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Comment by iknowstuff | Hacker News Reader

Who’s saying we definitely have a way to do this? Very few. Nobody’s trying to prove that we definitely do right now.

But the “presumption” that we can’t is silly given our advancements

This logic doesn’t work with anything else. If I say we’re going to fly to Jupiter you’re going to ask me for specifics not just presume that I know what I’m talking about. Or any of the other infinite things I can claim to be able to do. Why is this one different?

In that scenario, you are the one claiming we will "never" fly to jupiter.

Just to close the metaphorical loop here, the current AI debate is something like:

"There's a danger we'll be able to fly to Jupiter and bring home a Jupiterian life-form that will destroy humanity. Therefore we should stop all space exploration."

The doomers take the equation with some wildly improbable step that we can't currently explain or justify, multiply the outcome of that step by "infinitely bad", and conclude that the whole thing must be dangerous. But to amp up the rhetoric, they always skip over the "wildly improbable" part.

I guess the disagreement you have with doomers is the probablility you assign to us being able to create human level AI. For the record most "doomers" don't pull a pascal's wager here. Standard EA doctrine is that if we stagnate technologically at our current level for too long (read centuries) then we will inevitably be wiped out. So they want technological advance, they just want caution.

I don't know what "most" do, but I see that form of argument all the time -- particularly from the highest profile doomers.

Personally, I think this line of argument is driven by the hype cycle more than reality. Use chatGPT or midjourney or whatever for a while, and it's pretty easy to see that we're dramatically overweighting theories of AGI risk, and dramatically underweighting stuff like "disemploying the bottom 80% of the intelligence bell curve" with technologies that automate away lots of formerly white-collar labor.

If I had to put my money on an "existential risk" attributable to AI, it would be economic strife.

It's worth saying we still haven't seen a single model trained post-hype cycle from openAI. GPT-4 was summer 2022 stuff.

I’m saying that there are very many things that I can’t prove are impossible that I don’t worry about happening. I’ve learned to live with that uncertainty.

Hmm. When the first basic black powder rockets were invented, would it have been unreasonable for someone to think that they could one day reach the moon? Of course there would be many uncertainties -- including what the moon even was. No one could say what technology would be required. But clearly there was a major paradigm shift that suddenly made it within the realm of consideration.

I imagine it might have been unreasonable to suppose that, yes. The fact that the future is unpredictable doesn’t mean that all claims about the future are a priori equally valid.

In the future where AGI takes over the world next year I might look silly for arguing with you about it, but that’s a risk I accept based on the fact that I don’t think that’s going to happen.

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