Ah, yes, the good old Chinese estimation method.
it's gonna kill the self in a lot of people, if it hasn't done that already ... best example is people who want to be in film and music but are too bad even after years and now resort to AI or wannabe-writers and wannabe-journalists and wannabe-bloggers with zero real effort and sweat and pain and time put in now resorting to bot farms to collect ideas and AI hacking to steal ideas and pseudo-sabotage and distract some people to steal their attention and waste that of others.
it's so weird what the old guard "electively" ignored and fostered (people without money and opportunity managed well until they got sabotaged but people with money never got sabotaged and still.. this?) ... they just wanted their descendants to perform this bad and ugly? not better, harder, faster, stronger, smarter? so boring, ... but character and personal preference until the self is gone. copypasta, copypasta everywhere... and the few with ideas, it's always been a few, are definitely not going to share their good stuff no more.
Every number below is someone's judgment, and the answer changes with who is asked
But yeah, it says nothing. Though I realized sometimes the obvious needs to be spelled out at times.
We really can't help but let our imagination run wild when given the opportunity.
Reminds me of Y2K.
Are there going to be myriad material challenges we will need to face as this incredible technology unfolds?
Of course. Economic displacement, education reform, etc.
Are they existential, though? I don't see it. These are "standard fare" problems for post Enlightenment societies to deal with, even if they are real challenges.
We already have serious tangible existential threats we should be focusing on between things like climate change, ecological collapse, population decline, and pandemic risk.
I wish we could stay focused on the problems that are real instead of getting distracted by the problems that are imagined.
This is similar except the people warning about nuclear weapons are eagerly soliciting venture capital to build more of them.
And the reason why we should take it seriously? Probability! And multiplication. "If something is as bad as human extinction and there's a 1% chance, then that 1% times a bajillion is a gazillion!! A gazillion!! We must do everything! If it's a gazillion, it all makes it worthwhile!"
When pushed, adherents will say "intelligence is different," and this is "unlike anything else we've ever seen." And therefore this reasoning is valid. From my point of view, gibberish times gibberish is still gibberish. It doesn't matter how you dress it.
Fundamentally, these propositions are indistinguishable from religion and Pascal's wager. And I'm not ok with this, I am not ok with a retreat to superstition powered by hyper-technological black boxes that are a product of hundreds of years of scientific progress.
I reject this premise and this nonsense. I ask for evidence, and I ask for reason. The laws of physics care not if you're slab of meat or a silicon god.
Anyone know of this (MAD) is being seriously thought of?
On a purely technical basis, the most common, honest answer is "no." There are no inherent properties of LLMs that would make them independently turn computers into death machines. That's all humans, no matter how you dress it up.
There is, however, the hubris (human) problem. The rhetorical, experimental, and financial irresponsibility around this tech's roll out is far greater a threat to humanity than the actual technology itself.
And frankly that's a shame because LLMs are a phenomenal tool. But the Hollywood shit has cooked people's brains to the point of absurdity.
> 3.4% named existential risk, and the most common answer was malicious use, at 10.6% (UCL).
The danger isn't about sentient or human level AI, it's about how AI gives everyone capabilities beyond their wildest dreams, often without the knowledge or experience necessary to use those capabilities responsibly.
Forget Terminator, the two risks I can see being the most important here are "major security risk/system failure due to incompetent engineers/maintainers using AI without knowing how things work" and "criminals/terrorists/rogue states use it make their crimes easier and more efficient".
The latter seems especially bad when political stability is down across the board and a lot of people seem frustrated or outright furious with society at the moment.
Still, I feel the risks are still on the manageable side, simply due to both automated systems and malicious actors being constrained by logistics and a human driven society.
DylanMerigaud•6h ago