Hacker News Reader

Comment by hollerith | Hacker News Reader

"Convinced that we are a few years from extinction," is an exaggeration of the pessimistic/alarmed end of the spectrum of opinion.

All the forecasts I've seen have the period of danger spread out over at least 20 or 30 years, and no one claims to understand the topic well enough to be able to tell whether a particular model is dangerous even if given complete freedom to examine the source code and interview the creators.

Our inability to predict is in large part the basis of the pessimism/alarm because it means that the leading labs won't know when to stop.

View on HN

Exactly. And here is an example of that inability in the much clearer case:

"How many years after 1945 ... would it take for the Soviet Union to get the bomb? Framed this way, it was a much easier question than forecasting the advent of AGI: The Americans were concerned with only one adversary and the development of a single technology which they already knew all the details of. American predictions of Soviet proliferation offer a highly constrained case study for those who would undertake technological forecasting today."

https://asteriskmag.com/issues/03/how-long-until-armageddon

> "Convinced that we are a few years from extinction," is an exaggeration of the pessimistic/alarmed end of the spectrum of opinion.

It really isn't. There are people quitting their jobs, protesting AI companies, and inducing panic attacks in children over their irrational fears:

https://www.wired.com/story/pause-ai-existential-risk/

No, even the more-panicked wing is not betting the proverbial house on AI killing us within the next few years, although the possibility is there. The "don't expect to live much longer" sentiment is based on a probability horizon that extends over decades.

I've spoken to people in the article. They expect doom in <1 year.

Can you give a name so I don't have to read a long article?

It is easy to find people who believe that it is possible (with some low probability) that AI will end the human race in the next 12 mo. (I'm one of them.) I haven't seen anyone however put most of their probability mass in the next 12 or 24 mo, and I'd like to find out what their reasoning is.

Sure, first name in the article I posted, Joep Meindertsma. They have an open discord you can join, but fair warning that it's entirely panicky people lamenting their inevitable doom.

I just don't believe that unless you have specific quotes you can point to that indicates this.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com