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Nobody respectable has said that AGI will be achieved in the next 5 or even 500 years.

by ratg13 3y ago

sschueller 3y ago
Sadly a large part of the public believes it will happen and is all in. To the average person chatGPT is literally magic.
_heimdall 3y ago
Eliezer Yudkowsky should be respected in the field of AI. Agree or disagree with his level of concern over AI risk, he has made fairly accurate predictions so far. Last I heard, he was predicting that we could be as little as 10-15 years from the level of AI development that he considers to be an extinctions level risk. Again, there's plenty of different conclusions that can be made on the risk levels but that doesn't change his expectation on timing of development.
- yowlingcat 3y ago
  No one should respect that blowhard. Please point me to the specifically accurate predictions he has made so far.
  - voitvoder 3y ago
    Are you saying statements like "...and then AI takes over the whole galaxy and comes back to eats us!" doesn't sound rational? He is basically the next generation's Ray Kurzweil but instead of AI granting us biological immortality now AI is going to cause mass extinction. Instead of uploading consciousness to some digital nirvana we get the slightest variation on The Matrix. "And then it takes over the galaxy and uses the atoms in our bodies for batteries!!" With the way AI captures the imagination we can't but help take things to irrational extremes.
  - _heimdall 3y ago
    Eliezer made early predictions that we would solve the protein folding problem when effectively everyone else said we either wouldn't solve it or it was way off. If I remember right he was making those claims around 2005 or so and predicting wed have it solved in something like 30 years. We solved it in 2017.
    - _heimdall 3y ago
      For more context, Eliezer does himself a disservice focusing so hard on examples of how things could go horribly wrong but I haven't heard any compelling arguments against his core points. From everything I've seen from him, his concerns revolve around (1) a lack of a bounding function for the development of AI (2) a view that the alignment problem is unsolvable and (3) the risk that we won't recognize an AI was developed until it is sufficiently more intelligent than us to pose a fundamental risk.
    - staticman2 3y ago
      If your prediction is "A.I. is similar to magic and can do anything and will become a god" you would of course think it can solve the protein folding problem... I'm not exactly sure that leads to the conclusion his track record is great. (There are many more things A.I. can't do than can do, I would think?)
      - _heimdall 3y ago
        His prediction was that humans would solve the protein folding problem, it didn't have to do with AI. I raised it only as an example of a prediction he made that most at the time thought had no chance. My point isn't to claim he's some genius that gets everything right, but there are examples of him making predictions widely viewed at the time of having no chance that turned out to be correct. Writing him off because people responding strongly to his predictions of AI destroying us all doesn't do anyone any good. His core arguments and predictions seem sound and I haven't yet found anyone to explain how we can solve alignment after the fact, for example
        staticman2 3y ago
  - dang 3y ago
    Please don't cross into name-calling. You can make your substantive points without that, and it's in your interest to, since the first part of a comment like this discredits the rest. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    - yowlingcat 3y ago
      Fair enough. I could've phrased that better such as "I find his proto-Millenarian approach to be discursively vacuous, unnecessarily polemical, and not productive towards the answering the very real questions regarding negative externalities around the increasing rate of AI utilization in global society."

Nobody respectable has said that AGI will be achieved in the next 5 or even 500 years.

by ratg13 3y ago

Nobody respectable has said that AGI will be achieved in the next 5 or even 500 years.

Sadly a large part of the public believes it will happen and is all in. To the average person chatGPT is literally magic.

_heimdall 3y ago

Eliezer Yudkowsky should be respected in the field of AI. Agree or disagree with his level of concern over AI risk, he has made fairly accurate predictions so far. Last I heard, he was predicting that we could be as little as 10-15 years from the level of AI development that he considers to be an extinctions level risk. Again, there's plenty of different conclusions that can be made on the risk levels but that doesn't change his expectation on timing of development.

yowlingcat 3y ago
No one should respect that blowhard. Please point me to the specifically accurate predictions he has made so far.
- voitvoder 3y ago
  Are you saying statements like "...and then AI takes over the whole galaxy and comes back to eats us!" doesn't sound rational? He is basically the next generation's Ray Kurzweil but instead of AI granting us biological immortality now AI is going to cause mass extinction. Instead of uploading consciousness to some digital nirvana we get the slightest variation on The Matrix. "And then it takes over the galaxy and uses the atoms in our bodies for batteries!!" With the way AI captures the imagination we can't but help take things to irrational extremes.
- _heimdall 3y ago
  Eliezer made early predictions that we would solve the protein folding problem when effectively everyone else said we either wouldn't solve it or it was way off. If I remember right he was making those claims around 2005 or so and predicting wed have it solved in something like 30 years. We solved it in 2017.
  - _heimdall 3y ago
    For more context, Eliezer does himself a disservice focusing so hard on examples of how things could go horribly wrong but I haven't heard any compelling arguments against his core points. From everything I've seen from him, his concerns revolve around (1) a lack of a bounding function for the development of AI (2) a view that the alignment problem is unsolvable and (3) the risk that we won't recognize an AI was developed until it is sufficiently more intelligent than us to pose a fundamental risk.
  - staticman2 3y ago
    If your prediction is "A.I. is similar to magic and can do anything and will become a god" you would of course think it can solve the protein folding problem... I'm not exactly sure that leads to the conclusion his track record is great. (There are many more things A.I. can't do than can do, I would think?)
    - _heimdall 3y ago
      His prediction was that humans would solve the protein folding problem, it didn't have to do with AI. I raised it only as an example of a prediction he made that most at the time thought had no chance. My point isn't to claim he's some genius that gets everything right, but there are examples of him making predictions widely viewed at the time of having no chance that turned out to be correct. Writing him off because people responding strongly to his predictions of AI destroying us all doesn't do anyone any good. His core arguments and predictions seem sound and I haven't yet found anyone to explain how we can solve alignment after the fact, for example
      - staticman2 3y ago
- dang 3y ago
  Please don't cross into name-calling. You can make your substantive points without that, and it's in your interest to, since the first part of a comment like this discredits the rest. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - yowlingcat 3y ago
    Fair enough. I could've phrased that better such as "I find his proto-Millenarian approach to be discursively vacuous, unnecessarily polemical, and not productive towards the answering the very real questions regarding negative externalities around the increasing rate of AI utilization in global society."