Comment by kypro

Depends what you mean by sane I guess...

I've been thinking (and worrying) about AI for decades so this last few years have been extremely hard for me. A lot of the stuff I worried about when deep neutral networks first began to work are now beginning to play out and if anything timelines are significantly shorter than I imagined they would be.

I've believed since around 2012 that the most likely way I'd die is from AI so this isn't new, but until around 2021 the error bars have always been quite large. In the last few years that error has rapidly compressed to the point at which I'd now very confidently bet we're all doomed (were there any point in me betting on that). I have few uncertainties left in the core trends of how things will progress from here, and the uncertainties that I do have are really more about how quickly doom will come and how bad the ending will be.

People who know me IRL kinda get why I'm freaking out right now because stuff I said that sounded insanely stupid before are actually now starting to materialise. But online I keep having to decide if I'm okay with sounding insane on this given how important it is and how concerned I am. I think the right thing to do is to sound insane and at least try to convince people we need to change course ASAP because this will not end well. Plus I'm having nightmares constantly at the moment so I'm really feeling the need to just express myself.

The number of serious risks we now face are almost endless and the probabilities that they occur are relatively high for the most part. Even most people with vested interests in the AI industry who are actively building these systems will give high single digits to low double digit odds that they're helping to build a technology that will kill us all lmao. And more concerningly most them are either lying or genuinely uneducated on why alignment is hard. The lunacy of the situation we're in is astounding.

So how am I staying sane? At this point I've more or less come to terms with what's coming. I'm just worried about those I love because I don't want them to suffer. It's frustrating so few seem to be thinking beyond risks like job losses right now and that's making me feel a bit insane at the moment tbh. I suspect people will catch up within the next 12-24 months.

As for the geopolitical uncertainty, that's always been a thing. 9/11 felt far more scary than anything that's happening today imo. The full scale invasion of Ukraine was significant, but hardly unexpected or even unprecedented.