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Comment by dale_glass | Hacker News Reader

The critics didn't do themselves any favors. Part think the Terminator has something useful to say on the subject, part invent contrived scenarios like self-driving cars having to resolve trolley problems. Reality turned out to be much more boring.

But yes, what you said but unironically. Like it or not it's here, it's not going away, so all the remaining options have to assume that.

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> The critics didn't do themselves any favors. Part think the Terminator has something useful to say on the subject, part invent contrived scenarios like self-driving cars having to resolve trolley problems. Reality turned out to be much more boring.

You do very well in battles against straw men.

I guarantee you AI will not end the world

No one serious is arguing it will destroy the world (outside of LLM companies using these people as free marketing), the real critics argue that this is going to weaken labor while all the benefits go to the few capitalists and nothing ultimately improves in regards to society.

Unless improvement for you means increase cancer rates, exacerbating the climate crisis, or using poor systems to kill school children in wars.

All outcomes humans with souls typically want to avoid.

I never said it did, "doom" in this case is just "any negative consequences of AI", because anyone saying that AI could lead to negative consequences has been accused of "doomerism". My point is simply that the negative consequences are here right now, in the room with us, and AI boosters are still pretending that they don't exist.

I'm referring to actual people I argued with in the past. People convinced that AI in a self-driving car would involve the car calculating whether to kill a pedestrian or the driver, rather than trying to figure out whether this thing half obscured by foliage is a speed limit sign or not.

Obviously that's not what everyone argues, my point is that there's a lot of chaff in such arguments and not much wheat. People make a lot of noise about dramatic but completely unrealistic scenarios, while ignoring the far more boring reality.

The PauseAI people are for instance talking about human extinction, somehow. And not crappy GitHub PRs.

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