I'm not saying there aren't weird things going on, but this article sure does a lot of guilt-by-association. We're putting neoreactionaries, polyamorous rationalists, doomsday AI researchers and the Zizians in one big web.
The framing of how we think about AI has really been cultivated by a quite homogeneous group of people. These people, like all people that belong to a sub-culture, are almost certainly prone to groupthink.
It's extremely important to see that group as such. That it is not thousands of individual perspectives but a chorus of connected/aligned people who have all read the same things and talked to the same people and are rewarded implicitly for thinking a similar way.
Many of them read HN and are offended I put them this way. But it's inescapable that we as humans have this flaw when we're surrounded by a culture.
There's another universe where we do not constantly compare AI to nukes. I bet that world has a lower P(doom).
I'm going to be fucking irritated if we all die because BlueSky posters wanted to take pot-shots at the EA crowd. The Boy Who Cried Wolf is _also_ a story about how a community lost a child because of cynicism, and the people proudly declaring that they "know" every safety concern is just a marketing ploy also concerns me.
Hopefully enough smart people out there can distinguish between many "AI safety" people and actual AI engineers/scientists at these labs working at the coalface.
AI ethics reminds me of "design thinking" grifters or scrummasters or other such BS jobs of times past.
If you listen in an informed way to these people talk, they are not really as technical as they sound. They are personality hires, woo-woo spellcasters. They are just creating content for a narrative. The grasp of philosophy is not even at par with what you might think it ought to be.
This whole "we can't trust the people warning us because they're either weirdos or involved" deal is such a strange angle when you can just start from zero, look at what's known to be happening right now, and draw a very straight line to catastrophe.
It's like being concerned Oppenheimer and company are exaggerating when looking at the first nuclear tests at the same time.
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.
1. Researchers that have forgotten more about this technology than the average HNer will ever learn
2. Random HNers that think that suddenly they know more and thought about the problem more deeply than these researchers that have spent their lives on it
The AI optimists are not that much more rational if you dig deep. Like any deep problem it is best to look at the facts not the hype and make up your own mind, outsourcing your thinking to other people never ends well.
dupe https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49738411
See also from earlier today [1].
More or less the same content but parent is much more palpable, IMHO.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49737985
Thats certainly a title
I'd watch the movie for sure
I'm not saying there aren't weird things going on, but this article sure does a lot of guilt-by-association. We're putting neoreactionaries, polyamorous rationalists, doomsday AI researchers and the Zizians in one big web.
The framing of how we think about AI has really been cultivated by a quite homogeneous group of people. These people, like all people that belong to a sub-culture, are almost certainly prone to groupthink.
It's extremely important to see that group as such. That it is not thousands of individual perspectives but a chorus of connected/aligned people who have all read the same things and talked to the same people and are rewarded implicitly for thinking a similar way.
Many of them read HN and are offended I put them this way. But it's inescapable that we as humans have this flaw when we're surrounded by a culture.
There's another universe where we do not constantly compare AI to nukes. I bet that world has a lower P(doom).
I'm going to be fucking irritated if we all die because BlueSky posters wanted to take pot-shots at the EA crowd. The Boy Who Cried Wolf is _also_ a story about how a community lost a child because of cynicism, and the people proudly declaring that they "know" every safety concern is just a marketing ploy also concerns me.
I think it's more of a Chicken Little situation. Then the wolf ate us all up.
I have great news then, that absolutely isn't going to happen. And the EA crowd deserves all of the potshots and more
Hopefully enough smart people out there can distinguish between many "AI safety" people and actual AI engineers/scientists at these labs working at the coalface.
AI ethics reminds me of "design thinking" grifters or scrummasters or other such BS jobs of times past.
If you listen in an informed way to these people talk, they are not really as technical as they sound. They are personality hires, woo-woo spellcasters. They are just creating content for a narrative. The grasp of philosophy is not even at par with what you might think it ought to be.
This whole "we can't trust the people warning us because they're either weirdos or involved" deal is such a strange angle when you can just start from zero, look at what's known to be happening right now, and draw a very straight line to catastrophe.
It's like being concerned Oppenheimer and company are exaggerating when looking at the first nuclear tests at the same time.
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 know more and thought about the problem more deeply than these researchers that have spent their lives on it
The AI optimists are not that much more rational if you dig deep. Like any deep problem it is best to look at the facts not the hype and make up your own mind, outsourcing your thinking to other people never ends well.
I don't think that comparison is quite apropos
the field of AI Safety is older and more far reaching than Yudkowski et al