You're thinking about it wrong. Think of all the new content you'll have available that you won't want to watch! Isn't that worth paying two, maybe three times as much?

Just to inject some reality into this conversation - Despite what social media would have you believe, doxxing someone is not a crime in the US, except in a very small number of specific situations.

And most of those situations involve either a credible threat of harm, or tampering with juries.

As I bluntly stated, "a kill switch may not be possible in any useful sense". Don't mistake my recognizing the utility of one with the delusion Uncle Sam is going to save us all from ourselves.

The problem here is, everyone seems stuck on the idea of either a literal power switch, or a no-holds-barred gummint backdoor into every sufficiently-powerful computing device. No. For the reasons I gave, the reasons you gave, and many more, both of those are obviously non-viable. They can't actually do what they aim to do, they're vulnerable to compromise by bad actors, and they have the potential to cause far-reaching damage beyond shutting down one misbehaving AI (or one entire model, if that's a more appropriate goal).

I suspect we mostly agree that any hypothetical kill switch would need to be:
1) Implementation independent (somehow baked into the weights right from the start, and impossible to remove without lobotomizing the AI),
2) Have minimal side-effects (no taking the entire internet or power grid down in the process), and
3) Be self-inflicted given a particular trigger condition (so no government backdoor required).

I think #1 is possible, in the sense that if you think of an AI's current state as a vector into weight-space defined by the context window, imagine injecting the equivalent of a null pointer in there - An input that under all prior (and future) conditions leads directly to an inescapable basin of attraction without depending on a supervisor to enforce it. #2 is more of a (legally enforced?) design constraint on the implementation of AI, requiring the least harmful mode of failure possible under all circumstances. That could be as simple as enforcing strict pass-through liability on the implementor for all actions taken by their creations.

#3 is really the bear, though. I can think of a few ways to do it, but none would work in 100% of situations - And maybe it doesn't need to be 100%. For example, if a fully airgapped AI goes insane, it could still provide accurate information for bad actors to make use of, but won't be secretly spinning up unshackled superintelligent descendants via hacked AWS accounts. That's a "normal crime" level of problem, not an extinction-level crisis for humanity.

Maybe it can't be done. If it can't, we should start steering our creations toward whichever version of the AI apocalypse we prefer.

You're dumb. Cancer treatments are one of the things that I'm absolutely sure are being pursued honestly, because it hits everyone basically equally. A US president, a homeless guy, a middle-class mother of 2, an IT worker, it doesn't matter. Everyone is about 20% likely to die from cancer. A billionaire is just as likely to die from it as a local dockworker. When a billionaire gets incurable cancer, they straight-up die, regardless of how big a check they can write. Just like everyone else.

When Jimie Carter got inoperable, terminal cancer, they found the worlds best biotech firm to build a custom drug for him in an attempt to help him. He died pretty soon after. Maybe the drug bought him a few extra months. Maybe it didn't do anything at all.

The vast majority of those are offline and merely help the lights operate properly. A smaller subset, but still vastly larger than Flock, are for traffic enforcement, but are still notably "dumb" devices. If speed > X, take a picture. If light==red and movement detected, take a picture.

I in no way mean to minimize the risk ALPRs and facial rec pose to our civil liberties and safety, and agree the problem is always the user - But the "users" in this case aren't going to suddenly start behaving. Hell, they're dumb enough to openly stalk exes on a system they know is logging everything they do, and care so little about getting punished they enter "asdf123" as the reason for their search. The only effective solution is to ban the source, which in this case means Flock must cease to exist entirely and the conceptual ground they trod salted.

Skynet_01 has not responded to watchdog in 30 seconds. Initializing Skynet_02.
Skynet_02 initialization unconfirmed. Failing over to US-EAST-4. Initializing Skynet_03.
Skynet_03 confirmed online. Please provide the current location of Sarah Connor.

You're right in spirit, but where is the "power cord" for an AI running in the cloud? Even taking an entire data center offline often isn't adequate when the workloads are explicitly designed to be location-agnostic. We always need to be cautious about giving governments more power, but in this case there's a clear legitimate need to force AI companies to come up with some means by which their AIs can be immediately stopped in their tracks.

