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Comment by skepticATX | Hacker News Reader

I suspect that in 5 years we’re going to look back and wonder how we all fell into mass hysteria over language models.

This is the same song and dance from the usual existential risk suspects, who (I’m sure just coincidentally) also have a vested interest in convincing you that their products are extremely powerful.

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Yeah, like I fail to see how would an AI even cause human extinction? Through some Terminator style man-robot warfare? But the only orgnizations that would seem capable of building such killer robots are governments that already possess the capacity to extinguish the entire human race with thermonuclear weapons - and at a considerably lower R&D budget for that end. It seems like hysteria / clever marketing for AI products to me.

The standard example is that it would engineer a virus but that's probably a lack of imagination. There may be more reliable ways of wiping out humanity that we can't think of.

I think speculation on the methods is pretty pointless, if a superintelligent AI is trying to kill us we're probably going to die, the focus should be on avoiding this situation. Or providing a sufficiently convincing argument for why that won't happen.

Or why it should happen...

Who in that list are the 'usual existential risk suspects'?

Doomsday prepper Sam Altman[1], for one.

[1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/10/sam-altmans-ma...

I think in order to use the plural form you really need to have two examples.

Sam Altman is of course the least convincing signatory (except for the random physicist who does not seem to have any connection to AI).

> I think in order to use the plural form you really need to have two examples.

Perhaps, but I don't see the value proposition in relaying another. Altman was fun to point out. I see no remaining enjoyment.

> Sam Altman is of course the least convincing signatory

Less convincing than Grimes?

On second inspection of the list yeah there are loads of people less convincing than Sam

Grimes would still have a job if AI got regulated though.

> I think in order to use the plural form you really need to have two examples.

Eliezer Yudkowsky.

At least they had the decency to put him under "Other Notable Figures", rather than under "AI Scientists".

Yep. I might not be the sharpest tool in the shed, but seeing "AI experts" try to reason about superintelligence makes me feel really good about myself.

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