Comment by kragen
14 hours ago
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.
It's very disappointing to hear BS like this coming from a very intelligent crowd such as HN. How many people in the US do you think know who Epstein was, let alone what is contained in his file? How many in the world? If Bill Gates is worried about his reputation, Microsoft has sealed the deal long time ago.
As for Dario, of course he's worried about the stock price. I would if I were in his shoes. That's literally part of a CEO's job. He is also one who has consistently raised the issue with AI safety. He was OpenAI's head of AI safety after all. Anthropic is considered security risk by the US. Is that "temporary useful"?
That's plausible, although I don't think it's actually correct. But there's a pretty extensive set of AI luminaries who are concerned who can't be dismissed so easily.
Spreading fear of an awesome power whose true danger is unproven is Religion 101.
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