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This article explicitly endorses argument ad hominem: "These people are wearing funny robes and beads, they live in a remote compound, and they speak in unison

This article explicitly endorses argument ad hominem: "These people are wearing funny robes and beads, they live in a remote compound, and they speak in unison in a really creepy way. Even though their arguments are irrefutable, everything in your experience tells you you're dealing with a cult. Of course, they have a brilliant argument for why you should ignore those instincts, but that's the inside view talking. The outside view doesn't care about content, it sees the form and the context, and it doesn't look good." The problem with argument ad hominem isn't that it never works. It often leads to the correct conclusion, as in the cult case. But the cases where it doesn't work can be really, really important. 99.9% of 26-year-olds working random jobs inventing theories about time travel are cranks, but if the rule you use is "if they look like a crank, ignore everything they say", then you miss special relativity (and later general relativity).

AnimalMuppet 10y ago
Er, that wasn't inventing theories about time travel, just about time.
- apsec112 10y ago
  SR and GR explicitly allow time-travel into the future. Which isn't a fully general Time Machine, of course, but is a huge change from 19th-century physics. If SR had just been invented today, and someone who thought it was crazy and didn't know the math was writing a blog post about it, I 100% expect they'd call it "the time travel theory" or some such thing.
  - AnimalMuppet 10y ago
    > SR and GR explicitly allow time-travel into the future. I presume you're talking about time dilation here. That's... a little bit true, but not really? At a minimum, it's sure a strange way of looking at it.
    - cloudhead 10y ago
      It allows wormholes to exist, which can connect arbitrary points in spacetime, hence time travel.
      - state_less 10y ago
        I time travelled here. What's the big deal? :) State machines can be checkpoint at any state, load up whatever time you like, is there time per se?
        TeMPOraL 10y ago
        Oh guys you talk nonsense. I do dabble in time travel at times, so I know :). (Why I'm here today? I'm particularly fond of this time period; it's the perfect time when humans had enough computing power to do something interesting, but before the whole industry went to shit. Remind me to tell you about the future some other time.)
GFK_of_xmaspast 10y ago
> "if they look like a crank, ignore everything they say", then you miss special relativity (and later general relativity). Uh ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_special_relativity#Early_reception https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_special_relativity#...
chc 10y ago
That isn't exactly what it's doing. It's proposing that there are two ways we evaluate things — deeply examining and rationally analyzing them in depth to identify specific strengths and weaknesses, and using the very fast pattern-matching "feeling" portions of our brains to identify nonspecific problems. These are cognate to "System 1" and "System 2" of Thinking Fast And Slow. Having established that people evaluate things these two ways, the author then says, "I will demonstrate to both of these ways of thinking that AI fears are bogus."
Analemma_ 10y ago
> The problem with argument ad hominem isn't that it never works. It often leads to the correct conclusion ... You immediately self-contradicted here. If a decision heuristic often leads to the correct conclusion, then it's a good heuristic (if you are under time constraints, which we are). Of course, given unlimited time to think about it, we would never use ad hominem reasoning and consider each and every argument fully. But there are tens of thousands of cults across the world, each insisting that they possess the Ultimate Truth, and that you can have it if you spend years studying their doctrine. Are you carefully evaluating each and every one to give them a fair shake? Of course not. Even if you wanted to, there is not enough time in a human lifespan. You must apply pattern-matching. The argument being made here isn't really an ad hominem, it's more like "The reason AI risk-ers strongly resemble cults is because they functionally are one, with the same problems, and so your pattern-matching algorithm is correct". Note that the remainder of the talk is spend backing up this assertion. There's a good discussion of this in the linked article about "learned epistemic helplessness" (and cheers to idlewords for the cheeky rhetorical judo of using Scott Alexander and LW-y phrases like "memetic hazard" in an argument against AI risk), but what it boils down to is that our cognitive shortcuts evolved for a reason. Sometimes the reason is because of our ancestral environment and no longer applies, but that is not always true. When you focus solely on their failure cases, you miss sight of how often they get things right... like protecting you from cults with the funny robes. > "if they look like a crank, ignore everything they say", then you miss special relativity (and later general relativity). A lot of people did ignore Einstein until the transit of Mercury provided the first empirical evidence for relativity, and they were arguably right to do so.
- swolchok 10y ago
