4 ms·
TLDR: AGI doomers who talk about extinction are baseless. At 10m, he gives 3 doomer scenarios: nukes, bioweapons, and nanotech. He asks: "Is engineering an ac
by AlexErrant 2y ago
TLDR: AGI doomers who talk about extinction are baseless.
At 10m, he gives 3 doomer scenarios: nukes, bioweapons, and nanotech.
He asks: "Is engineering an act of intelligence alone?" He spends ~15m supporting the answer of "lol no". (He also says that science is harder than engineering, and AI will need science to kill us all.)
This isn't to say he's e/acc - at 35m he mentions how AI can continue racism, economic dislocation, classism, etc.
His conclusion is we need to focus on the real problems, not the "human extinction" ones.
- mlyle 2y agoI think there's plenty of scenarios where AGI causes doom that's short of extinction but still super bad. I don't know what the probability of these scenarios are. LLMs are remarkably incapable but still seem to be pretty effective at crushing the morale and initiative of many students. Deepfakes are going to make it harder and harder for anyone to determine what's actually true. The machines don't have to kill us or directly crush our quality of life. If they disrupt the social order enough, we'll do that to ourselves.
- AlexErrant 2y agoOkay gave my tldr more nuance. It was clearly too short.
- mlyle 2y agoOh, I think your TLDR was valid. I just don't think his response to AGI doom is adequate. If cheap, equal-to-human intelligence showed up tomorrow, it would be hugely disruptive to the social order.
- gary_0 2y agoThere's no guarantee that current generative AI won't be hugely disruptive to the social order in the near future. But I don't think that qualifies as an "AI apocalypse", since the problem is that it's just another kick to the labor-versus-capital beehive, not so much the technology itself. Unemployed writers and artists (and programmers?) going around blowing up datacenters would just be Luddism 2.0, not humanity vanquishing Skynet.