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AI doomer doomers are probably wrong too. Call me an optimist, I think any real doom will be accounted for or caught in time before it reaches doom status.
> But there are plenty of people who do believe that AI either will or might kill all of humanity, and they take this idea very seriously. They don’t just think “AI could take our jobs” or “AI could accidentally cause a big disaster” or “AI will be bad for the environment/capitalism/copyright/etc”. They think that AI is advancing so fast that pretty soon we’re going to create a godlike artificial intelligence which w…
There are also people worried about extinction, that call themselves "AI Alignment" people (more recently some have taken to call themselves "AI notkilleveryoneists" because the felt like every word they invented to describe their worries was soon applied to worries about jobs, systemic racism etc').
Importantly, these people and their worries are responsible for the special structure of OpenAI, which seems to have been founded at least partially by people who believe this. Importantly, it seems to be the core reason behind the sama drama. That is what the article discusses, and that is about the notkilleveryoneists, not the jobs doomers, though those exist too.
And his solution is for them to realize that they are net-negative and just... quit?
If somebody sincerely believes a comet is about to hit earth and kill everyone unless we all get together and send a bunch of miner-astonauts to Armageddon it to smithereens, I don't think telling them "stop trying to fix it, you're just causing a panic and wasting resources, sit back and let everyone else work on their problems that have a higher chance of being resolved" would be very convincing. To them, you would look quite stupid. And mentioning in glancing that you think everything they believe is silly sci-fi without justifying it wouldn't help much.
The steam engine made hash of the civilizational moral imperative to work for one's living. Suddenly, instead of N people's labor being needed to support N people, 0.1N or 0.2N people's labor could support N people. What was there for the others to do? So all -- exactly all -- of the political debates of the long 19th and 20th Centuries (where politics is taken to include war) were based on the pretense that the steam engine had no such consequence.
Or how about radio? The invention of radio made it impossible to secure national boundaries. Ask any dictator (and every nation has one): if information can cross borders, then it does not even matter whether persons or money or goods also can. School's out, game's over. Do you want to seal your border? What (in principle) a fine idea! Just round up all radio-based technology and put it beyond use. But "all" means everywhere in the world, and in space.
Briefly, the human species has the rational capacity to invent toys for itself but absolutely no emotional capacity to think through or confront the consequences of possessing them or the implications of using them.
This is the doom of AI, just as it was and still is the doom of the printing press, the steam engine, radio, television, social media, etc., etc., etc.
I am not an AI doomer, nor overly concerned with AI risk, but this post isn't a good rebuttal to the AI doomers. It mostly says "Nuh-uh, you're all being stupid".
I am not interested in news that somebody died because of a hammer.
I want to know who weilded the hammer.