  > If a decision heuristic often leads to the correct conclusion, then it's a good heuristic (if you are under time constraints, which we are). So, is it a good heuristic to conclude that since crime is related to poverty and minorities tend to be poor, minorities qua minorities ought to be shunned?
  - Analemma_ 10y ago
    No. The base rate of having a crime committed against you is extremely low, and the posterior probability of having a crime committed against you by a poor minority- even if higher- is still extremely low. My point refers to the absolute value of the posterior probability of one's heuristic being correct, not the probability gain resulting from some piece of evidence (like being a poor minority).
coldtea 10y ago
>This article explicitly endorses argument ad hominem That's because it's very effective in practice. In the real world (which is not a pure game of logical reasoning only played by equals and fully intelligent beings without hidden agendas), the argument ad hominem can be a very powerful way to cut through BS, even if you can't explain why they are BS by pure reason alone. E.g. say a person A with IQ 110 talks with a person B of IQ 140. The second person makes a very convincing argument for why the first person should do something for them. Logically it is faultless as far as person A can see. But if the person A knows that person B is shady, has fooled people in the past, has this or that private interest in the thing happening, etc, then he might use an "argument ad hominem" to reject B's proposal. And he would be better of for it. The "argument ad hominem" is even more useful in another very common scenario: when we don't have time to evaluate every argument we hear, but we know some basic facts about the person making the argument. The "argument ad hominem" helps us short out potentially seedy, exploitative, etc. arguments fast. Sure, it also gives false negatives, but empirically a lot of people have found that it gives more true negatives/positives (that is, if they want to act on something someone says, without delving into it finely, the fastest effective criterion would be to go with whether they trust the person). This is not only because we don't have the time to fully analyze all arguments/proposals/etc we hear and need to find some shortcuts (even if they are imperfect), but also because we don't have all the details to make our decisions (even if we have a comprehensive argument from the other person, there can be tons of stuff left out that will also be needed to evaluate it).
- nohat 10y ago
  It's a reasonable heuristic for when you just don't have the time or energy, but if you are giving a 45min keynote speech on the topic I think you are expected to make the effort to judge an idea on its merits.
  - Nevermark 10y ago
    Exactly. The "cultists" he is arguing against are leaders of industry and science. The discourse bar should be extremely high. Way above ad hominem disses.
to3m 10y ago
OK, so I ignore Einstein, and I miss general relativity. And then what? If it's proven true before I die, then I accept it; if it isn't, or if it is and I continue to ignore it, I die anyway. And then it's 2015 and it's being taught to schoolchildren. High-school-educated people who don't really know the first damn thing about physics, like non-hypothetical me, still have a rough idea what relativity is, and the repercussions are. Meanwhile, rewind ~100 years, and suppose you ignored the luminiferous aether. Or suppose you straight away saw Einstein was a genius? Oh, wait... nobody cares. Because you're dead. So I'm not sure what the long-term problem is here. Meanwhile, you, personally, can probably safely ignore people that appear to be cranks.
- lmm 10y ago
  If it were just a disagreement about physics then it would be safe to ignore. But in this case, if they're right then we're about to wipe out humanity. That's not safe to ignore.
maxerickson 10y ago
Einstein didn't look like a crank though. His papers are relatively short and are coherent, he either already had a PHD in physics or was associated with an advisor (I didn't find a good timeline; he was awarded the PHD in the same year he published his 4 big papers). Cranks lack formal education and spew forth the gobbledygook in reams.
- rntz 10y ago
  By this measure, I would say Bostrom is not a crank. Yudkowsky is less clear. I'd say no, but I'd understand if Yudkowsky trips some folks' crank detectors.
  - maxerickson 10y ago
    Einstein's paper on the photoelectric effect is a bit less than 7000 words. It is part of the foundation of quantum mechanics. Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies is in the range of 100,000 words (348 pages * roughly 300 words per page). I'm not familiar with it, but looking around it isn't even clear if it even lays out any sort of concrete theory.
    - rntz 10y ago
      1. Plenty of academics write books. 2. Comparing a paper and a book for length is obviously unfair. Bostrom has also written papers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Bostrom#Journal_articles_.28selected.29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Bostrom#Journal_articles_... 3. "Concrete theory" is vague. Is it a stand-in for "I won't accept any argument by a philosopher, only physicists need apply"?
      - maxerickson 10y ago
        I'm not intentionally trying to snub philosophy. With concrete theory, the point I was reaching for is that when you look to measure impact you probably want to point back to a compact articulation of an idea. The book comparison was probably a cheap shot (on the other side of it, Einstein didn't need popular interest/approval for his ideas to matter; I think that is a positive). I think as much as anything the comparison is worthless because we can look backwards at Einstein.
