Comment by kragen
14 hours ago
The most important difference is that this time it's the people who know the most about the topic who are concerned, and the people who know the least about it who are blasé. (Also, Yann LeCun.) With the LHC it was the other way around.
If you truly believe this, I am begging you to touch some grass, preferably very very far away from Silicon Valley. It’s nice out here.
Do you have an argument to make or only snide condescension?
My demographic claim? It's obviously correct, as anyone with the most casual acquaintance with the question knows. The worried people, like Geoffrey Hinton, Bill Gates, and Dario Amodei, might be wrong, but they certainly aren't ignorant outsiders. (Neither is Yann LeCun, of course, which is why I mentioned him: he's an important exception to the rule.)
How would touching grass help? Do you think the grass is better informed about AI risk than you are?
...that's plausible, actually.
Probably a site called "Hacker News" is not the smartest place for you to be implicitly asserting that thinking about things is bad, or that those nerds who do it are out-of-touch losers. Maybe you want to be on Rugby News instead.
On Hacker News, by contrast, what is valued is thoughtful discussion grounded in the kind of rigorous theoretical knowledge that comes from extended concentration, usually but not always indoors, where it won't rain on the computers.
Bill Gates is too busy trying to save his reputation from his Epstein association to be believed, he's a billionaire concern troll and Amodei is far more worried about his stock price than he is about humanity. Those two are discounted. That doesn't mean we don't have a problem, but they are just hitching their wagons to horse that happens to be running in a direction that is temporarily useful to them.
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