The other "Killer Robot Arms Race" Elon Musk should worry about 

AI safety in the media drinking game: Take a shot when: - Picture of the terminator - Picture of HAL9000 - Picture of Elon Musk - Picture of Bill Gates - "Doom" - "Evil" - "Killer Robots" - "Robot Uprising" - Author shows their understanding of the subject to be limited - Picture of Mark Zuckerberg - Picture of ones and zeros - Picture with the electronic circuit shaped like a brain - Picture of some random code, probably html - Picture of Eliezer Yudkowsky (finish the bottle) On a serious note: Perhaps some of the signatories are aware of your criticism, but consider this a more achievable step. In fact, one could use this as a test platform into the feasibility of restricting AI research.

For the "Why not just ... ?" series: why not just build a second AI whose function is to keep the "first" (and I quote because ideally you would build/activate them simultaneously) from destroying us?

To be fair - the arms race they want to deal with is the more imminent one. AGI is more dangerous, but far away in the future (let's say somewhere between 5 and 500 years). Simple AI with weapon is "I wouldn't be very surprised if we had those already".

Been kinda binge watching your channel. You seem like the kinda guy to have a drink with. Not for alcohol, but for good conversation and stuff. I'm really enjoying you 😉

Have you read 'Superintelligence' by Nick Bostrom? What is you opinion on the book? (I just finished it)

I really enjoy your videos Robert, keep up the good work.

I've been thinking about this stuff a lot, and you always give new, and interesting view points on this topic. I love it. Subscribed.

We need an AGI to safeguard AGI research.

Oh I'm going to release this in the air, because I don't see anyone bringing it up, yet I'm absolutely positive this is the way to go. The only way to keep an AGI in line, is to let it build another AGI whose goal would be to keep the first one in line. ad infinitum. In fact, and here things start to get perplexing, the reality of the universal AGI is that the thing will copy itself ludicrously fast and evolve, much like multicellular organisms do already. The way I'm seeing it, the goal shouldn't be in designing the "neural networks" but to allow cross-combination of its "genes" from which neural networks would begin to grow on their own. Before you know it, we'd have an ecosystem of superior intelligences fighting each other in lighting-speed debates, manifesting themselves in operative decisions only after a working cluster of the wisest among them has already claimed a victory. Because if there is a thing that universally defines an intelligence, it's a generality in point of view. Having a unique perspective is what makes one opinion unique compared to another. Having a VAST perspective is what constitutes a broad wisdom and lets it comprehend and embrace even what appears as a paradox. It's de facto more universal, more useful, and more intelligent if it can embrace the billions of viewpoints, and all of it in parallel. It consumes the moment of now much more accurately, but the only way to know for sure which opinions are good and which ones are bad -- technically it's an NP problem because it sits in an open, non-deterministic sandbox without a clear goal -- is to employ the principle in which only the most optimal opinions (or reasoning) would and could survive -- but they don't learn from the actual mistakes, but need to survive the battle of WITS. Also the newer agents would have access to newer information, thus quickly becoming responsible for weeding out the "habits" of the prior system. Having trillions of AGI systems that keep each other in line is much like how nature already balances itself. It's never just 1 virus. It's gazillions of them, surviving, evolving, infecting, reproducing. And from their life cycle a new complexity emerges. And so on. Until it fills every nook & cranny of what's perceivable and knowable. Thankfully, viruses have stayed in their own micro niche, and haven't evolved a central intelligence system, but we can't tell if we have organized ourselves against them or thanks to them -- in any case, we are here BECAUSE of them, that's how more complex system could emerge even though the first generation was designed with something else in mind. That would also make us relatively safe from any malicious human involvement. The swarm would always self-correct as it's not centralized, nor locally dependent on human input. It is curious though and constantly in the backdrop of everything, and the only way to contain or expand it is by liberating a new strain. And here are the three most common fallacies I can already hear you screaming about. 1) Before you start thinking about how it sounds completely dystopian, having these systems lurk everywhere, watching you every move, well if you have a rich imagination as that, why don't you think the same about the bacteria, or your own trillions of cells spying on you. Seeing how much the auto-immune diseases are on the rampage, oh they know what you've been doing, or what you haven't been doing, how exactly you feel inside and are talking to you in swarms already. Yet no one is bothered by this, it's almost as if they didn't exist, as if we're just our brain thinking processes alone in the dark, instead of being some sort of an overarching consciousness deeply immersed in this reality with no clear boundaries with the physical bodies. Think again whether it's dystopian or if you'd actually like it more if there were some sort of universal helpers at this scale of things. Just think about it from a medical standpoint for a second, as there is no true privacy in this regard anyway. 2) You'll also likely to start thinking about the absolutely catastrophic errors such system might be capable of, mutations and all, and that's legit -- but the factor you're neglecting is SPEED. The evolution I'm talking about is in the frequencies of tens to hundreds of orders of magnitude above the chemo-biological ones. These systems literally act in an incredibly small chunks, spatially and temporally speaking, that their mistakes cannot accumulate enough to truly spill out into any serious physical threat. In case of a clear macro-dichotomy, i.e. "to kill or not to kill" "to pull a trigger or not" etc. entire philosophical battlefields would ensue before the actual decision could be made, in a blink of an eye, simply because that's more efficient for a system as a whole. The reality of an AGI is not one of a whole unit, but of a swarm of many minute ultraquick intelligence agents, able to inhibit each other and argue endlessly with unique arguments, spread over an impossible-to-grasp landscape of knowledge, cognition, speculation, and determinism. They would consider much more than we could ever hope to contain in our heads or in any of our databases ever, and they wouldn't have to store this information and thus needlessly waste energy and space. They would literally act upon the reality itself, and nearly perfectly. So I'd argue that being ok with a policeman carrying a firearm is much less safe, simply because his or her central nervous system is less capable of an unbiased split-second decision that is typical for a dispersed AGI swarm intelligence of a comparable size. 3) Finally, yes it sounds like a grey goo an awful lot, even though such AGI agents have no need to have individual physical bodies, and would likely be in many forms and shapes, or even just data packets, able to self-organize themselves in separate roles of a much larger system (again, like multicellular organisms do). But hear me out -- for some reason, the fear of grey goo is likely our faulty "unit reasoning" (i.e. personal biases, fears, and cognitive fallacies we all suffer from as individuals), as we always tend to underestimate the actual reality when it comes to things like grey goo, much like we cannot intuitively grasp the concept of exponential growth. The swarm's decision-making quality has to be asymptotic as a consequence of its growth, as there are obvious natural limits to this "vastness of perspective," so there is also an implied maximum population after which the gains in processing power (or general perception) would be so diminished, the reproduction would simply cease being economical. Besides, if we think about the grey goo from a statistical viewpoint, in the line of thought similar to Boltzmann Brain, there is a significant chance that this Universe has already given rise to grey goo in some form, and yet we don't see any evidence for it anywhere --- Unless we already do, of course, in the form of black holes, dark matter, dark energy, or life itself(!). But then, it's hardly what we imagined it to be like and there's nothing we can do anyway. Just think about it, aren't we already grey goo? And if you think we're contained on this planet, well, think again. *tl;dr* If you skipped here, I'm sorry but this post wasn't meant for you. I couldn't compress it any more.

