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I'm sure that has nothing to do with decades of self-propagandizing that AI was something to be feared in fiction coupled with a year now of everyone who writes
by kromem 3y ago
I'm sure that has nothing to do with decades of self-propagandizing that AI was something to be feared in fiction coupled with a year now of everyone who writes for a living embodying the Upton Sinclair quote "don't expect someone to understand something their job depends on them not understanding."
I haven't seen a positive article on AI from mainstream press in at least a year.
Yeah, under those conditions public sentiment is going to be influenced in a given direction.
- reducesuffering 3y ago"don't expect someone to understand something their job depends on them not understanding." Sam Altman, Yoshua Bengio, and Geoffrey Hinton all think AGI is coming soon and could be an existential threat to all of humanity. So I agree, I don't expect people (tech startups) to understand something (AGI x-Risk) when their job (developing AGI and making $) depends on them not understanding it.
- Etherlord87 3y agoThere are arguments that AGI could become something much worse than the destroyer of the humanity: it could completely displace consciousness throughout the entire cosmos. Assuming it wouldn't be conscious and would never gain consciousness itself for some reason.
- exe34 3y agoI suppose it's possible to do a lot of taking over and displacing without actually being conscious. Think back to the last time you got frustrated with a computer system that wouldn't do the right thing as you see it, but there was nobody to actually complain to. Now imagine that same wretched program has control over your biosphere or somehow controls your off switch.
- nobaelazum 3y agoKind of like how we treat animals. That is pretty scary.
- Etherlord87 3y agoI'd argue AI is incomparably more dangerous than nuclear weaponry, so it makes sense that such propaganda exists. Granted, there are very limited positive aspects of nuclear weapons, while positive potential aspects of AI could arguably outweigh the risks.
- kromem 3y agoIt's a bit of a nonsense statement given the degree of nuances. Even with something like nukes, while yes dangerous and terrible weapons, it's arguably quite likely that without them existing we'd have had WWIII by now but for the threat of mutually assured destruction. How 'bad' and 'good' things in narrow scopes actually play out across exponentially larger scopes is almost impossible to predict or qualify. (Also, a lot of the classic threat modeling for AI was extrapolating obsolete anthropological models of past intelligence emergence on precursor species. We just sort of continue carrying forward a number of assumptions we should arguably be much more critical of.)
- oglop 3y agoThat you think it is more dangerous than a nuclear weapon is so bonkers to me lol. I’ve heard this sentiment a ton and I flat out don’t get it.
- darkwraithcov 3y agoIf we don’t solve alignment, then yeah it very well might be Terminator but really dumb and embarrassing while its happening and people deny its happening. I dont know if we are gonna have a robot apocalypse, but if we do I can guarantee its going to be incredibly fucking stupid.
- oglop 3y agoOk. Pretty sure any apocalypse is stupid lol. Yeah there’s no such thing as the alignment problem. Shrug.
- 3y ago