The word Apocalypse is on the table and if you agree that ignorance of History invites Doom then my brief perspective here may appeal to you (otherwise tl;dnr)

The word Apocalypse is on the table and if you agree that ignorance of History invites Doom then my brief perspective here may appeal to you (otherwise tl;dnr) ... From the AI Apocalypse Is Here essay: ... the truth that widespread interaction with machines endowed with conversational language abilities and superhuman cognitive power is the greatest social-psychological experiment the species has ever run. No. Our ongoing History would like a word. There is another. As a boy I had conversations with my grandfather who was born in 1888. If my parents were still alive they would be 104 years old. My older sister (deceased) did Duck & Cover drills in school (but I did not, as I am only 64). I have lived my whole life with always a small number of men able to (roughly) push a button and end our whole world. Like most of you, I don't think about that much. But the other day I parked outside a small town USA Post Office and noticed the faded yellow & black triangles icon on a sign reading: Bomb Shelter. The MAD reason this doom has not happened, despite apparently a number of close calls, is not that our past and present leaders are always wise good people, but that everyone in the high tech multi-trillion dollar nuclear weapons universe has, so far, plausibly believed that if they nuke, everyone else will nuke, inevitably being a Mutually Assured Destruction. The societies and voters and economies of the world's post WWII "great powers" had to be convinced and corralled (for way more than my whole 64 year lifetime) that this MAD experiment was going to work. And nuclear weapons pose a verifiable Apocalypse, not a maybe~AGI + maybe~Apocalypse. Have we been lucky? Or is MAD, genius? Both? I do see we are not in the mood/mode to be very MAD at exploding AI. So it will launch, whatever IT turns out to be.