3 ms·

Person observing Trinity test: "Wow this is really dangerous and could wipe out a city" Very astute response: "An atomic weapon has never wiped out a city"

jrflowers 3y ago
Watching the first dot matrix printer output a page of text: “This might print out text that summons Cthulhu”
- ethanbond 3y ago
  Is all that money flowing into AI development and deployment in order to produce pieces of paper with text on them? Nope, it's to produce society-scale transformation. So even the optimists wouldn't buy your analogy.
  - jrflowers 3y ago
    >produce pieces of paper with text on them? This is a good point — No. LLMs are meant to produce text on a screen, not paper, so I guess it’s more like Seeing the “it is now safe to shut off your PC” text on a screen for the first time: “I am become Death, destroyer of worlds”
    - ethanbond 3y ago
      Brilliant proof of exactly my point. When it comes to discussing any possible outcome other than utopia, suddenly the power of these tools drops to zero! Remarkable :)
      - jrflowers 3y ago
        You responded to my previous comment that called utopians as cultish as the fanfic folks. When it comes up discussing any possible outcome that isn’t the opinion of [cult x], the only reason that the other person disagrees is because they are in [cult y] Remarkable :)
        ethanbond 3y ago
        What? I never proposed that dichotomy and don't believe in it. You did and you're tripping over it a bit. You can just discard that model and engage with the substance of the topic, you know!
        jrflowers 3y ago
        The substance of this discussion is that a language model has never convinced anyone to crash a plane into a building and your position is that pointing out that fact is to ignore the material reality of the possibility of some theoretically advanced technology (which could maybe be adjacent to language models) at some point convincing a hypothetical person to crash a plane into a building. That is to say, the substance here is an emotional doomsday reaction to a benign statement of undisputed fact — a language model has never convinced a person to crash a plane into a building. Watching a cell divide into two cells: “Why isn’t anyone talking about the possibility that this is Hitler??”
        CatWChainsaw 3y ago
        Why aren't you mentioning that an LLM has already convinced someone to commit suicide? Why are you being deliberately obtuse about the unknowable-ness of the exponential curve the enthusiasts on one hand salivate over, and on the other confidently assert optimism just as you're doing?

jrflowers 3y ago

Watching the first dot matrix printer output a page of text: “This might print out text that summons Cthulhu”

ethanbond 3y ago
Is all that money flowing into AI development and deployment in order to produce pieces of paper with text on them? Nope, it's to produce society-scale transformation. So even the optimists wouldn't buy your analogy.
- jrflowers 3y ago
  >produce pieces of paper with text on them? This is a good point — No. LLMs are meant to produce text on a screen, not paper, so I guess it’s more like Seeing the “it is now safe to shut off your PC” text on a screen for the first time: “I am become Death, destroyer of worlds”
  - ethanbond 3y ago
    Brilliant proof of exactly my point. When it comes to discussing any possible outcome other than utopia, suddenly the power of these tools drops to zero! Remarkable :)
    - jrflowers 3y ago
      You responded to my previous comment that called utopians as cultish as the fanfic folks. When it comes up discussing any possible outcome that isn’t the opinion of [cult x], the only reason that the other person disagrees is because they are in [cult y] Remarkable :)
      - ethanbond 3y ago
        What? I never proposed that dichotomy and don't believe in it. You did and you're tripping over it a bit. You can just discard that model and engage with the substance of the topic, you know!
        jrflowers 3y ago
        The substance of this discussion is that a language model has never convinced anyone to crash a plane into a building and your position is that pointing out that fact is to ignore the material reality of the possibility of some theoretically advanced technology (which could maybe be adjacent to language models) at some point convincing a hypothetical person to crash a plane into a building. That is to say, the substance here is an emotional doomsday reaction to a benign statement of undisputed fact — a language model has never convinced a person to crash a plane into a building. Watching a cell divide into two cells: “Why isn’t anyone talking about the possibility that this is Hitler??”
        CatWChainsaw 3y ago
        Why aren't you mentioning that an LLM has already convinced someone to commit suicide? Why are you being deliberately obtuse about the unknowable-ness of the exponential curve the enthusiasts on one hand salivate over, and on the other confidently assert optimism just as you're doing?