History has shown that humans are terrible judges of the outcomes of our behaviour; your belief that we can confidently understand the risks of anything through

History has shown that humans are terrible judges of the outcomes of our behaviour; your belief that we can confidently understand the risks of anything through experimentation might work in theory but hasn’t been borne out in practice. Extremists exist at both ends of the spectrum and serve to balance each other out: without people positing the worst-case scenarios, the people positing the best-case scenarios would run full steam ahead without any consideration for what could happen. Perhaps if the proponents of (various flavours of) AI were doing careful experimentation and iteratively working towards a better understanding, then maybe the loud voices against it would be less valuable, but as we’ve seen through the last 20 years, progress in technology is being made without a second thought for the consequences — and what Facebook are doing here is a bare minimum, so it’s reasonable for proponents to be somewhat cynical about the long term consequence.