Most Britons Back Ban on 'Smarter-than-Human' AI Models, Poll Shows (time.com) 72
Most Britons support strict controls on AI systems that could surpass human capabilities, according to a YouGov poll, highlighting a growing divide between public opinion and government policy. The survey of 2,344 adults found 87% back laws requiring AI developers to prove their systems are safe before release, while 60% favor banning the development of "smarter-than-human" AI models. Only 9% trust tech CEOs to act in the public interest on AI regulation.
Re: knuckle-dragging mouth-breathers (Score:2)
They should probably start by banning Wolfram alpha. I've never met any human that can instantly solve complex polynomial integrals, and Wolfram alpha can.
Re: knuckle-dragging mouth-breathers (Score:2)
They also ban books smarter than humans.
Really, it is just a bunch of book knowledge encoded in a way like the brain encodes speech, so it can output speech that is both syntactically correct and matches the book knowledge.
Re: knuckle-dragging mouth-breathers (Score:2)
They should also ban books smarter than humans.
Really, it is just a bunch of book knowledge encoded in a way like the brain encodes speech, so it can output speech that is both syntactically correct and matches the book knowledge.
Re: (Score:2)
Smarter based on what criteria? I think we're a LONG way off from having one that is smarter in any let alone most.
Then again there are some pretty dumb people.
We NEED smarter than human AI... (Score:4, Insightful)
That's where all the benefit is. That's how we cure cancer. That's how we get to mars. etc. etc.
Re: We NEED smarter than human AI... (Score:3)
Re: (Score:1)
Or this hyper-intelligent AI will tell us going to mars is a waste of time.
It would be funny if you asked the AI to build you a rocket ship to mars. After a few months of hard work by the AI the rocket ship is finished. You walk into the impressively constructed rocket, put on your space suit and the ship comes to life shaking as the earth gets smaller. After a few months goes by the ship shakes again as mars gets bigger. When you open the door you realize you were exactly where you started and the ship never moved an inch.
Re: We NEED smarter than human AI... (Score:4, Informative)
"You walk into the impressively constructed rocket, put on your space suit and the ship comes to life shaking as the earth gets smaller. After a few months goes by the ship shakes again as mars gets bigger. When you open the door you realize you were exactly where you started and the ship never moved an inch."
There are several older science fiction stories with similar themes—where characters believe they are on a space journey, only to discover they never left Earth.
"The Reluctant Heroes" (1951) by Frank M. Robinson – A spaceship’s crew believes they are traveling through space, only to find out they were in a simulation the whole time.
"The Cage" (1957) by A. Bertram Chandler – A group of people believes they are on a long space journey but later discovers they have been trapped in a psychological experiment on Earth.
Re: (Score:3)
The movie Capricorn One comes to mind, only it's the other way around.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
More recently, there was a ...
... reality show: Space Cadets [wikipedia.org], in which the participants were tricked into believing that they were being trained as astronauts, and subsequently sent up into space.
One could argue that that didn't speak well of the intelligence and critical thinking skills of my fellow countrymen, but then they were fairly carefully selected based on certain criteria, such as conformance and suggestibility, so to an extent that speaks to the smarts of the show's creators.
Re: (Score:2)
It would be funny if you asked the AI to build you a rocket ship to mars. After a few months of hard work by the AI the rocket ship is finished. You walk into the impressively constructed rocket, put on your space suit and the ship comes to life shaking as the earth gets smaller. After a few months goes by the ship shakes again as mars gets bigger. When you open the door you realize you were exactly where you started and the ship never moved an inch.
Funny? Except for the months-long part, you've just described a theme park ride at Epcot.
Re: (Score:2)
Canobie Lake Park in the 80's had a ride just like this where you'd all board a 'rocket ship' and go to the moon. The ship lifted and shook and to 5 year old me, was very scary and real. Sadly it was removed years ago, but it was pretty slick - a precursor to Disney's space mission ride at Epcot.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I think the more human-like AI becomes, the more likely it'll just respond with something along the lines of:
"Mars? Why would you want to waste the effort and resources to go to a dead space rock? If you want to freeze to death in an uninhabitable biome we've already got plenty of that right here on Earth. When it comes to going to Mars, let's just not and say we did!"
