Humanity isn't ready for the coming intelligence explosion

It’s hard to take seriously a statement like this that’s grounded in “the last three years” when trends have tended to play out over decades. The fact the goal posts have moved from thousands to hundreds to decades to single digit years for massive transformation should give you a moment of pause in your bag saying.

I would however agree there are no experts. Not because of some prediction made on a short time scale not landing 100% but that there are literally no experts because expertise takes experience which takes time. There are no experts and no one knows what happens next. We are on the verge of where the foresight of science fiction effectively -ends-, the advent of AI is when things go a thousand possible directions and the stories stop there (sans a few like accelerando, but even then the story just plays out the end of thinking mass). No one knows what’s next, or when.

In fact I’d assert in many areas being discussed -it has already happened- and we don’t know it, and by the time we do it’ll be over. Not to be breathless, but there’s no reason to believe today some AI researcher somewhere didn’t build the first AGI and not be totally aware. And once they are there’s no reason to believe it’s going to be on the evening news or hacker news. By the time it’s ready for commercializing and disclosing it’ll be around for a while. Likewise with general purpose robots, autonomous weapons (btw already tested by Ukraine), etc.

They have to act together. Universities should take part too. Let's get these national and international forums started.

> Ultimately, what counts is what we do with it.

Looking at the people in charge of these companies, and the sheer lack of understanding by the broad consumer market using them, I have nothing but pessimism about the direction that this technology takes us.

I couldn't read the whole article, but just from the part I could read:

> Strikingly, this concern is being openly voiced by the very people who have the strongest incentives to project confidence rather than alarm: the founders of the largest ai laboratories.

I don't know, they also have an incentive to make their technology seem transformative and powerful, and saying that your technology has the power to cause a massive catastrophe is a way to promote that idea.

> Experts in artificial intelligence estimate the risk of an AI-caused catastrophic event at 10-50%.

I don't think it's that high but can we put that aside and focus on the 100% chance that it's being used to enshittify every part of our lives?