I'll have to check that one out, thanks! As you'll know better than I, the investment career graveyards are chock full of Guys Who Knew The Company Better Than Anyone Else On the Street
Essentially agreed with the caveat that I’m not sure that stops the AI from blowing us all to kingdom come as a staging post on its argument with itself or indeed to substantiate one of its priors. I’m fairly sanguine either way tbh
my other, less palatable thought, is that if a machine which is, ex hypothesi, thousands of times more intelligent than us, decides that the right thing to do is end human life, then isn't it rather arrogant and chauvinist of us to gainsay?
(people might think that's facetious, but something similar was apparently quite a common view among Maori in the lead-up to the Treaty of Waitangi - several chiefs thought that they'd had a good run, but the way of the world was warfare and extinction, and having gained their lands and titles by destroying the previous occupants, they had to recognise that Aotearoa was a pakeha country now. It was by no means the majority view, but it was prevalent enough to be recorded)
Quite. Live by the sword, die by the sword almost invariably a one way gate view. Takes real perspective to hold on to it when you’re at the pointy end
I sadly do not know, because the book I read it in did not say, whether or in which direction this view was correlated with having converted to Christianity
Also a related point is that as the AI systems start generating more and more of the content on the internet it is training more and more on its own output, reinforcing the things it already knows and further closing off the poissibility of learning "new" knowledge.
I am generally much more worried about “AI” being used for much more banally problematic purposes (disinformation campaigns, filling children’s entertainment with generated sludge, making the arts even less financially viable, etc.) than I am concerned about The Singularity.
It seems to me that the fear mongering about super-intelligences has become a thought terminating cliche. “The real impact of these AI systems is small potatoes compared to the coming apocalypse, ignore these current issues and focus on my particular flavor of end-times hysteria.” That’s not totally fair to the singularity folks, but they’ve sucked enough oxygen out of the AI debate that I’m not particularly inclined to be charitable.
This piece is a nice, succinct counterexample to the doom and gloom, and one that I hadn’t encountered previously. It may very well be that “exponentially smarter” was never a meaningful statement to begin with.
David Robson's The Intelligence Trap is fun on this.
I'll have to check that one out, thanks! As you'll know better than I, the investment career graveyards are chock full of Guys Who Knew The Company Better Than Anyone Else On the Street
What a savage attack on Plutocrats, Aristocrats, the Bourbons, The Royal Family, TechBros, and Elon.
Essentially agreed with the caveat that I’m not sure that stops the AI from blowing us all to kingdom come as a staging post on its argument with itself or indeed to substantiate one of its priors. I’m fairly sanguine either way tbh
my other, less palatable thought, is that if a machine which is, ex hypothesi, thousands of times more intelligent than us, decides that the right thing to do is end human life, then isn't it rather arrogant and chauvinist of us to gainsay?
(people might think that's facetious, but something similar was apparently quite a common view among Maori in the lead-up to the Treaty of Waitangi - several chiefs thought that they'd had a good run, but the way of the world was warfare and extinction, and having gained their lands and titles by destroying the previous occupants, they had to recognise that Aotearoa was a pakeha country now. It was by no means the majority view, but it was prevalent enough to be recorded)
Quite. Live by the sword, die by the sword almost invariably a one way gate view. Takes real perspective to hold on to it when you’re at the pointy end
I sadly do not know, because the book I read it in did not say, whether or in which direction this view was correlated with having converted to Christianity
Also a related point is that as the AI systems start generating more and more of the content on the internet it is training more and more on its own output, reinforcing the things it already knows and further closing off the poissibility of learning "new" knowledge.
Brill. The short way to do this is spend some time at the University of Oxford (or Cambridge. I imagine MIT is similar.)
I am generally much more worried about “AI” being used for much more banally problematic purposes (disinformation campaigns, filling children’s entertainment with generated sludge, making the arts even less financially viable, etc.) than I am concerned about The Singularity.
It seems to me that the fear mongering about super-intelligences has become a thought terminating cliche. “The real impact of these AI systems is small potatoes compared to the coming apocalypse, ignore these current issues and focus on my particular flavor of end-times hysteria.” That’s not totally fair to the singularity folks, but they’ve sucked enough oxygen out of the AI debate that I’m not particularly inclined to be charitable.
This piece is a nice, succinct counterexample to the doom and gloom, and one that I hadn’t encountered previously. It may very well be that “exponentially smarter” was never a meaningful statement to begin with.