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It's not about if/when people take these blogs seriously. It's a race between the creators of AGI and when it becomes mainstream enough for a popular politician
by throwaway_4ever 4y ago
It's not about if/when people take these blogs seriously. It's a race between the creators of AGI and when it becomes mainstream enough for a popular politician to make it the cause de jour and rally the populist base against an existential threat.
- anotherman554 4y agoIf it really is an existential threat why didn't a politician rally the population against AI in 1984 after the Terminator and War Games movies came out? I guess because nobody would take them seriously and they'd look ridiculous? You're positing at some point this is going to change but I'm not seeing how. Nuclear weapons are already an existential threat and I don't see anyone rallying against it.
- fatherzine 4y agoThere was no GPT3 or DALL-E in 1984, and no way to viscerally convey the (presumed) capabilities of such systems to the average person. In practice, the average person is so disempowered that nothing will change. We will step into the transhuman era with utmost vanity.
- anotherman554 4y agoI'm sure a malicious programmer could do a great deal of harm with GPT3 or DALL-E, but I'm still not seeing how these programs suggest that computers are going to take over the world. At some point it simply becomes an act of faith to assume technology is going to progress to the point where robots can self replicate, achieve sentience, and achieve autonomy from humanity. Phillip K Dick wrote a science fiction short story with such a premise entitled "second variety" in 1953. It's not a new idea. It doesn't seem to be subject to evidence, because you can't really prove a negative, can you? If a breakthrough will never happen to allow machines to take over the world, there's no way to prove it.