Thank you for making this channel Rob!

That actually IS my opinion on nukes. Mutually assured destruction is the only way to stop either guarenteed deployment or tyranny through exclusive access to nukes.

Sounds like the answer to the Fermi paradox.

Restricting GAI to a small group or organizations is the worst idea. If it is extremely distributed, that would that no organization is far ahead of the competition, and if someone would make a GAI first, the competition is almost at the same level and would still be stronger then this single GAI. It is not like a GAI would just pop out of existence. The difference to nuclear weapons, is that fighting against an abuser would destroy all. But if someone could make an GAI, then defending against it would be without much destruction.

Love your channel, keep it up!

Don't worry there will be a group of hackers building one that has no safe guards. :) let's hope the first AGI will be nice.....

Yeah, the problem with comparing AI to nukes is: - AI is hard to develop, but anyone with a functioning computer can try and make an AI, or replicate published work. - Nuclear weapons WERE hard to develop, but look around and you find that the information on how to do so is not so hard to come by. However. Just because you know HOW to make a nuclear bomb, doesn't mean you can; Because the processes involved are very difficult to do without huge amounts of resources, access to materials and equipment that not just anyone can buy without restriction, and very hard to construct and test without pretty much the whole world knowing you're doing it. Assuming I knew how, I could make an AGI in my bedroom with, what at this point is a few hundred dollars in equipment. Assuming I knew how, I'd need a massive facility, probably access to a functioning nuclear reactor, billions of dollars and thousands of people, as well as the right kind of connections to get the raw materials involved to make a nuclear bomb. (as it happens my country is one of the few on the planet with major uranium supplies, but that's neither here nor there, and it's a long road from some uranium to a functioning bomb) So... Yeah. Completely different risk profile. Assuming AI is actually as dangerous as that. To put it slightly differently, nearly anyone, given the right knowledge, can make gunpowder and several forms of other explosives in their kitchen using materials that can be bought from supermarkets, hardware stores and so on. This is much closer to the level of accessibility we're talking about; The ingredients are easily available, the tools required are cheap. It's only knowledge and having no desire to actually do it that keeps most people from making explosives at home. But... Your average explosive, while dangerous, is hardly nuclear weapons levels of dangerous. The kind of bomb you can make using easily available materials would basically require that you fill an entire truck with the stuff (and believe me, people are going to notice if you buy the raw materials you need in that quantity) to do any appreciable damage... And aside from the 'terror' part of 'terrorist', you could probably only hope to kill a few hundred people with that, realistically. A nuke, on the level that nations currently have could wipe out a huge area and kill millions of people easily. So, on the assumption that AGI's are really this prone to being dangerous, you're now in the position where anyone can make one with few resources (conventional explosives) yet the risks are such that it could ruin the lives of millions of people, if not wipe out our whole species (or even every living thing on the planet or the universe, depending on HOW badly things go wrong) Yeah... Kinda... Problematic.

