Posted by alkyon 4 hours ago
He would still be right and the field practioners would be wrong.
I do find capsules interesting though.
Because a certification has to be fixed at a particular point in time. Korea's certification exams start with the 23 GoF patterns and go on to rote memorization of countless patterns and layered terminology.
The problem is that the way you learn for this certification is the old way, so someone who gets the certification ends up writing legacy code.
But if you always update the questions to the latest, then nobody can pass the certification. So, having seen how the certification system works in East Asia, I don't think it's all that good
No way to tell until after, though. So far, mutually assured destruction is working. It works until it doesn’t.
Same with AI. Thus far we’re better off with it than without it. That may change.
I mean, look what we did with fossil fuels. Some people are even still willingly burning them, even though the data is clear that our use of them has already started the total destruction of our civilization.
Is there a name for this, a technology that is so insanely useful that there is no way we won’t exploit it, but where the worst case scenario is total collapse, and impossible to determine well in advance?
(Fossil fuels I suppose don’t count as even the energy companies knew unambiguously decades ago that large scale use would eventually bake the entire agricultural system out of existence.)
The reason for that was more that the 3-4 great empires involved in the previous two were exhausted, Japan was defeated, China was in no shape, and US vs USSR had no reason to push for one, since the Cold War era gave them plenty of breathing room, roughly half the world each.
Both the USSR and US fought multiple wars directly against the proxies of the other. They weren't simply hanging back and letting others do the dirty work. In most any other era one of those would have become a full blown war between the two. Both sides pushed the line of not directly involved and then both sides looked the other way versus escalating. Nukes made the alternative too much of a risk for both sides.
... no shit Sherlock
TFA could have been two sentences:
He warns that AI might cause serious problems: power failures, job losses, and greater social inequality.
He believes AI might improve our lives, but governments must make sure it is safe.