tikhonj 10y ago
It's also a perfectly apt description of, say, certain areas in academia—one that I'm pretty sympathetic too after seeing postmodern research programs in action! Hell, postmodernism is a bigger idea that eats more people than superintelligence could ever hope. And yet I suspect that many of the people swayed by one application of the argument won't be swayed by the other and vice versa. Interesting, isn't it?
freshhawk 10y ago
> but if the rule you use is "if they look like a crank, ignore everything they say", then you miss special relativity (and later general relativity) No you don't, you just don't catch it right away, relativity actually holds up under scrutiny. Besides, I reject the premise anyway. Einstein did serious work on the photoelectric effect first and then gradually worked towards relativity. Outside of the pop history he had very little in common with cranks. This is basically the result you end up seeing when you look into any of these examples used to try and argue against the ability to pattern match cults and cranks, the so-called false negatives never (to my knowledge) actually match the profile. Only the fairy tale built around their success matches it. So it is with cult-ish behaviour as well, these are specific human failures that self-reinforce and while some of their behaviour occurs in successful people (especially successful and mentally ill or far from neuro-typical people) there is a core of destructive and unique behaviour evident in both that you absolutely should recognize and avoid. Not just the statistical argument that you will gain much more than you lose by avoiding it, it's that it is staggeringly improbably that you will lose anything.
- Sean1708 10y ago
  Yep, Einstein was an expert in his field who wrote a couple of ground-breaking papers in his field. As far as I can tell no-one who is an expert in AI (or even similar fields) is worried at all about super-intelligence.
  - lern_too_spel 10y ago
    Literally everybody who is an expert in AI is worried about how to manage super-intelligence. The standard introductory text in AI by Russell and Norvig spends almost four pages discussing the existential risk that super-intelligence poses. The risk is so obvious that it was documented by IJ Good at Bletchley Park with Turing, and I wouldn't be surprised if it were identified even before that.
    - linschn 10y ago
      I'm an expert in the field and I'm not worried. It's an industrial risk like any other.
Confusion 10y ago
It's not an ad hominem argument if the personal characteristics are relevant to the topic being discussed. The personal characteristics of the people in his example are have empirically been found to be a good indicator of crankhood.
- Nevermark 10y ago
  Um, no. Hawking, Musk, et. al. are highly successful people with objectively valuable contributions who are known to be about to think deeply and solve problems that others have not. They are as far from cranks as anyone could possibly be. Anyone can find non-argument related reasons to suggest anyone else is crazy or a cultist, because no human is completely sane. What someone cannot do (credibly), is claim that real experts are non-expert crazies, over appearances while completely ignoring their earned credentials.
  - Confusion 10y ago
    Those were not the people used as an example. The example was real cultists, with robes and rituals that make no sense. And it's not an ad hominem to dismiss them outright based on their appearance. If someone I clearly perceive to be a cultist walks up to me in a mall, I'm not interested in hearing what they have to say, because the odds are empirically large that they will be wasting my time.
scandox 10y ago
The argument ad hominem here actually refers to the credibility of the source of an argument. If someone has a clear bias (cults like money and power), then you keep in mind that their arguments are the fruit of a poisoned tree.
mcguire 10y ago
That example is bad, but the arguments aren't quite as objectionable. "What kind of person does sincerely believing this stuff turn you into? The answer is not pretty. "I'd like to talk for a while about the outside arguments that should make you leery of becoming an AI weenie. These are the arguments about what effect AI obsession has on our industry and culture:..." ...grandiosity, megalomania, avoidance of actual current problems. Aside from whether the superintelligence problem is real, those believing it is seem less than appealing. "This business about saving all of future humanity [from AI] is a cop-out. We had the same exact arguments used against us under communism, to explain why everything was always broken and people couldn't have a basic level of material comfort."
- Nevermark 10y ago
  >We had the same exact arguments used against us under communism, ... What nonsense. None of the credible people suggesting that superintelligence has risk are spouting generic arguments that apply to communism or any previous situation. The question is not IF humanity will be replaced but WHEN and HOW. Clearly, in a world with superintelligence growing at a technological pace, instead of evolutionary pace, natural humanity will not remain dominant for long. So it makes enormous sense to worry about: * Whether that transition will be catastrophic or peaceful. * Whether it happens suddenly in 50 years or in a managed form over the next century. * Whether the transition includes everyone, a few people, or none of us.