I know that this doesn't have to do with the topic of this video, but I thought of something and I'm not sure if this would be a solution to the stop button problem. All I know is from your videos so I'm going to assume that there is something wrong with this, if you can find it I'd appreciate it. Why not have a system where the stop button being pressed has no reward, but it is possible to issue a command (just like getting a cup of tea) for the robot to press the stop button. With this system I figured that the robot might try to force the human to give it easy tasks with high rewards, so then maybe the rewards aren't positive rewards, but instead of negative score for not completing it. If this were the case then the robot would force the human *not* to issue any tasks, then you would have to give a small reward for a task being completed (one that it preset for all tasks so the AGI can't interfere with it). This way the robot wants to receive tasks and it can't do that if the stop button is pressed, but if the stop button task penalty is greater than the potential reward from from future tasks then the AGI will want to complete the task. did this make sense? if not please ask questions, because this seems like a good solution, but I doubt that I could come up with a real solution.

4:58 "Nukes are very dangerous. So we need to empower as many people as possible to have them" Thanks for saying that loud!! I've been finding Musk's statement ridiculous for that very reason and I just can't understand why not more people are pointing it out.

Make GI safe by making the human motivation safe one of the possibilities is to prohibit patents.

This aged well.

Honestly at this point I would be perfectly content to halt all AI research until we advance further in other areas. Even a 1% chance of *global extinction within a year* is a bit too much for me.

If there was a way to make an actual clear skull shot glass with eyes that lit up red (without seeing the wires and LEDs) they would sell.

lol clever fallout boy reference

How quickly do you think an unsafe AGI would scale to start doing bad things? Also, how many mistakes do you think we have to make for an AGI to get completely out of control? Is it just a matter of 1. design a very powerful and general purpose AI and 2. click the start button? What else needs to happen?

that second school of thought is absolutely terrifying and horrible and I'm shocked you would even put it forward

4:58 That sounds based as hell. NUKES FOR EVERYBODY

Why would anyone want to rush AGI development? The advantage and fame don't really outweigh the impending extinction of humanity.

Isn't this a prisoner's dilemma? Except that the reward for coming first might just turn out to be a punishment.

rest of the world : noo, you can't just keep developing Killer bots US, CHINA, RUSSIA : haha, VETO right goes brrrr

2:20 First heard that as "... the team that gets there first, is probably going to be *Russian*, cutting corners and ignoring safety concerns". That statement would also make sense.

Name of the song at the end?

There's another problem: to control the world, you don't need artificial general intelligence. You just need a narrow AI with proper infrastructure that's good enough to help any person controlling it to control the world. And it's much easier to control that kind of AI.

Elon's solution to bad guys with nukes is good guys with nukes

with nukes that might actually work, due to MAD.

So you're saying that the incentives are set up for us to lose. Well I guess that's it then.

Yeah, democratization sounds like open source. As powerful a tool as that's been in the development of the web and other tools, it's also led to some pretty crappy code. That's the last thing we need with AI research.

Legalise recreational nukes!

For Elon Musk, "democratisation" means the opposite of what normal people think. You think it means "AI in the hands of the people", for him it means "AI in the hands of the shareholders".

what if, once agi has been invented, it turns out that its quite cheap (unlike nuclear) for anyone to recreate it in their back yards?

To ensure AI safety, "...it's going to take a lot of smart people a lot of patience, diligence, and time." In other words, ensuring future AI safety is going to take hindsight and surviving AI disaster(s). No matter how smart and diligent individual programmers might be over time, the predictability of risk is limited by the speed of social comprehension and democratic agreement. Even small teams of smart programmers are forced to rely on track-records and faith rather than proof to release software. It takes more expertise and effort to analyze code than it does to write it. AI will simply produce increasingly exciting results for sponsors while the effort to police determinism will simply be cut from budgets. Same as regular human-generated blobware.

