Earlier quoted context omitted.
…are you sure a brave stance against safety and welfare is what we need in this moment? Why do you think your conception of the dangers are more accurate than all the scientists who have spent their lives studying this?
Because safety and welfare have literally nothing to do with LLMs. They generate text. If someone is stupid enough to hook the text generator up to nuclear missile launchers and try to "align" it against nuclear annihilation with a "pretty please don't do that" prompt, I'm not going to blame the AI for the impending nuclear apocalypse, I'm going to blame the idiot who handed the big red button to the digital equivale…
Lawyers and diplomats and politicians and bureaucrats are humans, that only generate text.
We are seeing LLMs have cognitive abilities that significantly exceed human abilities. At the same time, they are clearly not the same type of mind that humans are. They are something new.
I think the widespread "they are just text generators" and "they are just tools" are comforting lies rather than an honest look at what we are seeing right now. Intellectually lazy.
And by the way, there has been a long-standing consensus among ethicists, philosophers, and sociologists that technology is not value-neutral [1]. Of course Silicon Valley has a long-standing tradition of denying this.
[1] For example Footnote 1 in https://www.jstor.org/stable/27106634
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