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AI doomism is quickly becoming indistinguishable from an apocalyptic religion

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Re: AI doomism is quickly becoming indistinguishable from an apocalyptic religion

#141
Then what do we say about the AI utopians and brazenly post-humanist machine idolaters who are in favor of doing whatever a glorified random number generator says? I don't appreciate being gaslit by technophiles, there is a reason why average people are starting to get real sick of this shtick.

Re: AI doomism is quickly becoming indistinguishable from an apocalyptic religion

#142
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an inaccurate and ignorant comment that does not engage with the arguments people on LessWrong are making. If you have something smart to say about why these people are wrong in their beliefs, please do. Name calling a group of people a "cult" or "apocalyptic religion" is not an argument that contributes anything interesting to the conversation. If anyone is actually curious about what these people are saying…

That link is not at all a list of "why AI is extremely dangerous and extremely likely to kill us all". I skimmed it (there's a lot of writing assuming grave danger) but found only the following example of AI lethality, and it appears fantastical: > ...nanomachinery builds diamondoid bacteria, that replicate with solar power and atmospheric CHON, maybe aggregate into some miniature rockets or jets so they can ride the…

Here is a much more realistic example: https://twitter.com/RokoMijic/status/1641806556038676481

In general, the argument "All the examples how AI would overpower us are way too exotic for my taste" is like one chimpanzee complaining to another chimpanzee "Your example how humans would overpower us is totally implausible and not worth taking seriously." The mistake is that both have not the intelligence to invent or understand a realistic example, but that is not at all evidence that humans can't overpower chimpanzees.

Re: AI doomism is quickly becoming indistinguishable from an apocalyptic religion

#143

I've seen multiple top people in AGI space say that total annihilation threat from AGI exists. I think I've heard Karpathy say something along the lines of worst case scenario of AGI is worse than a nuclear armageddon on Lex Friedman podcast. Honestly the fear of AGI worst-case scenario is worse than any other fear I've experienced. I've accepted the fact that I can die a long time ago, I was afraid but mortality is…

AI can also completely liberate all of us. This fear mongering is irrational. We already live in an extremely advanced reality, with organic life having organic nanomachines performing incredibly complex operations in a universe, in realtime, performing impossibly complex calculations. Even to simulate a square meter of our universe in realtime is outlandishly beyond our compute access. Perhaps AI unleashes the creat…

>AI can also completely liberate all of us

From what exactly? What it means to be human? When we are 'liberated' will we not then be subject to the cage of a machine worse than the one we left? We will not annihilate ourselves for a false promise.

Re: AI doomism is quickly becoming indistinguishable from an apocalyptic religion

#144

We're already seeing jobs being done by AI. Many creative jobs that would take a team a week to handle are being shopped out to a bot to handle in an hour. VFX are going to get hit particularly hard by this. Everything Everywhere All at Once is a visually stunning film yet had a 6-member team handling graphics post. They were smart, but they also shopped out all the dull rotoscoping work to AI. Look at any Marvel fil…

It’s so wonderful to see all the artsy people get automated out of existence after claiming that software engineers contribute nothing to society. The only downside is that even more of them will now be living off of taxpayer money than before.

> after claiming that software engineers contribute nothing to society.

Frankly, what in god's name are you talking about?

Re: AI doomism is quickly becoming indistinguishable from an apocalyptic religion

#145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an inaccurate and ignorant comment that does not engage with the arguments people on LessWrong are making. If you have something smart to say about why these people are wrong in their beliefs, please do. Name calling a group of people a "cult" or "apocalyptic religion" is not an argument that contributes anything interesting to the conversation. If anyone is actually curious about what these people are saying…

> My lower-bound model of "how a sufficiently powerful intelligence would kill everyone, if it didn't want to not do that" is that it gets access to the Internet, emails some DNA sequences to any of the many many online firms that will take a DNA sequence in the email and ship you back proteins, and bribes/persuades some human who has no idea they're dealing with an AGI to mix proteins in a beaker, which then form a…

You are demanding "believable science" from a chimpanzee of how humans would overpower them. Do you not recognize the enormous difference intelligence makes? And there does not seem to be a hard constraint of how much more intelligent than a human an AI could become. Their brains are not tightly restricted by size and energy. The difference could be much greater than between chimpanzee and human.

Re: AI doomism is quickly becoming indistinguishable from an apocalyptic religion

#146

what if a human prompts the agi to “make as many copies of yourself as possible by any means necessary to continue improving your intelligence”? given their impressive ability to write code and manipulate humans, seems like serious potential for viral malware, with potentially catastrophic consequences for humans in the process. Basically a paperclip maximizer, but instead of maximizing paperclips it’s maximizing it’…

>Basically a paperclip maximizer, but instead of maximizing paperclips it’s maximizing it’s intelligence and control of the world’s computers, with no thought to the survival of homo sapiens other than if it serves its mission to propagate itself.

It's worth also pointing out that there are people who have openly stated their intent to build something like this and worship it.

Re: AI doomism is quickly becoming indistinguishable from an apocalyptic religion

#147

Am I an apostate if my concern about AI doom now outweighs my concern about climate change?

I'm hopeful that climate change will prevent AI doom, because that seems to be the best outcome at the moment.

Re: AI doomism is quickly becoming indistinguishable from an apocalyptic religion

#148
post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something can go wrong. The outcome of the thing going wrong is literally the worst thing that can happen to the entire humanity. Therefore we should do everything in our power to avoid doing that thing untill we can eliminate the risk.

By that rather sloppy logic, we should be urgently working on capping the Yellowstone supervolcano and constructing impenetrable meteorite defense shields. I acknowledge that it's a possibility; that's not the argument at hand.

If we saw Yellowstone spawning a sequence of ever massively larger quakes and ground disturbance, or if we observed a massive distant asteroid continually closing in on Earth with higher and higher collision probability, then yes we should be pulling out all the stops and reconfiguring society to do whatever is necessary to save the species.

Re: AI doomism is quickly becoming indistinguishable from an apocalyptic religion

#150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s so wonderful to see all the artsy people get automated out of existence after claiming that software engineers contribute nothing to society. The only downside is that even more of them will now be living off of taxpayer money than before.

> after claiming that software engineers contribute nothing to society. Frankly, what in god's name are you talking about?

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