I wonder why on earth would anybody want to program AI since those same people can't produce a piece of a simple software without at least 6 patches and more? i really hope that it's physicaly impossible to produce an AI on Terminator level for our own good.

AGI Perpetual Motion Machine

I too squint when drinking water

Big tech companies: AI is power and we are good people and we want everyone to be empowered. Democratize AI! Big tech companies: AI is power and only good people should have it. Big tech companies: AI is power and it will be too dangerous if bad people have it. Big tech companies: AI is power and only WE (the good people) should have it.

any videos is good, longer videos is better tbh

Um... No. This is faulty reasoning. Nukes don't stop nukes, but if an AI (or the AI elite) goes bonkers it's probably a good idea to have other AI in a position to stop it.

He`s adjusting to our degrading attention spans lmao

Just an observation... Wars are not won by "good people". They're won by people that are good at winning wars--and sometimes sheer luck...

The obvious solution is to create a superhuman AGI with the goal of policing AI research 😉... I'll show myself out 😞

I agree that there is more than one AGI race in play. It reminds me of the old debate about "grey goo" (accidental runaway self-replication) vs. "khaki goo" (deliberate large-scale self-replication as a weapon).

Mandate safety requirements when dolling out that sweet grant money.

Unless you impose some sort of Orwellian control on technology, there isn't much you can do to police the development of AGI. It's not like nuclear weapons that require a special substance to be made.

Is the song in the background an acoustic cover of "This ain't a scene, it's an arms race"?

Is anyone else faintly reminded of Jreg watching this dude?

I'd suggest a CERN type deal, non privatised and multi governmental.

"but I don't think AGI needs a gun to be dangerous" I agree, oh boy I so thoroughly agree

I think democratizing it in the sense of collectivization rather than proliferation is a good goal. Collectivization, whilst allowing marginally less autonomy and freedom, still creates accountability and still responds to the will of the people. Creating a bureaucracy that can't be bought (that may require a change to our political-economic system) and who's members are subject to immediate recall (this definitely requires a change to our political-economic system) that does the more dangerous and/or authoritarian aspects of keeping AI under control seems preferable to either corporatization (which ignores human need) or proliferation (which ignores safety).

You are a freakin' champion! Your videos are insightful and thought provoking. Cheers!

2:20 I thought he said "Russian" the first time :p

Democratizing AGI sounds like democratizing nuclear weapons.

Pretty ironic for a billionaire oligarch to talk about "democratization and sharing of power"

I'm not a scientist or any kind of engineer but your content is very easy to comprehend, I'm glad you have patrons to support your channel as I just recently discovered this channel and really enjoy it.

1:01 Loving this positivity😀👍😀!

If all the AGI researchers banded together in an open program where everyone would get the final results at the same time and everyone would be concentrated on safety then you could say that democratization of the technology was the better route. This is one area that cooperation rather than competition may be the best bet.

Ideally "democratization of AI research" would not lead to thousands of competing parties, but lead to an absence of competition that would promote an environment where focusing on safety is no longer the opposite of focusing on progress.

We are all fucked

I think in a good timeline AGI is in democratic hands and all of the people working on it are not competing at all. If they share their work and the reward with each other and everyone then there is no incentive to rush for a competitive edge because it is no competition. To achieve that we simply need to restructure human society across the world. How hard could it be?

generally you'd think the experts will think of everything because they are the _experts_ but then there is the challenger disaster where the reason as an incredibly dumb rookie mistake of not converting from metric units to American units but rather keeping the value as is.

I would appreciate a video about neuralink.

Robert, if you have time can you do a brief piece on IBMs TrueNorth please...

Good video Rob!

Stop using this outro. Unless you want your entire channel copyright striked all at once in 6 months

I'm glad w RU-vid is here for this kind of video. This was the point of the internet. I don't have any reservations about the normies I'm just glad smart people get a corner so I get a chance to hear what the smart people think.

i think a tripple core ai could solve the problem. one core cares about the ai's preset goal and is hard programed with "instincts" (sirvival, conservation of energy, doing the minimum of what is required, social interaction), one core is the moderator, with the goal of morality, human freedom, integration and following preset limits. the third core is a self observing core with an explorator and random noise generator. it is motivated by the instinct and goal core and is moderated by the moral and integration core. it has access to both cores output. the goal/ instinct core and moderator core can access the actualizer cores results. the goal core is hard limited by the moderator core. the moderator is softly influenced by the instincts. the result is an ai with a conciousness and subconciousness. the subconciousness is split into an "it" (goal and instincts) and a "super-ego" (morals and rules). both develop mostly seperately. the actualizer/explorer is the ego. it acts upon the directives of both the super-ego and the it to fullfill the task at hand. it should have an outline of the task, but no hard coded information or algorythm about the task. the continous development of the moderator creates adaptable boundaries for the otherwise rampant motivator. the actualizer is there to find solutions to the diverging comands without breaking them and to find methods to better folow both. it also alows for the insertion of secondary soft goals and is the interactive terminal.

