Comment by SideburnsOfDoom
2 years ago
It's a hell of a conditional, though.
"How are all those monkeys flying out of my butt?" would be the important technical problem of our time, if and only if, monkeys were flying out of my butt.
It's still not a very important statement, if you downplay or omit the conditional.
Is "building safe superintelligence (SSI) is the most important technical problem of our time" full stop ?
Is it fuck.
Yeah — that was exactly my (slightly sarcastic) point.
Let us know if you ever encounter that monkey problem, though. Hopefully we can all pull together to find a solution.
> Let us know if you ever encounter that monkey problem
Ah, the subtlety escaped me there. My (extremely sarcastic) point is that aside from being personally embarrassing, this would (to belabour the joke) violate many laws of physics and biology, and therefor the scientific and medical community would take immediate note and try to establish a basis for how this could be physically possible.