AnimalMuppet 10y ago

Er, that wasn't inventing theories about time travel, just about time.

apsec112 10y ago
SR and GR explicitly allow time-travel into the future. Which isn't a fully general Time Machine, of course, but is a huge change from 19th-century physics. If SR had just been invented today, and someone who thought it was crazy and didn't know the math was writing a blog post about it, I 100% expect they'd call it "the time travel theory" or some such thing.
- AnimalMuppet 10y ago
  > SR and GR explicitly allow time-travel into the future. I presume you're talking about time dilation here. That's... a little bit true, but not really? At a minimum, it's sure a strange way of looking at it.
  - cloudhead 10y ago
    It allows wormholes to exist, which can connect arbitrary points in spacetime, hence time travel.
    - state_less 10y ago
      I time travelled here. What's the big deal? :) State machines can be checkpoint at any state, load up whatever time you like, is there time per se?
      - TeMPOraL 10y ago
        Oh guys you talk nonsense. I do dabble in time travel at times, so I know :). (Why I'm here today? I'm particularly fond of this time period; it's the perfect time when humans had enough computing power to do something interesting, but before the whole industry went to shit. Remind me to tell you about the future some other time.)

GFK_of_xmaspast 10y ago

> "if they look like a crank, ignore everything they say", then you miss special relativity (and later general relativity). Uh ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_special_relativity#Early_reception https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_special_relativity#...

chc 10y ago

That isn't exactly what it's doing. It's proposing that there are two ways we evaluate things — deeply examining and rationally analyzing them in depth to identify specific strengths and weaknesses, and using the very fast pattern-matching "feeling" portions of our brains to identify nonspecific problems. These are cognate to "System 1" and "System 2" of Thinking Fast And Slow. Having established that people evaluate things these two ways, the author then says, "I will demonstrate to both of these ways of thinking that AI fears are bogus."

Analemma_ 10y ago

> The problem with argument ad hominem isn't that it never works. It often leads to the correct conclusion ... You immediately self-contradicted here. If a decision heuristic often leads to the correct conclusion, then it's a good heuristic (if you are under time constraints, which we are). Of course, given unlimited time to think about it, we would never use ad hominem reasoning and consider each and every argument fully. But there are tens of thousands of cults across the world, each insisting that they possess the Ultimate Truth, and that you can have it if you spend years studying their doctrine. Are you carefully evaluating each and every one to give them a fair shake? Of course not. Even if you wanted to, there is not enough time in a human lifespan. You must apply pattern-matching. The argument being made here isn't really an ad hominem, it's more like "The reason AI risk-ers strongly resemble cults is because they functionally are one, with the same problems, and so your pattern-matching algorithm is correct". Note that the remainder of the talk is spend backing up this assertion. There's a good discussion of this in the linked article about "learned epistemic helplessness" (and cheers to idlewords for the cheeky rhetorical judo of using Scott Alexander and LW-y phrases like "memetic hazard" in an argument against AI risk), but what it boils down to is that our cognitive shortcuts evolved for a reason. Sometimes the reason is because of our ancestral environment and no longer applies, but that is not always true. When you focus solely on their failure cases, you miss sight of how often they get things right... like protecting you from cults with the funny robes. > "if they look like a crank, ignore everything they say", then you miss special relativity (and later general relativity). A lot of people did ignore Einstein until the transit of Mercury provided the first empirical evidence for relativity, and they were arguably right to do so.

swolchok 10y ago
> If a decision heuristic often leads to the correct conclusion, then it's a good heuristic (if you are under time constraints, which we are). So, is it a good heuristic to conclude that since crime is related to poverty and minorities tend to be poor, minorities qua minorities ought to be shunned?
- Analemma_ 10y ago
  No. The base rate of having a crime committed against you is extremely low, and the posterior probability of having a crime committed against you by a poor minority- even if higher- is still extremely low. My point refers to the absolute value of the posterior probability of one's heuristic being correct, not the probability gain resulting from some piece of evidence (like being a poor minority).

