This is the same as slacklining over a ravine with no harness. Are the views epic? Yes. Does the adrenaline rush feel good? Yes. Are the consequences irreversible if you happen to mess up? Probably yes. The last point is why there's so much more doomerism compared to OpenAI's previous products. We don't have that harness and we don't know if we'll ever have it.
It's an analogy.. perhaps a bit hyperbolic, but it's within the acceptable window IMO.
When Facebook came out very few considered it an existential risk. Turns out, it has immense power over elections. Elections have consequences for the well being of billions of people on the planet. Not to mention it might negatively impact the mental health of its users (a large chunk of the human population).
More climate change, war, microplastics in our body and now extreme joblessness ?
If I woke up and I saw a headline that said OpenAI has developed and AI which told us how to sequester huge amounts of cO2 then I’d be excited and agree.
Exactly. I'm sick of people advocating changes as "progress" until we get some fundamental baseline sampling of humanity's well-being. When "are you depressed?" "do you contemplate suicide?" "are you exhausted?" go up for 10 years around the globe, then people will look like lunatics saying this is "progress" and maybe we'll have a better conversation about where progress actually is.
The e/acc camp will tell you AGI can solve all of those, which is why AI research needs to move as fast as possible. What they don't tell you is only an aligned AGI can solve it in a way beneficial for humans.
We had a half-assed lockdown for a few months where most people just kind of stayed indoors and saw noticeable environmental improvements world-wide. An unaligned AGI can easily conclude the best way to fix these problems is to un-exist all humans.
There has never in the history of humanity been anything "aligned" in the sense that AI doomers use that word. Yet humanity has had a clear progression towards better, safer, and more just societies over time.
You say as you comfortably type on a thinking machine while indoors sheltered from the elements, presumably without any concern for war or famine or marauding gangs of lawless raiders.
Climate change is looking pretty existential to me. Might be comfortable now, but where I am we're having extreme snow fall shortages which are going to effect our water supplies and ability to farm. God knows what it's going to look like at this rate.
So practically massive destruction of the biosphere so people can sit there smug on there computers in the air-con.
Anyway you reinforced my point. Progress is a good idea, I'm not sure we all have the same ideas about what good progress looks like. Lifting the rest of the developing world by selling them arms and fossil fuels so I can sit on my computer in my room reading smug comments is probably not good progress.
