hyeonwho22

That is a very poor regulation. Why enforce wheel lift? What matters is that the chair doesn't tip over - that the center of gravity remains in the center of the four wheels.

Hindawi is the worst. They solicit book chapters, pretend to be peer reviewed, but any peer review is cursory. You can tell because they have published books on homeopathy and on the theory of Chinese traditional medicine (qi).

Is that a serious argument against an AI pause? There are potential scenarios in which regulating AI is challenging, so it isn't worth doing? Why don't we stop regulating nuclear material while we're at it?

In my mind the existential risks make regulation of large training runs worth it. Should distributed training runs become an issue we can figure out a way to inspect them, too.

To respond to the specific htpothetical, if that scenario happens it will presumably be by either a botnet, by a large group of wealthy hobbyists, or by a corporation or a nation state intent on circumventing the pause. Botnets have been dismantled before, and large groups of wealthy hoobyists tend to interested in self preservation (at least more so than individuals). Corporate and state actors defecting on international treaties can be penalized via standard mechanisms.

1. The religious nut doesn't have the knowledge or the skill sets right now, but AI might enable them.

2. Accessibility of information makes a huge difference. Prior to 2020 people rarely stole Kias or catalytic converters. When knowledge of how to do this (and for catalytic converters, knowledge of their resale value) became available (i.e. trending on Tiktok), then thefts became frequent. The only barrier which disappeared from 2019 to 2021 was that the information became very easily accessible.

Your last two questions are not counterarguments, since AIs are already outperforming the median biology student, and obviously removing sites from the internet is not feasible. Easier to stop foundation model development than to censor the internet.

> What is to stop someone from training a model on such data anytime they want?

Present proposals are to limit GPU access and compute for training runs. Data centers are kind of like nuclear enrichment facilities in that they are hard to hide, require large numbers of dual-use components that are possible to regulate (centrifuges vs. GPUs), and they have large power requirements which make them show up on aerial imaging.

The only thing keeping bioweapons from being easy to make is information becoming easily available.

> Essentially you are advocating against information being more efficiently available.

Yes. Some kinds of information should be kept obscure, even if it is theoretically possible for an intelligent individual with access to the world's scientific literature to rediscover them. The really obvious case for this is in regards to the proliferation of WMDs.

For nuclear weapons information is not the barrier to manufacture: we can regulate and track uranium, and enrichment is thought to require industrial scale processes. But the precursors for biological weapons are unregulated and widely available, so we need to gatekeep the relevant skills and knowledge.

I'm sure you will agree with me that if access information on how to make a WMD becomes even a few order of magnitudes as accessible as information on how to steal a Kia or how to steal a catalytic converter, then we will have lost.

My argument is that a truly intelligent AI without safeguards or ethics would make bioweapons accessible to the public, and we would be fucked.

Why not? It has already been shown that AI can be (mis)used to identify good candidates for chemical weapons. [1] Next in the pipeline is obviously some religious nut (who would not otherwise have the capability) using it to design a virus which doesn't set off alarms at the gene synthesis / custom construct companies, and then learning to transfect it.

More banally, state actors can already use open source models to efficiently create misinformation. It took what, 60,000 votes to swing the US election in 2016? Imagine what astroturfing can be done with 100x the labor thanks to LLMs.

[1] dx.doi.org/10.1038/s42256-022-00465-9

You have much more patience than I. After the second email type I deleted my account.

When dating in Korea women would guess my height to 2 cm higher than I am tall. Which was very eerie, because I correct my gait with 1.5 cm high insoles. I would estimate most women there have an accuracy of +/- 1 cm, and the worst were +/- 2.5 cm.

The problem in Korea at least isn't with meeting people (well, for 80% of the population), it is young couples feeling they can't meet the finances required to satisfy social norms, and thus deciding to delay the marriage-kids sequence indefinitely.

Several of my coworkers had been dating for 5+ years, but they were only making $50k annually (early career engineers). The socially expected family-sized condo costs $500k to $1M, and the young couple is expected to buy and furnish it before their wedding.

I got a CR subscription to look at air filters. For good air filtering you really only need a hepa filter ($20) in front of a fan ($20), but CR only analyses the performance of brand name products ($200).

> Are DMCA claims under oath?

Yes. DMCA claims are made under penalty of perjury.

> Being prevented from publishing a video someone else created, say, doesn't inhibit your right to express any opinion (aka freedom of speech).

Indeed, the inhibition of free speech is when you are prevented from publishing a video you created, because someone else falsely claims that they created it. Hence the felony.

The real answer is that the US doesn't want public transit. I visited a rustbelt town several years ago, and a new mall had been sited specifically so that it would not be on the bus network: being accessible to the people who ride the bus was considered a liability for the businesses that would rent space in the mall.

More recently I visited a much nicer midwestern town which is planning an expansion of its bus network amd optimizing traffic lights for better bus flow. There is a new mall on the bus line. The difference is that 95% of bus riders in this second town are upper middle class college students.

Under the Sherman Act, the criminal penalty for conspiracy to monopolize is up to 10 years in prison or $10M for individuals, and up to $100M for a business, OR up to twice the monetary benefits to conspirators OR up to twice the money lost by victims, if those amounts are over $100M.

DMCA claims are made under penalty of perjury. Perjury is usually a felony.