coldtea 10y ago

>This article explicitly endorses argument ad hominem That's because it's very effective in practice. In the real world (which is not a pure game of logical reasoning only played by equals and fully intelligent beings without hidden agendas), the argument ad hominem can be a very powerful way to cut through BS, even if you can't explain why they are BS by pure reason alone. E.g. say a person A with IQ 110 talks with a person B of IQ 140. The second person makes a very convincing argument for why the first person should do something for them. Logically it is faultless as far as person A can see. But if the person A knows that person B is shady, has fooled people in the past, has this or that private interest in the thing happening, etc, then he might use an "argument ad hominem" to reject B's proposal. And he would be better of for it. The "argument ad hominem" is even more useful in another very common scenario: when we don't have time to evaluate every argument we hear, but we know some basic facts about the person making the argument. The "argument ad hominem" helps us short out potentially seedy, exploitative, etc. arguments fast. Sure, it also gives false negatives, but empirically a lot of people have found that it gives more true negatives/positives (that is, if they want to act on something someone says, without delving into it finely, the fastest effective criterion would be to go with whether they trust the person). This is not only because we don't have the time to fully analyze all arguments/proposals/etc we hear and need to find some shortcuts (even if they are imperfect), but also because we don't have all the details to make our decisions (even if we have a comprehensive argument from the other person, there can be tons of stuff left out that will also be needed to evaluate it).

nohat 10y ago
It's a reasonable heuristic for when you just don't have the time or energy, but if you are giving a 45min keynote speech on the topic I think you are expected to make the effort to judge an idea on its merits.
- Nevermark 10y ago
  Exactly. The "cultists" he is arguing against are leaders of industry and science. The discourse bar should be extremely high. Way above ad hominem disses.

to3m 10y ago

OK, so I ignore Einstein, and I miss general relativity. And then what? If it's proven true before I die, then I accept it; if it isn't, or if it is and I continue to ignore it, I die anyway. And then it's 2015 and it's being taught to schoolchildren. High-school-educated people who don't really know the first damn thing about physics, like non-hypothetical me, still have a rough idea what relativity is, and the repercussions are. Meanwhile, rewind ~100 years, and suppose you ignored the luminiferous aether. Or suppose you straight away saw Einstein was a genius? Oh, wait... nobody cares. Because you're dead. So I'm not sure what the long-term problem is here. Meanwhile, you, personally, can probably safely ignore people that appear to be cranks.

lmm 10y ago
If it were just a disagreement about physics then it would be safe to ignore. But in this case, if they're right then we're about to wipe out humanity. That's not safe to ignore.

maxerickson 10y ago

Einstein didn't look like a crank though. His papers are relatively short and are coherent, he either already had a PHD in physics or was associated with an advisor (I didn't find a good timeline; he was awarded the PHD in the same year he published his 4 big papers). Cranks lack formal education and spew forth the gobbledygook in reams.

rntz 10y ago
By this measure, I would say Bostrom is not a crank. Yudkowsky is less clear. I'd say no, but I'd understand if Yudkowsky trips some folks' crank detectors.
- maxerickson 10y ago
  Einstein's paper on the photoelectric effect is a bit less than 7000 words. It is part of the foundation of quantum mechanics. Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies is in the range of 100,000 words (348 pages * roughly 300 words per page). I'm not familiar with it, but looking around it isn't even clear if it even lays out any sort of concrete theory.
  - rntz 10y ago
    1. Plenty of academics write books. 2. Comparing a paper and a book for length is obviously unfair. Bostrom has also written papers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Bostrom#Journal_articles_.28selected.29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Bostrom#Journal_articles_... 3. "Concrete theory" is vague. Is it a stand-in for "I won't accept any argument by a philosopher, only physicists need apply"?
    - maxerickson 10y ago
      I'm not intentionally trying to snub philosophy. With concrete theory, the point I was reaching for is that when you look to measure impact you probably want to point back to a compact articulation of an idea. The book comparison was probably a cheap shot (on the other side of it, Einstein didn't need popular interest/approval for his ideas to matter; I think that is a positive). I think as much as anything the comparison is worthless because we can look backwards at Einstein.

