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Comment by adamsmith143 | Hacker News Reader

>I have been asked by many people to explain how AI could kill us all. How about some clarity for common people.

There are countless resources to find this stuff out. To be clear there may not be a level at which common people understand why e.g. Fission Chain Reactions are dangerous but they can grok why a giant bomb that spreads radiation is bad.

For Starters: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uMQ3cqWDPHhjtiesc/agi-ruin-a...

>The public have all heard “AI is going to destroy humanity” but those statements have been short on specifics.

You can no more explain how Stockfish is going to beat you at chess then you can predict how an AGI would defeat humanity. Nevertheless the outcome is nearly certain.

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You have to find a different preacher than Yud, he has zero capacity to explain himself to skeptics.

Robert Miles is a much more effective communicator: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMLKbhY0ji0

Thanks, I'm a half hour in and will keep listening; he's more soft spoken and relatable sure but he still strikes me as a vague doomer who's not trying to explain why he's confident humans will lose, just that he's confident.

@30:24, on what solutions might be realistic to help, if not a 6 month sanction, Miles says:

"Maybe what we should be asking for is just an enormous amount of money to do alignment research with"

Sounds like a classic doomsday cult, end is nigh, deposit your checks to this account...

Ah yes all that research money will be used to buy mansions and ferarris. Do you have a clue how this stuff works in real life?

Also note that until maybe the last year not only was there not a great financial incentive to be a "doomer" but it would actively hurt your career if you were. Most of the main people in the scene have been sounding this alarm for years sometimes decades. It's also difficult to explain people like Geoff Hinton or Yoshua Bengio joining and leaving behind high profile and highly lucrative positions. Yann LeCun, a staunch anti-doomer is perhaps the perfect example who has actually DOES have enormous financial incentive to play down AI dangers.

That's the same as saying "through God all things are possible". Yes if you skip over the hard step of creating an omniscient, omnipotent being, then you have the problems of dealing with an omniscient, oomnipotent being.

So the fact that thousands of researchers with billions of dollars behind them to build this omnipotent being means nothing to you? Because they all certainly think it's achievable.

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