I don't worry about scifi stuff that doesn't appear to have any actual bearing in reality.
The Bernoulli Equation, which gave us the basic understanding of how lift can be generated with an airfoil, was developed in the mid-1700s. [1]
We don't have any fundamental understanding today of how an AGI could be built. We have a bunch of interesting ideas, with varying degrees of evidence for them, but we don't have the same kind of solidly-established scientific foundation for understanding intelligence and the human brain today that we did for understanding lift in 1900.
"Some people didn't understand the science, and so called it fiction" isn't a very strong argument.
No one has provided us with an ironclad scientific foundation for AGI. Some people keep declaring very firmly that it must logically be possible, but even if there are no gaps in your logic whatsoever, that's not the same thing as providing equations for how it would work.
Imagine we had started taking climate change seriously in 1990 instead of... Whatever we're doing now.
This is very much not what they do.
I’m definitely on this camp. Because it is happening already, I’m seeing it before my very eyes.
My partner’s employer, a tiny ~50 people company, is already making the copywriters and graphic designers use AI.
I work as a developer for a large media company. The chairman, like everybody else not living under a rock for the past few months, has become aware of ChatGPT and wants us to integrate AI stuff in the CMS. We’re working on it, there’s hundreds of people using this CMS daily to create content.
Even the best case scenario here, where people are not laid off and just become more productive, results in the profession of many people changing a lot overnight. People who might have loved writing articles or designing stuff from scratch will soon be mere supervisors of AI’s work.
I think a lot of some guy’s post in Reddit that made it to HN: he was a 3D artist who loved his work, but was forced by his company to use midjourney, stable diffusion, dall-e or whatever and now was just doing some touches in Photoshop. He hated his “new” job.
I haven’t really used ChatGPT, Copilot and the like to generate code yet, because I don’t think I’d like it. I don’t want to correct/touch up some AI’s code as that removes all the joy.
It’s weird how roles are changing: we used to have some “AI” autocorrecting the stuff we typed and now we’re the ones correcting the AI.
Interesting times for sure, but the “large swaths of people are going to lose their jobs or have any kind of joy removed from them” I’m sure it’ll happen. And no one has a plan to deal with this nor time to come up with something. And having 90% of the workforce being “prompt engineers” is sci-fi worthy dystopia.
Lots of attempts will be made. We'll see how they pan out. The fact that attempts are being made does not mean they will all succeed. A lot of it could backfire. I would bet good money there are CEOs out there right now contemplating firing their whole support staff and replacing it with ChatGPT. And I would love to know who they are so I could short their company's stock.
This smacks of misinformation. If you're referring to that dreaded basilisk, very few people actually believe that scenario has any likelihood at all. Also, it has nothing to do with time travel anyway.
The other two things are more or less guaranteed because they're simple extensions of processes that are happening right now and can be seen all around us.
Since he's become, for many, the "face of AI risk", that gives it much more (undeserved) appearance of credibility than you imply.
I don't think that's true; he's stated before he doesn't and didn't believe it was true. His reaction was more about the stupidity of posting information hazards on public fora rather than that specific information hazard being credible. However, he could be lying post-facto.
And I do agree that it kind of sucks that Yud is the "face of AI risk" because it doesn't even matter how correct he might be; a lot of people just don't like him (I'm indifferent). There shouldn't be a "Face of AI risk" because there won't be a single person that everyone like. The idea is bigger than him.
(And apologies if I misled people into believing the superintelligence basilisk has time travel powers)
Or weird nanobot bullshit.
Is there a really boring possible outcome that leads to the destruction of humanity?
The second biggest risk is just humans being afraid. A scared human is a dangerous, irrational human.
It doesn’t have to be boring, but boring sounds more likely to me, because it’s soemthing we don’t think much about… because it’s boring.
I don't want to completely derail this thought but I am a bit older than some of the crowd on HN and I was in high school in the 90s so my perspective is a bit different I guess on this. Do Millennials think that Gen-X generation wasn't fighting against client change? I remember even further back to elementary school and just having a constant flow of ecological/environmental stuff thrown at us. It used to be deforestation, species extincition and the ozone layer ... but it was taken very seriously even then.
I mean, I just looked at the Paris Agreement [1] Wikipedia and the "Lead Up" section mentions:
The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), adopted at the 1992 Earth Summit is one of the first international treaties on the topic.
At any rate, you may find yourself in 30 years faced with the same kind of attitude ... like people in 2050 saying "imagine people in 2023 actually took climate change seriously!" and you might then feel the same as I do.
Even boomers were taking the risks of climate change very seriously.
There was quite a lot, including public demonstrations, etc. Not so different from now, really, except that now the problem has become urgent enough that it's harder to be a denier.
Although I was a child then, I even remember a lot of serious agitation happening in the 70s.