Interestingly, Musk also bought a few corps that actually do Killer Robots... don't know if the guy screaming SKYNET!!!1eleven is the best one to conduct that research...

Collorary question: how do you actually restrict AI research? With nukes you need quite large and sophisticated facilities to refine the raw elements, but AI can be developed by anyone with enough computing power, something that will only become more achievable as time goes on.

Any company that cuts corners on safety protocols for any type of AI system should be imprisoned for life no exceptions.

No subject consumes more of my thought than this, and it's one that fills me its equal parts wonder and terror.

The other robot arms race that might kill us: { reward == #human_arms.posessed }

1:45 - 2:26 Once again, you perfectly put into words one of my biggest concern. This and the fact that, once developed, such an AI will be kept a secret initially, for obvious reasons...

love your videos, not least because of you sense of humor, thanks!

Tell me, What do you think it will happen first, Skynet, Glados, The matrix, or I robot?

Ending is great. Video is great. Channel is great. Every video I watch is so well thought out and intelligent.

We love your videos Robert! Would love to see some longer ones! 👍🤖

I like the way you think

I would love to meet you but i've never been in the UK. If you are in Brussels, you are always welcome at my house.

I have a lot of respect for Elon, but he is out of his wheel house when talking about AI. He's a brilliant engineer, not an AI researcher, but the media paints him as all wise and knowing.

I didnt see this kind of argument here so im posting it. Its an ethical approach. obviously the more people working together on it the better. but people WILL do things for their own benefit, whether they are trying to kill someone or donating money to charity. Its all selfish. in other words, unless youre trying to IMPOSE(by force) your idea that you can only work on it if youre part of the "United Research Group", there will always be independent developers. and thats ok. thats ok because, this "Official Group" is also just a group of humans, independent of each other too. Someone might build an AGI that will kill everyone, but if you think we should force people so that only ONE GROUP can do that, youre saying THEY have the right to risk everyone, and no one else. (who died and gave them this right above everyone else?) you cannot say that. because we are all humans, and treating some different than others like that is at least tyranny. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Now the question becomes, DO YOU AGREE WITH TYRANNY?

4:58 r e c r e a t i o n a l n u k e s

"Nukes are incredible dangerous so we need to empower as many people as possible to have them" AncapSmiley.png

AI SAFETY? That would be like trying to stop a semi by standing in front of it.

It's interesting. We don't allow companies to build and store nuclear weapons. But we do allow them to do GAI research.

for me the very dangerous thing is the risk of I.A monopoly potentially owned by GAFA companies

and btw, the T-1000 is much more advanced conceptually than the mechanical terminator, dunno how to describe the t-1000, an amorph holistic material, maybe an intelligent "Holon"

I hope and trust that the enemies of Freedom shall invest vast efforts into lining up vast rows of clue-free #KillerRobots like robotic dominoes waiting for just one tap.

This is interesting but so much less interesting than the already existing boston dynamic kill bots that I'm "eh"

with stable diffusion being open source now - I think maybe you want to redo this vide, Robert

this might be my a level in economics talking, but i think the most effective way to prevent this arms race from creating an AGI with no concern for safety, is for the government to take away the perverse incentive to be the 1st to create an AGI as opposed to trying to ban or regulate it. Basically i'm saying change the cost/benefit balance such that no one wants to simply be the 1st to make an AGI (but rather perhaps the 1st the make a SAFE AGI). There are a number of ways to do this (I've thought of a couple) and not being an economist nor a politician i can't speak for the real world efficacy of any of them but here goes: -You could offer a lot of money to those who create an AGI safely such that the extra effort ends up getting you a bigger total reward than the benefits of being the 1st to create an AGI alone - You could heavily regulate the use of AGI so that even if you've got a fully functional one, you can't do much with it due to government restrictions unless it's demonstrably safe I'd be interested to hear anyone's ideas about other ways to achieve this end and perhaps some feedback on mine.

Why not just accept our robot overlords?

Dude Subbed, BAN TACTICAL AI STAMP COLLECTORS.