So... AI and cannabis bad... Tobacco and alcohol good... It's the American Way??? Personally, I think he nailed it with the first paragraph and went downhil

So... AI and cannabis bad... Tobacco and alcohol good... It's the American Way??? Personally, I think he nailed it with the first paragraph and went downhill from there. If humanity needs an intellectual codpiece to stay relevant, humanity IMO has failed their own Turing test. To truly believe the only two outcomes are we stop AI before it's too late or humanity is replaced by it goes against the past 10,000 years of technological progress (and yes, it came with a body count, we are still poo flinging monkeys with opposable thumbs after all despite all the hubbub about fire, the wheel, and everything else). The problems with our experiment in democracy are broadly political and not technological. By all means, regulate the deployment of AI and crack down on surveillance to boost privacy and freedom, also known as "wouldn't be prudent" or "not gonna happen" because capitalism and freedom. For example, if I were to suggest that the left and the right do not need to agree on renewables and nuclear, but there's no reason they couldn't agree that coal is bad, that's not gonna happen either. A friend recently stated that most of these problems will not be addressed until enough people have died in the west because of them as he pointed to the recent European heat wave. That's my prediction for everything else that comes to mind, two podcasts from a revolution and all that. IMO we should work towards AI offloading reasoning and drudgery to enable and assist humans instead of replacing them. Even the best two models out there frequently hallucinate and downright lie to the user, they are essentially Rainman and we need to be Tom Cruise to their Dustin Hoffman for the foreseeable future. But such a viewpoint doesn't hit the engagement numbers of going Yudkowsky light as this article does so we don't get pieces like it or if we did, they would never see enough eyeballs to get traction. Western corporate socialism is the equivalent of the big bad malevolent AGI we all feared, and we're all still here, we could all do something about it, but my money is sadly still on the opiates of the masses keeping us in check for the near-term. And relying on the opinions of a small cabal of billionaires who likely couldn't bathe themselves without assistance at this point in their antihero's journey to predict what's coming with AI is folly, but it is a cautionary tale to not let that happen in the first place by staying intellectually engaged and mastering the technology instead of the exact opposite that most seem to prefer. My tradespeople friends continue to do just fine. Good luck building robots that can replace them (Sorry Karl). Too bad they're only 15% or so of the work force. But I don't think anyone gets how hard it's going to be to give LLMs and their ilk the common sense they need to really really really replace 60% of the workforce with white collar jobs. And while self-checkout kiosks do replace cashiers, I don't get why anyone misses them. Ditto for the accidents waiting to happen roaming the aisles of Amazon fulfillment centers. Where is the quiet dignity of such work that must be preserved? Also, by all means give me the robots to work in the mines. See "not gonna happen" above for the same reason we won't be replacing tradespeople any time soon. It's up there in my mind with the smaller cost of giving everyone over 50 in coal early social security to retire the segment down to the point of industrial coal, but see "wouldn't be prudent" above. And then there's the barb about individualism. Sure, LLMs were trained just like Freakazoid to have the powers of the Internet. But anyone trying to use one straight out of pre-training is gonna have a bad time. There is significant post-training to shape the user experience that can be individualize and fine-tuned to any task for which it will continue to hallucinate and lie because trying to control hyperdimensional silly putty like LLMs is hard, but it's not 100% mean reversion. In the end, I'm probably as deeply pessimistic about the future as the author of this article, but for completely different reasons. America, the country that went to the moon in 10 years and walked away from global conquest after WWII stands poised to make itself irrelevant and cave to the reckless agenda of pleasing the billionaire class. AI is a sideshow in comparison IMO and we absolutely have the power and capability to deploy it responsibly, it's just that we won't because that would make the billionaires sad.