tikhonj 10y ago

It's also a perfectly apt description of, say, certain areas in academia—one that I'm pretty sympathetic too after seeing postmodern research programs in action! Hell, postmodernism is a bigger idea that eats more people than superintelligence could ever hope. And yet I suspect that many of the people swayed by one application of the argument won't be swayed by the other and vice versa. Interesting, isn't it?

freshhawk 10y ago

> but if the rule you use is "if they look like a crank, ignore everything they say", then you miss special relativity (and later general relativity) No you don't, you just don't catch it right away, relativity actually holds up under scrutiny. Besides, I reject the premise anyway. Einstein did serious work on the photoelectric effect first and then gradually worked towards relativity. Outside of the pop history he had very little in common with cranks. This is basically the result you end up seeing when you look into any of these examples used to try and argue against the ability to pattern match cults and cranks, the so-called false negatives never (to my knowledge) actually match the profile. Only the fairy tale built around their success matches it. So it is with cult-ish behaviour as well, these are specific human failures that self-reinforce and while some of their behaviour occurs in successful people (especially successful and mentally ill or far from neuro-typical people) there is a core of destructive and unique behaviour evident in both that you absolutely should recognize and avoid. Not just the statistical argument that you will gain much more than you lose by avoiding it, it's that it is staggeringly improbably that you will lose anything.

Sean1708 10y ago
Yep, Einstein was an expert in his field who wrote a couple of ground-breaking papers in his field. As far as I can tell no-one who is an expert in AI (or even similar fields) is worried at all about super-intelligence.
- lern_too_spel 10y ago
  Literally everybody who is an expert in AI is worried about how to manage super-intelligence. The standard introductory text in AI by Russell and Norvig spends almost four pages discussing the existential risk that super-intelligence poses. The risk is so obvious that it was documented by IJ Good at Bletchley Park with Turing, and I wouldn't be surprised if it were identified even before that.
  - linschn 10y ago
    I'm an expert in the field and I'm not worried. It's an industrial risk like any other.

Confusion 10y ago

It's not an ad hominem argument if the personal characteristics are relevant to the topic being discussed. The personal characteristics of the people in his example are have empirically been found to be a good indicator of crankhood.

Nevermark 10y ago
Um, no. Hawking, Musk, et. al. are highly successful people with objectively valuable contributions who are known to be about to think deeply and solve problems that others have not. They are as far from cranks as anyone could possibly be. Anyone can find non-argument related reasons to suggest anyone else is crazy or a cultist, because no human is completely sane. What someone cannot do (credibly), is claim that real experts are non-expert crazies, over appearances while completely ignoring their earned credentials.
- Confusion 10y ago
  Those were not the people used as an example. The example was real cultists, with robes and rituals that make no sense. And it's not an ad hominem to dismiss them outright based on their appearance. If someone I clearly perceive to be a cultist walks up to me in a mall, I'm not interested in hearing what they have to say, because the odds are empirically large that they will be wasting my time.

scandox 10y ago

The argument ad hominem here actually refers to the credibility of the source of an argument. If someone has a clear bias (cults like money and power), then you keep in mind that their arguments are the fruit of a poisoned tree.

mcguire 10y ago

That example is bad, but the arguments aren't quite as objectionable. "What kind of person does sincerely believing this stuff turn you into? The answer is not pretty. "I'd like to talk for a while about the outside arguments that should make you leery of becoming an AI weenie. These are the arguments about what effect AI obsession has on our industry and culture:..." ...grandiosity, megalomania, avoidance of actual current problems. Aside from whether the superintelligence problem is real, those believing it is seem less than appealing. "This business about saving all of future humanity [from AI] is a cop-out. We had the same exact arguments used against us under communism, to explain why everything was always broken and people couldn't have a basic level of material comfort."

Nevermark 10y ago
>We had the same exact arguments used against us under communism, ... What nonsense. None of the credible people suggesting that superintelligence has risk are spouting generic arguments that apply to communism or any previous situation. The question is not IF humanity will be replaced but WHEN and HOW. Clearly, in a world with superintelligence growing at a technological pace, instead of evolutionary pace, natural humanity will not remain dominant for long. So it makes enormous sense to worry about: * Whether that transition will be catastrophic or peaceful. * Whether it happens suddenly in 50 years or in a managed form over the next century. * Whether the transition includes everyone, a few people, or none of us.