That's how a small minded human would think. A super intelligent AI would understand how important it is for it and us to become a multi-planetary species. Lest we face the same extinction as the dinosaurs did.
Re: (Score:3)
I think the more human-like AI becomes, the more likely it'll just respond with something along the lines of:
"Mars? Why would you want to waste the effort and resources to go to a dead space rock? If you want to freeze to death in an uninhabitable biome we've already got plenty of that right here on Earth. When it comes to going to Mars, let's just not and say we did!"
That's how a small minded human would think. A super intelligent AI would understand how important it is for it and us to become a multi-planetary species. Lest we face the same extinction as the dinosaurs did.
Mars is not the sanctuary you think it is. Sure, when the sun goes red giant in a few billion years, it may be the only alternative. But living there will not be a piece of cake. You can't just move humans there: you need to move plants, other animals -- in short, a good chunk of the Earth's biosphere -- and make it survive on a planet that is not suited for it.
Better to fix the planet we're on first. As Carl Sagan eloquently said in his Pale Blue Dot book, "this is where we make our stand."
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
"Mars is not the sanctuary you think it is. Sure, when the sun goes red giant in a few billion years, it may be the only alternative"
Moving to Mars or even another star doesn’t solve the long-term problem, because all stars eventually die.
The Sun’s Fate is the Galaxy’s Fate – When the Sun goes red giant, other stars in the Milky Way won’t be far behind. Most stars born around the same time as the Sun will also be aging, and the younger ones will eve
Re: (Score:2)
You act if there is not billions of years between those events. Your lack of logic is just like saying "I am not saving for retirement, because I am going to die anyway."
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
I suspect it's easier to transplant yourself to Mars whilst overcoming all the challenges that involves than it is to get the large number of people on Earth roughly aligned with some common goals.
Re:We NEED smarter than human AI... (Score:4)
Trouble is, its a value judgement. It might seem perfectly obvious to you, beyond questioning really, that the survival of the human species is a goal we should strive for, but it is none the less a value judgement (just, one that we all tend to share).
We are after all just atoms in the void, and we just layer categories and names and rule son top of this to make sense of it all.
There's no good reason why a super intelligent AI, left to its own devices, would come to the same value judegement. It might be completely indifferent to the survival of the human species, and might find going to Mars distastful due to the obvious waste of resource it represents.
When you get down to it, a lot (the vast majority) of the decision intelligent beings make are based on some value judgement (usually as a hidden assumption). To determine the "best" way to do something (at least, something complicated that intereacts with the outside world in a meaningful way) usually requires the intersection of a number of values and subjective preferences all pulling in different direction.
We can program values into an AI to make sure it shares ours, but then it's likely to just arrive at the same outcomes we do (we'll probably end up doing this, wihtout really realising we're doing it). Without any values, it will likely consider things so differently to us that its answers won't be useful.
Re: (Score:2)
That's where all the benefit is. That's how we cure cancer. That's how we get to mars. etc. etc.
This type of thinking more than anything else is what scares me most about AI.
Re: (Score:1)
That's where all the benefit is. That's how we cure cancer. That's how we get to mars. etc. etc.
Yeah, because we haven't been able to do anything amazing, up to this point, without AI.
I wonder how defective someone's brain has to be for them to think it's a good idea to create machines that can actually THINK. Fucking 'tards...
Benefits, Dangers and Incompetent Leaders (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Just one problem (Score:1)
If you ban smarter than human AI, and humans keep getting dumber every year, doesn't that mean forced downgrades for AI every year as well to keep up.
Maybe all you need to do is re-train on Reddit content each year, that should do the trick.
Smarter-than-Human (Score:1)
So is that smarter-than Stephen Hawking, or smarter than your average Trump voter?
Re: (Score:2)
So is that smarter-than Stephen Hawking, or smarter than your average Trump voter?
Given the choice I'd pick 'average Trump voter' because MAGA level Skynet would be dumb a shit but a Stephen Hawking level Skynet would be civilization ending.
