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We know that progress towards ever more sophisticated AI will be incremental, with occasional breakthroughs and leaps forward. But even assuming we never leap f

We know that progress towards ever more sophisticated AI will be incremental, with occasional breakthroughs and leaps forward. But even assuming we never leap forward again, the ideal time to sort out what to do when some threshold is crossed is before we have crossed that threshold. By way of analogy, the climate crisis is arguably suffering from the same kinds of thinking. We’ve never witnessed the kinds of climate catastrophe that we know is around the corner, but that doesn’t stop people who understand the dynamics from taking it seriously. It also hasn’t stopped a very vocal and powerful opposition who won’t be convinced until we experience real catastrophe. To me, the argument that we’re nowhere close is unconvincing, and I’d argue irrelevant. Even if the real risk is decades away, we’re now living in the moment where we can mitigate risks before they become pressingly real. Anything else is kicking the can down the road. > There is a further argument that even with actual AI, which people have written volumes of sci-fi tier essays about how it will kill us all, that there has been no demonstrated risk How would you define “demonstrated risk”? We’re at a stage where all we can do is speculate and predict based on our models of the world as they currently exist. That says nothing about the actual intrinsic risks that we are or are not speculating about. And again, the climate crisis seems like a useful parallel to consider.

carom 3y ago
>Even if the real risk is decades away... All we can do is ... predict based on our models... What real risk? What models? Climate change is not a useful parallel because changing weather has an actual impact on human safety. No one can articulate the risks that AGI would pose beyond speculative fiction. It's going to clone itself to every device and turn us into paperclips by emailing an on-demand gene printing lab to make a super virus!! Sure, whatever man. Just because you can say the words "X is similar to Y" does not make it true. This applies to comparisons with nuclear weapons, guns, climate change, et al. I understand how all of those things can kill me. No one has made a reasonable argument for how an LLM could harm me, much less an argument convincing enough to justify the regulatory capture sought by these companies.

carom 3y ago

>Even if the real risk is decades away... All we can do is ... predict based on our models... What real risk? What models? Climate change is not a useful parallel because changing weather has an actual impact on human safety. No one can articulate the risks that AGI would pose beyond speculative fiction. It's going to clone itself to every device and turn us into paperclips by emailing an on-demand gene printing lab to make a super virus!! Sure, whatever man. Just because you can say the words "X is similar to Y" does not make it true. This applies to comparisons with nuclear weapons, guns, climate change, et al. I understand how all of those things can kill me. No one has made a reasonable argument for how an LLM could harm me, much less an argument convincing enough to justify the regulatory capture sought by these companies.