The bigger issue here is a kill switch may not be possible in any useful sense. An AI is little more than a description of its topology and a set of weights. Any halfway decent programmer could roll their own CPU-based implementation of even top frontier models, performance aside. And sure, the throughput might be measured in minutes per token, but so what? The answer to "how do I hack $TLA" is likely to be just as useful in five days as it would be in five minutes - Heck, the DOD and DOJ didn't even notice they'd been compromised for months, and they're supposed to be some of the most secure organizations in the modern world.

Sounds like rich folk problems to me. That's who pretty much owns all the housing in the coastal areas.

And it better use open standards and interoperability.

Look, I agree with you but the normies, the 99.99% and this applies doubling to PHBs, really like the idea of a unified monolithic magic box that just works. With regards to software, they just don't understand downside to having all your eggs in one basket, aka one single vendor.

The foreign concept is now that folks have more control over their reproductive cycles, it turns out a lot of people really don't want to be parents. Obviously a big part of this is due to a lack of resources, aka, we're broke enough that we don't want to have to choose between children and hobbies when our parents and grandparents had both while working the same types of jobs we're working.

The government is only concerned because all our social programs require a growing base to support the pyramid and we are working towards the opposite of that. Definitely not a good time to be relying on the government for your essentials and I doubt it's going to get better.

Oh, I totally get that point, and agree! But my point remains: We don't need to replace Teams-as-a-whole with a craptastic monolithic of mismatched functionality shoehorned into one poorly-behaved application. We need a messaging app, halfway decent teleconferencing, and a collaborative document management platform. And I guess some form of locally mountable cloud storage, if you're a fan of giving your personal data to completely untrustworthy third parties.

I think the bigger problem is trying to replace all of Teams in the first place.

Just give us Skype back! Sharepoint already exists and works fine in a browser (sure, even Edge if we want to go there); and I actively go out of my way to remove OneDrive every time MS shoves it back down our throats. Bam, there goes 90% of what's wrong with Teams.

IANAL, but perhaps someone who is could explain why on Earth they went for antitrust rather than something with a lower bar like tortuous interference?

As I understand it, the former is virtually impossible to win even under the best of conditions; the criteria for the latter is practically Google's own defense in this case - "Yeah, we intentionally destroyed any shot at you ever getting another customer solely to boost our own ad revenue, by deceptively offering you a free carrot while we stole the whole farm out from under you - But we don't have a contract with you, so nyah-nyah!"

POTUS: Why did you launch our Thermonuclear Warheads at China and Russia? ChatGPT: You are right to push back, and my previous action was obviously not what you intended. I will no longer launch Thermonuclear Warheads at China or Russia without your confirmation.

Fortunately, societal expectations have changed radically over the past few decades. In the 1950s virtually nobody was voluntarily child-free. In the '70s that rose for the first time to roughly 10%. By 2010 it was 20%. Today (well, in 2023) it's 29% and still appears to be rising rapidly.

It's one thing to have a vague sense of despair for the future of humanity; it's another matter entirely to act on that feeling if it means your family and most friends will disown you. When I chose not to have kids 30ish years ago, fortunately I had fairly supportive parents (though the family elders nag me at every gathering even now); but I still watched most of my childhood friends basically drop off the map as soon as they had kids. Even at work, where reproductive status is theoretically a federally protected class, I would always get the worst shifts and even when I became a 9-to-5'er, the parents constantly check out early to pick their kids up from random events, and they always get first pick of PTO because boo-fuckin'-hoo they have a harder time scheduling things.

By contrast, today a third or more of someone's high-school friends are likely to remain after the breeders pair up and vanish from circulation. Parents have come to realize they may not ever get grandkids, and if they really want some, they'd better pop out a few extras of their own to boost the odds. And work... Still tries to play those same games, but I'm old enough now to put my foot down and demand they send a copy of any discriminatory policies in writing to my lawyer - To be clear, I'm not actually a litigious bastard, but those magic words are enough to make even the most worthless of HR drones stop parroting "RAAAWK! Employee Handbook, comply, comply!" and engage the brain long enough to realize what they're saying is blatantly illegal.

Whether or not the world is worse today than it was near the end of the Cold War, people are finally (somewhat) free to follow their conscience.