The Aliens Have Landed, and We Created Them – Cassandras: [AI as] End of Mankind
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
The position is immediately pessimistic, not projectively in terms of future AGI:
> As my Hoover Institution colleague Manny Rincon-Cruz says: LLMs don’t manipulate atoms or bits; they manipulate us. [...] // We are already well on our way to Raskolnikov's nightmare at the end of Crime and Punishment, in which humanity goes collectively mad and descends into internecine slaughter. If you still cannot foresee how GPT-4 will be used in 2024 to “flood the zone” with deepfake content, then I suggest you email Eliezer Yudkowsky
Also contains some nice new label
> The more I read about GPT-4, the more I think we are talking here not about artificial intelligence (i.e., synthetic humanlike intelligence) but inhuman intelligence, which we have designed and trained to sound convincingly like us
- though it is faulty, as it paradoxically risks antropomorphizing the actual process stretching the term "intelligence" in a dubious area.
Once upon a time the western intellectual class was known for their outcomes, not just their thoughts. Now its just overflowing with this kind of performing buffoon class, that spends their whole day not doing any actual work beyond mesmerizing the ppl with word play.
You just disparaged Niall Ferguson's opinion through your own opinion. The difference in weight is unclear.
Edit: and the largest part of the article is compilative (informative about the position of different parts)...
> outcomes
Well, he published his books, he has professed, he "writes and lectures": what outcomes should be expected from him?
Generative AI accelerated things greatly, but I dont think it even changed the trajectory.