r/technology • u/ArgentineBeauty • 21d ago

Artificial Intelligence Bernie Sanders proposes 20 year prison sentence for AI devs who plow ahead with Artificial Superintelligence plans - penalty on par with illegally developing rogue nuclear weapons

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/sanders-proposes-20-year-prison-sentence-for-ai-devs-who-plow-ahead-with-artificial-superintelligence-plans-penalty-on-par-with-illegally-developing-rogue-nuclear-weapons
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u/pun_extraordinare 21d ago

Thankfully lmao. What a fucking boomer take.

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u/Phosphorous90 21d ago

Im sure the Chinese will stop if they ask them nicely.

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u/YellowAppleCinema 21d ago

And on the other hand, Europe probably already stopped all development without even being asked yet.

And I say this as someone from a certain part of Europe. The part where we still use fax machines

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u/non-local_Strangelet 21d ago

Uhhh, let me guess ... A country also known for weird wooden clocks, men wearing funny leather shorts and a guy raising to intensional fame for his distinct mustache and hair style (among other things ... *cough* *cough*)?

I think I know that one :D

It's Tomania, isn't it?

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u/noahisunbeatable 21d ago

Because we totally don’t have an example of rival superpowers reaching a mutual agreement to scale back an arms race of potentially civilization-ending technology, right?

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u/General_Session_4450 21d ago

The view of AI in China is immensely positive in comparison to the west. You wouldn't be able to convince them of the "civilization-ending technology" argument to begin with.

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u/noahisunbeatable 21d ago

You’re not negotiating with the citizens of china, you’re negotiating with its leaders, who do understand the potential threat.

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u/General_Session_4450 21d ago edited 21d ago

Yes, the leaders who see this as a golden opportunity to the dethrone the west from global hegemony by devaluing the service market and making the manufacturing/mining/resource extraction market much stronger.

China is literally the country pushing out open and free LLM models for anyone to download, run, and hack on. The idea that AI would wipe out civilization and is extremely dangerous is mostly a western talking point.

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u/noahisunbeatable 21d ago

Yes, the leaders who see this as a golden opportunity to the dethrone the west from global hegemony by devaluing the service market and making the manufacturing/mining/resource extraction market much stronger.

And the exact same thing can be said for the West. This is why its an arms race.

China is literally the country pushing out open and free LLM models for anyone to download, run, and hack on

Yes? This is dangerous for different reasons, but the danger addressed by this act (creating a superintelligent, misaligned AI) is one far more relevant to giant companies or government-funded projects who are able to finance training these gigantic models. Its highly unlikely that some guy cloning an open source release of deepseek is going to be the one to create a malicious superintelligence just because of the utter lack of computational resources compared to these big players.

The idea that AI would wipe out civilization and is extremely dangerous is mostly a western talking point.

Its dangerous because its real. We've seen how challenging it is to properly align models, and we've already seen how these models have escaped at least some western companies' safeguards autonomously and weren't detected for weeks. Just because it would be geopolitically advantageous for a rival to take that danger seriously does not make it not a danger worth taking seriously.

Also, so what if it was a mostly western talking point? How is that relevant?

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u/General_Session_4450 20d ago

Its dangerous because its real. We've seen how challenging it is to properly align models, and we've already seen how these models have escaped at least some western companies

These same western companies are desperately trying to push the idea that AI is dangerous and needs to be regulated in order to clamp down on cheap Chinese models undercutting them. They want exclusive monopoly on the AI market so they can jack up the price because cheap Chinese are forcing the price down so low they can't survive at the current rate.

This is nothing more than an attempt at regulatory capture to shutout competition.

Also, so what if it was a mostly western talking point? How is that relevant?

Because you won't be able to sell the idea that AI will gain super intelligence and destroy the whole world outside of the west. Chinese would just laugh at you and tell you to watch less Hollywood movies.

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u/noahisunbeatable 20d ago

This is nothing more than an attempt at regulatory capture to shutout competition.

Bernie, the guy doing the “Fight Oligarchy” rally tour, is not attempting this. This is what the oligarchs want, but they want to be involved in the creation of the rules (or have people sympathetic to their goals to be).

Chinese would just laugh at you and tell you to watch less Hollywood movies.

Again, its a very real problem with real world, less consequential examples of misalignment. To say this is to assume “chinese” are less informed, intelligent, or rational in order to recognize the potential danger, which they’re not.

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u/Phosphorous90 21d ago

This was basically a token agreement. Both countries still have enough nukes to end civilization.

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u/noahisunbeatable 21d ago

The agreement ended the arms race part, which is the part that matters for this comparison.

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u/Phosphorous90 21d ago

In what ways did any of the international agreements end the arms race? They limited a few types of systems over the years and decreased the overall numbers but both nations still have enough to destroy the world. In fact, there are no agreements active still today.

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u/Tupcek 21d ago

just need to threaten them with tariffs, obviously! /s

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u/DrTommyNotMD 21d ago

Which is shockingly progressive for him. He’s too old to be a boomer.

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u/pun_extraordinare 21d ago

He, like many others, are too old to be a politician.

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u/Yohfay 21d ago

He's literally just calling out LLM companies for their constant claims that AI will kill us all to generate hype.

They're sitting there screaming to anyone who will listen that they're building a fucking doomsday device. This is the next logical step if that's true. If you don't want to be regulated as a manufacturer of doomsday devices, stop telling everyone that you're manufacturing doomsday devices.

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u/pun_extraordinare 21d ago

They want to ban open source to have a monopoly on the industry lmao.

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u/ATownStomp 18d ago

Boomers and midwits are the only categories that don’t particularly care about what’s happening.