How can you possibly hold this belief after Tuesday? An LLM solved a significant number of major open problems in many subfields of mathematics, including a major breakthrough on the Riemann Hypothesis. Get your head out of the sand.
<3
This sort of nihilism/defeatism always irks me. It's so selfish, so privileged.
Tell my starved, murdered ancestors "let us enjoy the end" of their era of stability's denoument.
And, truly, it is not the end. Inconveniently, many—if not most—of us will survive. Will continue on. And it's for the betterment of those who come after us that we ought to toil a little, and not indulge in this childish, self-interested to nihilism.
marginalized populations have repeatedly survived past "apocalypses" not through aesthetic surrender, but through the deliberate, daily reproduction of the commons, ie through pooling resources, sustaining life for its own sake, and preserving collective memory.
Yielding to fashionable doomism merely validates the oppressor's narrative that the future is already decided. A superstition of doom is no different from a superstition of inevitable progress; both models rely on an abstract determinism that strips humans of agency, that encourages the us to accept suffering as unalterable destiny or "the will of God" rather than an artificial, historical barrier.
So, I agree with a lot of what OP is saying, but I think they're a jerk.
Not anything interesting here that hasn't already been stated 20 other times.
> interesting if true.
Not sure what you mean by this. This is obviously about MAGA and other allied political forces in the US, at the very least. I wouldn't call it interesting to document the recent observed behavior. It's been evident through journalistic analysis of public statements, policy, and investment for most of the year.
> The hope of the Elons and Sams of the world is that this will come to fruition well enough that we only have to bother sustaining the "cream of the crop" in the labor force […]. So basically the plan here is to let things go to shit, and when billions of people die as a natural consequence of that, things will keep running as desired.
For one, I don’t think that Sam Altman can be characterized as MAGA (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Altman#Political_engagemen...). Secondly, I’d be interested in sources substantiating a plan that explicitly includes billions of people dying as a necessary factor for the plan to work out.
He is not usually associated with MAGA. The reference was not directed at the heads of the most well know tech companies, despite the quote about "Elons and Sams". This wouldn't make sense in context. It was a reference to the ruling political regime.
> The dangers posed by this technology on its present trajectory are best understood as simple accelerants for the existing dangers humans pose to themselves.
Is very true. All the doomspeak "aI EsCaPeD AnD HaCkEd aNoThEr sYsTeM" was a human error all along, and the tech was doing what it is programmed to do, retry until a satisifiable outcome is met.
With dangerous chemicals and radioactive materials these are generally pretty easy to classify. This said, after the physical behaviors, the above technologies can induce behavior changes in humans because they exist. After nukes, a lot more people had issues with extental dread. It also causes n-order interactions that get very hard to predict. For example MAD or laws against using chemical weapons.
And these are weapons with a very easy to map out causal chain in their own behavior. You can't prompt a chemical weapon to make a decision.
We come up with agentic AI and all of a sudden a lot of rules on causality break. In a harness they are a causal agent. They can interact with a digital reality, and with the right tools and/or human contacts they can causally effect analog reality.
Anyone that says 'programmed' about an LLM almost certainly does not know what they are talking about and can be summarily ignored.
Accelerating the ability for any given person to have access to some amount of these capabilities is terrifying, is it not?
Maybe many were too young for the cold war. But it really does feel like we're setting a new one up.
He is right that the AI giants would like a bit of regulatory capture.