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/JPuree 21d ago

If you truly believe they never could succeed, it becomes a lot like:

Threatening to jail a child for attempting to build a gun out of popsicle sticks

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u/arcbe 21d ago

Or it's like attempted robbery. These aren't children, they're high profile CEOs.

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u/Working-Permission84 21d ago

Or a better analogy: Threatening to jail a madman for attempting to build a nuclear weapon. He's not going to succeed, but the IED he does manage to cobble together and set off will still kill people.

But you're also underestimating current development if you think super-intelligence is an impossibility. AI is improving very rapidly and has not slowed down since it kicked off a few years ago. And now that the agents can code reasonably well, we're in the recursive improvement phase, where AI is used to make better tools to make the next version of the AI quicker and better, and that AI is used to make even better tools, and so on. It's an exponential curve.

If we get to the point where we can remove the human from the loop entirely and have AI recursively improve itself, we'll go from several months between improved models, to days or even hours. At that point, we would have to simply hope that there's some fundamental limit preventing it from greatly exceeding a human's intelligence - but there's no logical/mathematical/physical basis by which we can actually know that.