, and more present with my loved ones when I am unmedicated.
If the downsides get too bad and things start to fall apart then I will medicate again. Until then, no way I'm making that tradeoff.
Indeed some people think they want a machine guessing at your intentions and acting upon that guess. Those people
Are wrong in at least 2 directions: that it is what they want, and their implicit assumption that it could possibly be safe.
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