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I begin to feel this way now. The whole drive is to make something that can do everything humans can, but better. For vague reasons. To create some sort of u

I begin to feel this way now. The whole drive is to make something that can do everything humans can, but better. For vague reasons. To create some sort of utopia. To upload our minds and go to the stars and live forever. We're unlikely to get human utopia or transhumanism, but we are likely to get extremely competent NAIs. Maybe they can't be stapled together as a GAI and that's a limit we reach, but it means that whatever a human can think of doing, you can point to a NAI system that does it better. But people are still trying. We've come this far already, with no curbing of enthusiasm at obsoleting ourselves, and people who don't share this enthusiasm are chided for their lack of self-sacrificing nobility at sending "humanity's child" to the stars. Even if progress in AI stopped today, or was stopped, and never resumed, we would always carry the knowledge of what we did manage to accomplish, and the dream of doing even more. It's very nihilistic and depressing.

JohnFen 4y ago
> It's very nihilistic and depressing. Indeed. The common reactions here to people who are scared of what LLMs might bring have gone far to increase my worries. An extreme lack of empathy and even expressions of outright contempt for people is very common from those who are enthusiastic about this technology. Instead of scorn, anger, and mocking, people who think that LLMs are a great thing should be working on actually presenting arguments that would reassure those who think the opposite.
- CatWChainsaw 4y ago
  The contempt is another symptom of what social media shoved into overdrive (extreme polarization). Hatred has become easier than empathy. But it also reads like a very different sort of doomsday cult that worships a borg, only instead of the cult being the weird fringe movement, they're the ones driving the bus.

JohnFen 4y ago

> It's very nihilistic and depressing. Indeed. The common reactions here to people who are scared of what LLMs might bring have gone far to increase my worries. An extreme lack of empathy and even expressions of outright contempt for people is very common from those who are enthusiastic about this technology. Instead of scorn, anger, and mocking, people who think that LLMs are a great thing should be working on actually presenting arguments that would reassure those who think the opposite.

CatWChainsaw 4y ago
The contempt is another symptom of what social media shoved into overdrive (extreme polarization). Hatred has become easier than empathy. But it also reads like a very different sort of doomsday cult that worships a borg, only instead of the cult being the weird fringe movement, they're the ones driving the bus.