Posted by srcreigh 20 hours ago
Humility is the wrong word. We didn't feel it when the steam engine was introduced, so why now?
Fear? Ai is an abstract (for most people). A steam engine, you can touch. And, it doesn't replicate.
In a world with ASI, having that capacity is vital.
I mean just looking at all the numbers to see which have interesting properties could take a while.
It will be as it always has been: these ideas will further enrich the rich, at the expense of everyone else. We'll have our first quadrillionaire, while the masses are debating whether the minimum wage of $7.25/hr should be bumped up.
> Another approach is to follow that word, heresy. In every period of history, there seem to have been labels that got applied to statements to shoot them down before anyone had a chance to ask if they were true or not. "Blasphemy", "sacrilege", and "heresy" were such labels for a good part of western history, as in more recent times "indecent", "improper", and "unamerican" have been. By now these labels have lost their sting. They always do. By now they're mostly used ironically. But in their time, they had real force.
>
> The word "defeatist", for example, has no particular political connotations now. But in Germany in 1917 it was a weapon, used by Ludendorff in a purge of those who favored a negotiated peace. At the start of World War II it was used extensively by Churchill and his supporters to silence their opponents. In 1940, any argument against Churchill's aggressive policy was "defeatist". Was it right or wrong? Ideally, no one got far enough to ask that.
What You Can’t Say https://paulgraham.com/say.html
Look at the average life of a person living in Western Europe 400 years ago.
Look at the average life of a person living in Western Europe today.
Heck, look at the lives of the top 1% of humanity living 400 years ago.
From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_XIV#Personal_life
> Louis and his wife Maria Theresa of Spain had six children from the marriage contracted for them in 1660. However, only one child, the eldest, survived to adulthood
From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_XIV#Health_and_death
> Louis outlived most of his immediate legitimate family. His last surviving legitimate son, Louis, Dauphin of France, died in 1711 of smallpox and barely a year later, Louis, Duke of Burgundy, the eldest of the Dauphin's three sons and then heir-apparent to Louis, died of measles. Burgundy's elder son, Louis, Duke of Brittany, died of the same disease a few weeks later.
The king of France, arguably one of the richest people on the planet at the time, had 5/6 six children with his wife, the Queen of France and daughter of the Spanish King die before adulthood.
Now look at the life of an average middle-class French person (or American, or English person or any of the 6+ billion people living with electricity) today. See anyone dying in childbirth? Anyone dying of measles or smallpox before they're old enough to vote?
Technological progress, helping not just the rich get richer, but everyone get richer.
QED.
It really looks like Tao is on the path of accepting and embracing AI now.
Or it as with other professionals: shortage means shortage of cheap labor.
This is an unfortunate example to choose, being as it is entirely confounded by the canonical illustration of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality.