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Comment by al_borland | Hacker News Reader

I said 3 years, because that’s how long ago ChatGPT was released to the public. Since then we’ve been told that all of us should be out of a job in 6 months, every 6 months, for those 3 years.

I agree that change happens on a longer timeline. This is why I’m so tired of statements like this…

“Within a couple of years, possibly much sooner…”

These “experts” are pulling timelines out of the sky, and these predictions are leading to reckless behavior from CEOs and executives which have a material impact on people’s lives. But they get clicks on their blogs and funding for their startup… I guess that’s all that matters.

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Be a Bayesian, and they'll stop annoying you.

If you have a 5% chance of thermonuclear war each decade for 10 decades, you'll:

- Hear similar annoying statements

- They'll be true

With AI, we don't know if it's one week or one decade. This means we should assign probabilities and consider all possibilities, not get annoyed.

Assigning, and more specifically announcing/reporting on, all possibilities makes all of these predictions meaningless.

If I predict the world will end every single day from now until forever, I will most certainly be right eventually. That doesn’t make me an “expert” or someone worth listening to on the topic. That’s the playbook of a doomsday cult, not anyone that should drive world markets.

s/all possibilities/all possibilities with odds greater than some threshold/g

There's no reason to report on the odds of a meteor falling on my head tomorrow. There is every reason to consider the odds of:

- Nuclear apocalypse (esp. Cold War era)

- Bioweapon

- Climate change leading to disaster

- AI apocalypse

- Etc.

None of those are infinitesimal odds. That contrasts with, say, a zombie virus.

Ultimately we agree but for slightly different reasons. My assertion is there are no experts because there can’t be as not enough time passed for expertise to form. Further the rate of change is such that by time someone becomes an expert in some aspect, it’s been made irrelevant. Hence expertise in this space is unattainable at the moment and all expert advice is fraudulent.

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