Hacker News Reader

Comment by maccaw | Hacker News Reader

You don't think solving every disease is a significant upside?

You cannot prove or promise that an AGI would be willing to do that, or anything, even if it could.

The whole problem of "general" intelligence is that the "general" implies agency. If an AGI exists, it has agency, and it can do or not do things.

The humans with agency we have in the world are already enough of a problem. Let's not add superintelligent computers.

We don't go around spending all our resources trying to solve diseases for ants...

This argument isn't really valid because:

1) Ants did not give birth to our species.

2) We do try to solve diseases for other animals. If we could communicate with insects the way we do with other species, there would be an effort to help them. The biggest barrier is language, something that will not be the case with AGI.

Humans communicating with animals (in cases where that's possible) is only interesting or worthwhile because of how similar our brains are to theirs. We don't spend a lot of effort trying to communicate with more primitive animals. I'm not sure why an AGI would necessarily regard us more like chimpanzees than lungfish. If we could talk to a lungfish... what would it say? Is its perception of the world even sophisticated enough for it to matter?

And to be clear, I'm actually not an AI catastrophist. I just don't think any sufficiently advanced AI is going to be very motivated to help us with our puny problems. I think it's more likely they'll just fuck off somewhere far away where we can't bother them.

Maybe not ants, but we absolutely do spend a lot of research effort to solve diseases for other species, for example Tasmanian Devils - https://www.menzies.utas.edu.au/news-and-events/media-releas...

You don't think OpenAI won't price-gouge the shit out of everyone suffering from those diseases? Not even that - you don't think they won't sell exclusive licenses for this kind of thing?

Most countries in the world have universal healthcare systems. How would that even work?

Last I checked there are still 350 million people living in a country where getting price gouged in healthcare is the norm

It's not clear to me that they would be able to - look at what has happened with Dalle-2 for instance: it was cloned very quickly. Once people know that something in AI can be done, it seems it's only a matter of getting a few million dollars together to train a model.

I have zero faith that OpenAI will open source their AGI, and I'm sure that it'll be developed by techniques considered proprietary

I don't think it even needs to be open sourced - once people know it's possible, someone will figure it out.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com