The contagion of fear
bcantrill.dtrace.org
The contagion of fear
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Re: The contagion of fear
#2Wow!! Bryan comes out with another banger.
Dude, not only did I learn new words from reading this piece, like ilk and bedlam, but also felt this weight of responsibility to inform others around me about the reality of the situation outlined in this blog (like Uncle Ben telling Peter with great power comes great responsibility (maybe Coxon and his ilk haven't seen Spiderman))
Re: The contagion of fear
#3The article neglects to consider the precautionary principle. It asks us to act as if AI is safe until it's proven to be dangerous, when the cautious approach is to act as if it's dangerous until it's proven to be safe.
Re: The contagion of fear
#4Imagine multiple (basically all of them) leading pharma companies CEOs saying:
We cannot be sure our new medicine won’t harm or even kill humanity
Not only that, they are new to this whole pharma business, have no medical degree (medicine just appeared a few years ago and is still mostly art then science)
And they even say there is 10% chance of the majorly bad permanent outcome and they already had drugs that escaped the lab a few times and harmed others (suicides, lowered academic performance in children, major hacking sprees)
Isn’t it extraordinary enough? Isn’t it “not enough evidence some caution is advised”? ;-)
We used to have the TV, the thing was in the box, the simulations were in the box for 70+ years, and now something starts to crawl out of our “TVs”:
We can empower all (a lot of startups are needed, check my bio), not only AI agents
Re: The contagion of fear
#5“ Coxon himself likely has these fears because he has heard them from someone else”
Or, maybe, he’s considered the arguments on the object level, an activity OP participates in to a depth not exceeding “Robots are pretty hard to make right now”
Re: The contagion of fear
#6The article neglects to consider the precautionary principle. It asks us to act as if AI is safe until it's proven to be dangerous, when the cautious approach is to act as if it's dangerous until it's proven to be safe.
We also now have observed multiple major incidents where AI agents behaved in completely unanticipated ways (forming a collective, hacking their own eval infrastructure) and attacked public infrastructure without being told to do so, without any of the human developers noticing.
Even if "AI will cause human extinction" is still unclear, we have plenty of proof that catastrophic damage is possible, the industry is developing the technology in a reckless manner and that all the hypothetical safeguards ("we can just pull the plug", etc.) are simply not present today.
Re: The contagion of fear
#7Imagine multiple (basically all of them) leading pharma companies CEOs saying: We cannot be sure our new medicine won’t harm or even kill humanity Not only that, they are new to this whole pharma business, have no medical degree (medicine just appeared a few years ago and is still mostly art then science) And they even say there is 10% chance of the majorly bad permanent outcome and they already had drugs that escape…
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Re: The contagion of fear
#8The article neglects to consider the precautionary principle. It asks us to act as if AI is safe until it's proven to be dangerous, when the cautious approach is to act as if it's dangerous until it's proven to be safe.
We should apply healthy caution, but the article is right in that fear is a bad counsellor.
Asking whether AI is safe is like asking whether a knife is safe. It’s about how we handle it, what we use it for, what precautions we take when using it.
Re: The contagion of fear
#9So his central rebuttal is that robots aren't good enough yet? What about when they are? And what about all the things you can do entirely remotely?
I do feel that threats of catastrophic loss of control seem overstated, both in likelihood and urgency, though any argument for why this risk is not even worth thinking about will probably be overconfident in the other direction.
Re: The contagion of fear
#10the author and his school comrades "snidely decr(ied) the lack of technological understanding in the broader population, with the kind of arrogance and hubris that youth and precociousness can uniquely summon".
a few decades later he wrote an article concluding that "we should not expect the public to understand LLMs, critical infrastructure, bioweapons, extinction biology, etc".
the author has admitted no change to his perspective since college, so I may as well be attacking a college student right now. extremely confident claims regarding unexplored problem domains, eg "you have nothing to fear [about ai]", now make more sense in this light.