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You are the scariest monster in the woods

jamie.ideasasylum.com

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Re: You are the scariest monster in the woods

#41

Post by whycombinetor »

graemep wrote: post #32
whycombinetor wrote: post #17

"We (humans) are the scariest animal in the woods. We’re the scariest animal anywhere. At any time, in any location, under any circumstances, if there’s a human present then that’s the scariest motherfucker in the woods." Has this guy not heard of the Bengal tigers of the Sundarban forests, which kill ~50 humans per year? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiger_attacks_in_the_Sundarban...

> Has this guy not heard of the Bengal tigers of the Sundarban forests, which kill ~50 humans per year? How many tigers have been killed by humans? How many would be killed if humans did not restrain each other from killing tigers because we have killed so many that they are endangered. That population could be entirely wiped out by humans in the area. Mosquitoes kill far more people than tigers. So do venomous snake…

This isn't about what humans have done at other times or in other places. The author wrote "At any time, in any location, under any circumstances", so the statement can be proven false with one single counterexample - e.g. a lone human without a firearm encountering a tiger in the Indian Sundarbans.

Re: You are the scariest monster in the woods

#42

Post by excalibur »

Filligree wrote: post #33
ekimekim wrote: post #6

As always, there is a relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1968/

We can worry about both. There being additional dangers does not reduce the impact of the other dangers.

True, but one of them is much more imminent than the other.

Re: You are the scariest monster in the woods

#43

Post by Insanity »

So “guns don’t kill people, people with guns kill people”.

But for AI I’m not sure that preposition will hold indefinitely. Although I do think we are a far away from having actual AGI that would pose this threat.

Still, the author has a good but obvious point.

Re: You are the scariest monster in the woods

#44

Post by woeirua »

There's this weird disconnect in tech circles, where everyone is deathly afraid of AGI, but totally asleep on the very real possibility of thermonuclear war breaking out in Europe or Asia over the next 10 years. There's already credible evidence that we came perilously close to the use of tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine which likely would've spiraled out of control. AGI might happen, but the threat of nuclear war keeps me up at night.

Re: You are the scariest monster in the woods

#45

Post by jncfhnb »

myrmidon wrote: post #30
alansaber wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps the AGI people thinking we can catch up millions of years of evolution in a handful of years

If you make the same argument for flight it looks really weak. Cognition is (to me) not even the most impressive and out-of-reach achievement: That would be how (our) and animals bodies are self-assembling, self-repairing and self-replicating, with an impressive array of sensors and actors in a highly integrated package. I honestly believe our current technology is much closer to emulating a human brain than it is to…

Flight leverages well established and accessible world engine physics APIs. Intelligence has to be programmed from lower level mechanics.

Edit: put another way, I bet the ancient Greeks (or whoever) could have figured out flight if they had access to gasoline and gasoline powered engines without any of the advanced mathematics that were used to guide the design.

Re: You are the scariest monster in the woods

#46

Post by pixl97 »

wmeredith wrote: post #19
us-merul wrote: post #5

"Humans will do what they’ve always tried to do—gain power, enslave, kill, control, exploit, cheat, or just be lazy and avoid the hard work—but now with new abilities that we couldn’t have dreamed of." -- A pretty bleak, and also accurate, observation of humanity. I have to hope that the alternative sentence encompassing all of the good can lead to some balance.

I really liked this article, but it is pessimistic. Unfortunately that seems to be the culture-du-jour. Anger and fear drive engagement effectively, as it always has. If it bleeds, it Leeds has been a thing in news organizations since at least the 70s. If we ignore the headlines peddled by those who stand to benefit the most from inflaming and inciting, we live in a miraculous modern age largely devoid of much of the…

I mean, any article that doesn't include both is incomplete.

>If it bleeds, it Leeds has been a thing in news organizations since at least the 70s.

The term yellow journalism is far older.

Re: You are the scariest monster in the woods

#47

Post by [deleted] »

myrmidon wrote: post #13

I struggle to understand how people can just dismiss the possibility of artificial intelligence. Human cognition was basically bruteforced by evolution-- why would it be impossible to achieve the exact same result in silicon, especially after we already demonstrated some parts of those results (e.g. use of language) that critically set us apart from other animals? I'm not buying the whole "AI has no agency" line eith…

[deleted]

Re: You are the scariest monster in the woods

#48

Post by seniortaco »

jvanderbot wrote: post #11

About as helpful as "Guns don't kill people ... " And equally rebutted by Eddie Izzards "Well, I think the gun helps".

My thought as well. Nuclear weapons are also horrifying.

And with LLMs, it's difficult to prevent the proliferation to bad actors.

It seems like we're racing towards a world of fakery where nothing can be believed, even when wielded by good actors. I really hope LLMs can actually add value at a significant level.

Re: You are the scariest monster in the woods

#49

Post by runjake »

woeirua wrote: post #44

There's this weird disconnect in tech circles, where everyone is deathly afraid of AGI, but totally asleep on the very real possibility of thermonuclear war breaking out in Europe or Asia over the next 10 years. There's already credible evidence that we came perilously close to the use of tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine which likely would've spiraled out of control. AGI might happen, but the threat of nuclear war…

100%.

Except the things that kill most of us[1] keeps me up at night.

1. https://ourworldindata.org/does-the-news-reflect-what-we-die...

Re: You are the scariest monster in the woods

#50

Post by Chance-Device »

boole1854 wrote: post #22
myrmidon wrote: post #13

I struggle to understand how people can just dismiss the possibility of artificial intelligence. Human cognition was basically bruteforced by evolution-- why would it be impossible to achieve the exact same result in silicon, especially after we already demonstrated some parts of those results (e.g. use of language) that critically set us apart from other animals? I'm not buying the whole "AI has no agency" line eith…

If anyone knows of a steelman version of the "AGI is not possible" argument, I would be curious to read it. I also have trouble understanding what goes into that point of view.

The only thing I can come up with is that compressing several hundred million years of natural selection of animal nervous systems into another form, but optimised by gradient descent instead, just takes a lot of time.

Not that we can’t get there by artificial means, but that correctly simulating the environment interactions, the sequence of progression, getting the all the details right, might take hundreds to thousands of years of compute, rather than on the order of a few months.

And it might be that you can get functionally close, but hit a dead end, and maybe hit several dead ends along the way, all of which are close but no cigar. Perhaps LLMs are one such dead end.

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