Futurology

"Experts agree these AI systems are likely to be developed in the coming decades, with many of them believing they will arrive imminently," the IDAIS statement continues. "Loss of human control or malicious use of these AI systems could lead to catastrophic outcomes for all of humanity."

Boston Dynamics latest demo of its humanoid robot Atlas shows the day when robots can do most unskilled and semi-skilled work is getting closer. At the current rate of development that may be as soon as 2030.

Many people's ideas of the future are shaped by dystopian narratives from sci-fi. For storytelling purposes they always dramatize things to be the worst possible. But they are a poor way of predicting the future.

UBTECH, a Chinese manufacturer's $16,000 humanoid robot is a better indicator of where things are going. The sci-fi dystopian view of the future is that mega-corps will own and control the robots and 99% of humanity will be reduced to serfdom.

All the indications are that things are going in the opposite direction. The more likely scenario is that people will be able to purchase several humanoid robots for the price of an average car. It's not inconceivable that average people will be able to afford robots to grow their own food (if they have some land), maintain their houses, and do additional work for them.

Meta's Open Source Robotics AI

The crash of the AI stock market bubble seems all but inevitable. If/when that happens, it won't end AI itself, just some of the AI companies. Ironically, the recession it will provoke will probably only accelerate the adoption of AI to replace human workers.

Our politics has yet to catch up to the coming realities of AI and employment, but I wonder how much longer that can last.

Measuring the performance of our models on real-world tasks: We’re introducing GDPval, a new evaluation that measures model performance on economically valuable, real-world tasks across 44 occupations.

I feel like this is the future, but with all things AI at the moment, it's probably just a money grab.

"We study subliminal learning, a surprising phenomenon where language models transmit behavioral traits via semantically unrelated data. In our main experiments, a "teacher" model with some trait T (such as liking owls or being misaligned) generates a dataset consisting solely of number sequences. Remarkably, a "student" model trained on this dataset learns T. This occurs even when the data is filtered to remove references to T."

This effect is only observed when an AI model trains one that is nearly identical, so it doesn't work across unrelated models. However, that is enough of a problem. The current stage of AI development is for AI Agents - billions of copies of an original, all trained to be slightly different with specialized skills.

Some people might worry most about the AI going rogue, but I worry far more about people. Say you're the kind of person who might want to end democracy, and institute a fascist state with you at the top of the pile - now you have a new tool to help you. Bonus points if you managed to stop any regulation or oversight that prevents you from carrying out such plans. Remind you of anywhere?

Original Research Paper - Subliminal Learning: Language models transmit behavioral traits via hidden signals in data

Commentary Article - We Just Discovered a Trojan Horse in AI