Comment by jackmott42
1 month ago
There is a wide gulf between catastrophe and killing us all, and its not just that these people are weird, they seem to be complete clowns, tossing out % predictions about incalculable future states like spock in star trek. Total clown show.
Yes, I wonder who the clowns are:
1. Researchers that have forgotten more about this technology than the average HNer will ever learn
2. Random HNers that think that suddenly they understand the problem better than researchers that have spent their lives on it
This is just anti intellectualism in a different coat, and it's not much different from people denying environmental scientists talking about climate change or biologists talking about vaccines.
But everyone here thinks they are the smart protagonist and certainly they would never hold a position so silly!
Anti-intellectual? Because they don't believe claims that are backed up only by untested hypotheticals?
If we're going to have whistleblowers emerge declaring a 10% chance we all die because of AI, we're going to need more than vibes. Real experts can explain their position plainly. That has not happened here.
> Real experts can explain their position plainly. That has not happened here.
It has, over, and over, and over. There is literally a book on it. https://ifanyonebuildsit.com/
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These people are more like creationists, in that they assume that their intended conclusion is true, and then argue backwards from that.
That doesn't explain the many former AI researchers (including Yudkowsky) who quit the field because they came to believe it is a potent danger: they didn't choose to become AI researchers because they started with an assumption that AI research is too dangerous to be allowed to continue.
Stop doing this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority
It's not my job to re explain AI safety from scratch to every uninformed take on the internet. Authority serves a useful purpose.
Having humility and delegating a topic to people that understand the topic better than you is not a bad thing, and certainly preferred to this state.
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In a circus troupe, clowns are a critical role, and are an important, if silly, job. In the AI jobpocalypse, we should all be so lucky to have any job.
you have the anthropic mindset. the new aristocracy, or rather, kleptocracy.
Really? Forgotten more than we know? So what can they tell us about how this technology works then? It seems a lot of it, besides the actual training engineering parts, is handwaving about "black boxes" and "divine benevolence" (a quote from Noam Shazeer).