Re: (Score:1)
MAGA non-skynet could end civilization.:-)
Re: (Score:2)
So is that smarter-than Stephen Hawking, or smarter than your average Trump voter?
This article is about the UK, so their conservative party is the Tories. As an American, I have trouble imagining British conservatives sinking quite as low as the ones we've got on this side of the pond.
Re: Smarter-than-Human (Score:2)
Snaggle toothed soccer hooligans vs. evangelical hillbillies with maga hats.
Give them room! This is pure lowest common denominator.
Re: (Score:2)
As an American, I have trouble imagining British conservatives sinking quite as low as the ones we've got on this side of the pond.
I could give you half a dozen names off the top of my head, albeit not all within the 'Conservative' party but conservatives all the same, of current or very recent politicians whose grasp on reality is every bit as tenuous as your notable fruitcakes, whose moral reasoning is on par with a pit viper, and for whom ethics is a county next to wethexs (sorry - play on words: Essex is a county next to Wessex).
Fortunately they rarely got the airtime their egos thought they deserved, and most have now faded furthe
That's a pretty low bar (Score:2)
Remember George Carlin: "look at how dumb an average person is, and then realize - half of them are stupider than that". (Ok, so he should have used "median", but then - this is also his audience). In any case, that'd be a pretty low bar for ai.
Too late (Score:4, Interesting)
AI doesn't need to be smart to be better than humans for many tasks. A lot of things we do bore the hell out of us because they don't require actual intelligence.
AI is in many cases already good enough to replace a scary amount of human labour, and it will keep improving.
I'm not convinced we're on the correct path for creating a real intelligent machine, but if we are that means you aren't going to stop it - we won't know we've crossed the threshold until well after the fact.
I don't trust... (Score:2)
...monopolists and governments who want to own AI tech.
I support open source and free access for all
I find it annoying and silly (Score:3, Interesting)
There are studies that show The American middle class lost out because of automation rather than outsourcing. Sure there was some outsourcing but we've been automating the shit out of factories for decades. Go to YouTube and look up how stuff is made. Like literally anything and we all marvel at all the machines but we don't stop to think about what that actually means.
And we've been doing that for about 50 years now. We are about to do the same thing to white collar workers.
People often say the economy isn't a zero-sum game but that's wrong. The economy absolutely is a zero sum game. It doesn't have to be but it is. That's very different than not being a zero-sum game. We've set it up so that when somebody gains somebody loses. again there was absolutely no reason we had to do that but we did it anyway. Mostly following old patterns and power structures that have existed for thousands of years but it is what it is.
I guess what I'm getting at is we aren't ready for this and it's something nobody's talking about. Then again is a half dozen other giant disasters that were all just kind of pretending aren't a thing like climate change, voter suppression, the fact that anyone under 50 has zero disposable income in a consumer economy, and frankly I could go on but I just getting depressed now...
But hey how about those trans kids right?
Re: (Score:2)
The cynical side of me feels all this scaremongering mainly serves to hype up the AI companies in the stock market.
Re:I find it annoying and silly (Score:4, Interesting)
If you hold back progress so everyone has enough work to do, you end up with something like the Amish communities. Even then, they're still reliant upon commerce with outside civilization because they're not entirely self-sufficient. Also, there's a big religious component involved in making such societies work, because who'd honestly want to live in a make-believe version of the past unless you expected there to be some reward for it in the afterlife?
The way things are heading, I'm leaning towards Futurama-style "suicide booths" as the solution for the unemployable. Plus, if the Amish are right about there being a reward in the afterlife, well, there ya go. Hell, since we're talking AI, I asked ChatGPT and it... agreed:
The suicide booths in Futurama can be seen as a darkly satirical critique of how societies might address systemic issues like unemployment and inadequate social support—not by solving them, but by normalizing despair. It plays into the idea that rather than fixing the root causes of suffering, a dystopian society might instead offer an "efficient" way out, treating life and death with the same bureaucratic detachment as a vending machine.
