Humanity isn't ready for the coming intelligence explosion • Hacker News Board

Re: Humanity isn't ready for the coming intelligence explosion

#521

Post by sirspacey » Thu, Jun 18, 2026, 8:11 AM UTC

There’s a blind spot in this argument that seems to be beyond the reach of intelligent people to recognize.

Humanity has almost never been prepared for anything and almost never successfully prepared when it has chosen to.

almost all progress has been in reaction to change that has already happened.

while on its face this piece is a logical, reasonable stance, it is more likely to become a political foil than deliver anything tangible.

we can either have superintelligence or others will have it and we will not. guns, germs, and steel and all that.

it is bizarre how convinced we are that we can take coordinated action in advance of a threat as a body politic or a species.

Re: Humanity isn't ready for the coming intelligence explosion

#522

Post by tsss » Thu, Jun 18, 2026, 2:10 PM UTC

_DeadFred_ wrote: post #413

saulpw wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Companies don't serve poor people; they have no money. Companies will pivot to serving the people who have money. If that means they only serve rich people, then that means we'll have more yacht makers and fewer dollar stores.

Early industrialization meant industrial canneries to feed people, building cities to house everyone from the countryside, indoor plumbing. And the AI revolution is no housing, worsening food, a few people with yachts, the Epstein class getting away with what they want to do, and no new plumbing hookups because the datacenter took the municipal water supply.

You got it the wrong way around. Industrial revolution happened _because_ there was demand from a new middle class for those goods.

Re: Humanity isn't ready for the coming intelligence explosion

#523

Post by frognumber » Thu, Jun 18, 2026, 3:11 PM UTC

al_borland wrote: post #54

frognumber wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Be a Bayesian, and they'll stop annoying you. If you have a 5% chance of thermonuclear war each decade for 10 decades, you'll: - Hear similar annoying statements - They'll be true With AI, we don't know if it's one week or one decade. This means we should assign probabilities and consider all possibilities, not get annoyed.

Assigning, and more specifically announcing/reporting on, all possibilities makes all of these predictions meaningless. If I predict the world will end every single day from now until forever, I will most certainly be right eventually. That doesn’t make me an “expert” or someone worth listening to on the topic. That’s the playbook of a doomsday cult, not anyone that should drive world markets.

s/all possibilities/all possibilities with odds greater than some threshold/g

There's no reason to report on the odds of a meteor falling on my head tomorrow. There is every reason to consider the odds of:

- Nuclear apocalypse (esp. Cold War era)

- Bioweapon

- Climate change leading to disaster

- AI apocalypse

- Etc.

None of those are infinitesimal odds. That contrasts with, say, a zombie virus.

Re: Humanity isn't ready for the coming intelligence explosion

#524

Post by ipdashc » Thu, Jun 18, 2026, 3:55 PM UTC

esafak wrote: post #408

ipdashc wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, makes sense, if they just spent a bunch of money they could answer all of those "political, social, economical, moral questions". All of these unprecedented sociological and labor market changes flying towards us are trivially solvable, we just need to... what, hire a few dozen economists? Fund a team of philosophers to think about it really hard for a few months?

You are right; a bunch of trillion dollar companies that are cracking artificial intelligence couldn't possibly muster the resources to solve such problems, so they ought to plow full steam ahead and let everyone else worry about the fallout.

So do you have any thoughts on how they could "solve such problems" or are we unironically going for the "hire a team of philosophers and hope they can just think it out really hard"?