The illusion of AI’s existential risk
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The illusion of AI’s existential risk
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Re: The illusion of AI’s existential risk
#2We live in a very confusing, transitory time. Right now there's a large chunk of people who are convinced that we are a few years away from extinction if we do not ration out GPUs and bomb illegal clusters of compute, while at the same time there's a large chunk that believes that a car can never navigate a single-lane one-way tunnel safely without a driver (ie, The Boring Company). Absolutely wild.
Re: The illusion of AI’s existential risk
#3We live in a very confusing, transitory time. Right now there's a large chunk of people who are convinced that we are a few years away from extinction if we do not ration out GPUs and bomb illegal clusters of compute, while at the same time there's a large chunk that believes that a car can never navigate a single-lane one-way tunnel safely without a driver (ie, The Boring Company). Absolutely wild.
"Convinced that we are a few years from extinction," is an exaggeration of the pessimistic/alarmed end of the spectrum of opinion.
All the forecasts I've seen have the period of danger spread out over at least 20 or 30 years, and no one claims to understand the topic well enough to be able to tell whether a particular model is dangerous even if given complete freedom to examine the source code and interview the creators.
Our inability to predict is in large part the basis of the pessimism/alarm because it means that the leading labs won't know when to stop.
Re: The illusion of AI’s existential risk
#4We live in a very confusing, transitory time. Right now there's a large chunk of people who are convinced that we are a few years away from extinction if we do not ration out GPUs and bomb illegal clusters of compute, while at the same time there's a large chunk that believes that a car can never navigate a single-lane one-way tunnel safely without a driver (ie, The Boring Company). Absolutely wild.
> a car can never navigate a single-lane one-way tunnel safely without a driver (ie, The Boring Company).
I think the criticisms of the Boring Company are more "small diameter tunnels are a bad way to build high-throughput underground infrastructure, and autonomous cars will not solve that"
Re: The illusion of AI’s existential risk
#5We live in a very confusing, transitory time. Right now there's a large chunk of people who are convinced that we are a few years away from extinction if we do not ration out GPUs and bomb illegal clusters of compute, while at the same time there's a large chunk that believes that a car can never navigate a single-lane one-way tunnel safely without a driver (ie, The Boring Company). Absolutely wild.
I've only seen grifters, hysterics, or the ignorant talking about existential AI risk. A lot of people just nods their heads and go along, but I don't think there are many that have really thought about it (and understand what modern AI is) that really belive the risk.
It's more like political polarization where people dwell on something they don't agree with to the point where they treat it as if the world is going to end because of it, instead of in context. AI is more like the political party they don't like winning, potentially undesirable from a certain point of view but they see it as "existential".
I think it's important to see it in this light, instead of trying to actually debate the points raised, which are absurd and will only give credibility where none is due.
Re: The illusion of AI’s existential risk
#6AGI doesn't ever have to happen for rapid deployment of AI based systems to cause harm.
Google "robodebt australia" for what happens when government uses machine derived decisions to penalise the poor.
Re: The illusion of AI’s existential risk
#7I don’t understand why economic disruption and human obsolescence isn’t considered an existential risk. We could end up in a world where 99.99% of people are redundant and useless cost centers for our GDP maximizing economic paradigm. In that case, you don’t need killer robots in order to push humanity towards near-extinction. The invisible hand will smite them.
But don’t worry, TED Talk attendee. The obsoletariat mostly won’t be Americans. The median member of this class will probably be Chinese or Indian. So you can continue your performative concerns about Roko’s Basillisk or whatever topic of distant, paralyzing uncertainty is overflowing from the next room into mine.
Re: The illusion of AI’s existential risk
#8We live in a very confusing, transitory time. Right now there's a large chunk of people who are convinced that we are a few years away from extinction if we do not ration out GPUs and bomb illegal clusters of compute, while at the same time there's a large chunk that believes that a car can never navigate a single-lane one-way tunnel safely without a driver (ie, The Boring Company). Absolutely wild.
"Convinced that we are a few years from extinction," is an exaggeration of the pessimistic/alarmed end of the spectrum of opinion. All the forecasts I've seen have the period of danger spread out over at least 20 or 30 years, and no one claims to understand the topic well enough to be able to tell whether a particular model is dangerous even if given complete freedom to examine the source code and interview the creat…
Exactly. And here is an example of that inability in the much clearer case:
"How many years after 1945 ... would it take for the Soviet Union to get the bomb? Framed this way, it was a much easier question than forecasting the advent of AGI: The Americans were concerned with only one adversary and the development of a single technology which they already knew all the details of. American predictions of Soviet proliferation offer a highly constrained case study for those who would undertake technological forecasting today."
Re: The illusion of AI’s existential risk
#9I don’t understand why economic disruption and human obsolescence isn’t considered an existential risk. We could end up in a world where 99.99% of people are redundant and useless cost centers for our GDP maximizing economic paradigm. In that case, you don’t need killer robots in order to push humanity towards near-extinction. The invisible hand will smite them. But don’t worry, TED Talk attendee. The obsoletariat mo…
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Re: The illusion of AI’s existential risk
#10I don’t understand why economic disruption and human obsolescence isn’t considered an existential risk. We could end up in a world where 99.99% of people are redundant and useless cost centers for our GDP maximizing economic paradigm. In that case, you don’t need killer robots in order to push humanity towards near-extinction. The invisible hand will smite them. But don’t worry, TED Talk attendee. The obsoletariat mo…
This is a problem with capitalism in general, not just with AI.