5 ms·
Interesting how an intellectual movement claiming to know better than anyone else how development of an unpredictable technology might pan out over the course o
by caesil 3y ago
Interesting how an intellectual movement claiming to know better than anyone else how development of an unpredictable technology might pan out over the course of years failed to predict how one decision would pan out over the course of a single weekend.
Perhaps there's some level of overconfidence at play from systems thinkers who overintellectualize their ability to conceptualize and extrapolate forward an impossibly complex system.
- jacquesm 3y ago> Perhaps there's some level of overconfidence at play from systems thinkers who overintellectualize their ability to conceptualize and extrapolate forward an impossibly complex system. You may well be on to something. I'd trust a cabal of science fiction writers more than that I would trust these self appointed governors of our collective future. They lack imagination, for starters.
- OccamsMirror 3y agoScience fiction writers like L. Ron Hubbard?
- hallway_monitor 3y agoGood science fiction writers. Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke, even Orson Scott Card I'd trust more than today's politicians.
- rurp 3y agoI'm not sure we want Orson Scott Card deciding the future of humanity given his outspoken racist and homophobic beliefs, not to mention his warnings about Obama raising a secret army to become the next Hitler.
- jacquesm 3y agoAll four of those have some asterisks after their name that you may want to become familiar with.
- marcellus23 3y agoWho doesn't?
- dekhn 3y agoPlease say what you mean.
- jacquesm 3y agoIf you insist: - Heinlein https://www.spectator.com.au/2019/03/robert-a-heinlein-the-giant-of-sf-was-sexist-racist-and-certainly-no-stylist/ - Asimov https://www.publicbooks.org/asimovs-empire-asimovs-wall/ - Clarke https://www.vice.com/en/article/bjxp5m/we-asked-people-what-childhood-moment-shaped-them-the-most (nebulous, but credible) - Orson Scott Card https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orson_Scott_Card#Homosexuality_2 Sorry if that toppled any of your heroes. I have book by all of them on my shelves but they're not necessarily saints.
- dekhn 3y agoNone of them were my heroes, except card before he wrote Speaker for the Dead. More importantly, if you don't like somebody, don't just hint at it- give us a link.
- ak217 3y agoI have my doubts that those are good choices. But I would cautiously suggest Stephenson and Vinge.
- adolph 3y agoPhilip K Dick for all the boards
- jacquesm 3y agoNo, I didn't have him in mind. But he did have imagination. How many people do you know that can say that they founded a church that is even crazier than the ones that were already out there?
- next_xibalba 3y agoAnthony Levandowski, to name one.
- jacquesm 3y agoHe founded a church?
- next_xibalba 3y agoYes: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/18/anthony-levandowski-closes-his-church-of-ai/ https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/18/anthony-levandowski-closes...
- jacquesm 3y agoWOTF? WTF?? Thank you for that, it had completely passed me by.
- louky 3y agoWasn't that a bet with Heinlein? His entry was "Stranger in a Strange Land" which having a human raised by Martians as the main person was a bit better Oh and the fosterites were poking fun at Scientology, Mormons, and proto megachurch People. And his intent wasn't to rip off or lie to anyone
- jacquesm 3y agoYes, it was.
- drewcoo 3y agoBy the time Hubbard started his religion, he wasn't really able to be part of a cabal of SF authors. He started his own cabal.
- throwuwu 3y agoConsidering they get most of their doomsday predictions from science fiction I’d say that would be a smart bet. Why get it second hand, just go right to the source.
- spacecadet 3y agoAlways has been!
- empath-nirvana 3y agoTo put it another way, how are they going to control a super intelligent AI when they can't even control Sam Altman.
- 0xDEAFBEAD 3y agoI mean, that's essentially the thesis of the notkilleveryoneist position: We don't know how to control powerful agents, and we need to pause AI development in order to figure out.
- patcon 3y agoYou're making the case for the side you're critiquing
- 0xDEAFBEAD 3y ago>Perhaps there's some level of overconfidence at play from systems thinkers who overintellectualize their ability to conceptualize and extrapolate forward an impossibly complex system. Actually this is more or less the point that Eliezer Yudkowsky makes in this essay about the need for caution in AI development: https://www.econlib.org/archives/2016/03/so_far_unfriend.html https://www.econlib.org/archives/2016/03/so_far_unfriend.htm... (see especially points A/B/C/D) I doubt overconfidence is a problem specific to effective altruism. In any case, any good machine learning engineer knows that a dataset with only a single data point is essentially worthless -- even if we grant the premise that the board took the wrong action given the information they had available to them at the time.
- guiambros 3y agoIt's ironic how they'd have been more successful if they had followed recommendations from their own LLM [1] (or Bard [2]). Of course the recommendations are not that novel; that's CEO succession planning 101. But I guess none of those four have done any large succession planning, and were clearly out of their depth. [1] https://chat.openai.com/share/e77bc868-fe27-4346-9c13-0908e84a67de https://chat.openai.com/share/e77bc868-fe27-4346-9c13-0908e8... [2] https://g.co/bard/share/549edfddc624 https://g.co/bard/share/549edfddc624
- NumberWangMan 3y ago> how development of an unpredictable technology might pan out > how one decision would pan out I'm not sure what point you are making here. Are you trying to say "see, the AI not-kill-everyone-ists couldn't predict the future even in the short term, therefore we shouldn't put much credence into the the idea that the specific examples of AI doom they have given will happen"? Or are you trying to imply that the idea of AI doom as a whole is bunk, because we can't predict the future... therefore everything will be fine...?