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"Experts in the world on this topic" for self-driving cars, register-free retail and voice assistants made the same world-shattering claims. Anyone is free to "
by boh 3y ago
"Experts in the world on this topic" for self-driving cars, register-free retail and voice assistants made the same world-shattering claims. Anyone is free to "set off alarm bells" for anything. Silicon Valley has consistently undermined its own credibility by spending as much time and effort on BS as everything else.
The same "experts" on AI couldn't foresee what would happen when they decided to suddenly fire their CEO so it's not entirely reasonable to expect them to have some magic ability to tell the future (particularly when all of their messaging on any given product is specifically designed to entice investors).
- ethanbond 3y agoJust to recap, your argument is: "Some experts in some fields have been wrong before, ergo we have good reason to disbelieve some claims of some experts in this field (and by sheer coincidence the ones we should disbelieve are the ones I already disagree with)?" Another great example of faulty alarm bells. I'm all for approaching these claims with skepticism, but that's not what you're doing here. You are categorically discarding claims you already disagree with.
- nradov 3y agoThat's not how this works. Those "experts" making extraordinary claims haven't provided any evidence. Thus, the rest of us should categorically discard their claims.
- ethanbond 3y agoDo you think the people worried about nuclear weapons at the time the first atom was split had evidence for their claims or no?
- CamperBob2 3y agoThere has got to be a corollary to Godwin's Law here somewhere. "Any argument about AI will inevitably end up with a comparison to nuclear weapons. The conversation will go south from there," or some such.
- ethanbond 3y agoI am asking a legitimate question about what constitutes evidence to the person I'm speaking with. Some people think expecting scale-up is meaningful, and some people don't.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- nradov 3y agoYes, that's exactly my point! Back in 1945, nuclear physics was a well established science with actual experimental results. By contrast, 100% of the people making wild claims about AI risks are worthless scammers and grifters with no scientific backing. A total clown show.
- ethanbond 3y agoBut Einstein and Szilard wrote their letter to Eisenhower in 1939, well before any chain reaction had been achieved. Did that constitute a baseless concern? > 100% of the people making wild claims about AI risks are worthless scammers and grifters with no scientific backing. I mean this is demonstrably untrue: Sutskever, Suleyman, Hinton, Russell to name a few.