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Comment by nostrebored | Hacker News Reader

There’s something odd about the concentration of true believers in ai xrisk and climate change catastrophism. They are both technopessimist in a way that is seen as progressive. Stopping progress in AI would make people’s lives immeasurably worse, while stopping fossil fuel consumption would kill billions of people. But it seems like a particular kind of risk aversion that is blind to upside.

I’m curious why this calculus makes sense to you?

I’ve been friends with eco-activists who are very against anthropocentric ideology. Their perspective was that the deaths of billions of people was worth it. But this brand of conservatism is one that I’d really like to understand better

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> Stopping progress in AI would make people’s lives immeasurably worse

I’d really like to hear your reasoning for this.

Were it used to make it practical for people to reduce or stop working while maintaining a comparable standard of living, sure.

It seems far more likely it’s going to wipe out jobs on a massive scale, consolidate wealth, and leave millions or billions struggling to eke out a living.

And it certainly hasn’t made anyone’s life dramatically better. It’s made my job easier, but how much longer will I have it?

I didn't say I was against AI or a true believer that AI will kill us all. I said it represents an existential risk. It could be fine. Just like dropping the first atom bomb was an existential risk.

Pretending like there is no possibility of AI going wrong is ridiculous.

> Stopping progress in AI would make people’s lives immeasurably worse

They'd be, like, living in conditions of last decade, deprived of personalised targeted AI-slop? The horror.

Is that immeasurably because it's a change too small to measure, or because it's too vast to comprehend? Maybe you're overstating this just a tad.

> Stopping progress in AI would make people’s lives immeasurably worse

This is such a weaselly statement without your definition of "AI". If you specifically mean LLMs or image generation, you're way out of touch and flat out wrong. If you mean machine learning in general, sure, but progress there was never under any threat or question.

Everybody alive today will die. We're mortal, that's just how it goes. So with or without fossil fuels, billions of people will die regardless, that much is baked in. It's a moot point.

As a species, however, we can persist indefinitely so long as our lifestyles are sustainable. If it's not sustainable it's a joke.

Go free solo El Cap or something before telling me you're cool taking those kinds of risks on behalf of all humanity.

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