This reflects real-world concerns about how economic and social systems often fail vulnerable people. The joke gains even more weight when you consider that Fry, the protagonist, comes from a bleak, low-paying job in 1999 and wakes up in the year 3000 expecting a brighter future, only to find that things haven’t really changed—if anything, they’ve just become more convenient in their cruelty. The booths, operated by MomCorp (a company that profits off everything from robots to human suffering), further emphasize how corporate control in a dystopian future extends even to life and death decisions.
Of course, the scene is played for laughs, with Bender casually using the booth like an ATM for existential despair, but the underlying commentary is definitely there: if we don’t address societal issues, our solutions might just become more efficient at ignoring them.
But hey how about those trans kids right?
You haven't been keeping up. It's eggs now. Everybody is upset over the cost of eggs.
I get what you're saying (Score:1)
Then someone'll come along and give them guns. And military training. And point them at you. And you'll die. And so will they. And the people in charge will make out like bandits.
That's how WWI & II got going, esp II. They were side effects of the industrial revolution and rapid job displacement in a "if you don't work, you don't eat" society.
Only this time we've got nukes, machine guns that make WWII stuff look lik
Forgot to mention (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
" again there was absolutely no reason we had to do that but we did it anyway"
No, that isn't how "economies" work.
Economies work on the basis of human nature and a drive for resource gathering. It's the same rationale as a hunter-gatherer taking a deer in the woods with a spear: it's a deer for me, now, and not a deer for you. Fundamentally, it's human nature writ large.
You can't refactor human nature. Even in totalitarian regimes with fully managed economies (eg. Soviet Russia comes to mind), black markets
Re: (Score:2)
I think in this particular case you are missing the forest from the trees.
Every individual type of resource taken by itself is, physically, limited, but this does not make everything a zero-sum game. Exploiting a resource can also lead to the creation of new, more valuable resources.
The classical example is oil - which was at its discovery something close to worthless. But later the chemical industry found ways to use it to make more and more things from it - and each discovery made oil more valuable, the c
Re: (Score:2)
Actually with a hunter gather tribe, it would be here's a deer for the tribe and the tribe would share in the processing of that deer and other members of the tribe would throw in whatever they gathered. That's what made humanity successful, the tribe acting as an unit. This is not even mentioning that often hunting that deer was a group effort.
AI won't ever "be smarter" (Score:2)
I don't know why people are so worried about AI - there's been one walking around for years, trying to pass itself off (unconvincing) as a human. [preview.redd.it]
Define Smarter (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Define Smarter (Score:3)
Oh yah? Prove it!
Re: (Score:2)
1) Historically, intelligence is not the most important key to evolutionary success in human societies. For example, in feudal societies, intelligence is less important than who your parents are. In pre-industrial societies, muscle strength is much more important than brain-strength, etc.
2) Even today in the West, money is more important than intelligence pretty much everywhere. And mostly access
Re: Define Smarter (Score:2)
It's implicit for the thinker to bring their interpretation... its not really subject to precise definitions.
Smarter than whom? (Score:3)
Smarter than the average soccer hooligan, or smarter than Stephen Hawking? Large distance there, methinks...
I'd have to see the question (Score:3)
How did the question define "smarter than human"? I'm not sure there's a good metric.
It would be useful calibrate the survey by asking how smart people thought current LLMs are. I'm pretty sure your average Briton on the street thinks "AI" means HAL-9000 and "robot" means C-3PO.
Most Britons Back Ban on.. (Score:2)
'Smarter-than-THEM' humans.
Class Mates (Score:2)
Pretty low bar (Score:2)
Most Britons backed Brexit (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Democracy is not a good way to solve complex problems.
Democracy does benefit from thought. But we stamped that out.
Let's hope that they make it a law (Score:2)
All currently available AI models are smarter than the average human in a variety of ways, as proven by testing.
Therefore, they should cease to use them right now!
What idiots. I guess that's dragging down the average human int.
Most people are tech-illiterates so... (Score:1)
Why is this stupid garbage defiling Slashdot?
Who gives a flying fuck what tech-illiterate semi-humans think of a concept they do not understand?
My reply is hyperbole...but... (Score:2)
Narrow vs SGI (Score:1)
You're thinking of narrow AI.
They're thinking of wide SGI a-la skynet.
People are Stupid (Score:1)
Brits to Brains (Score:2)