Comment by hn_throwaway_99 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hn_throwaway_99 | Hacker News Reader

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hn_throwaway_99

Thank you for putting it so succinctly. I find that lots of people get "stuck" in the current state of things - they think that AI will continue to improve, but they inherently believe (perhaps subconsciously) that humans will always have the edge in things like "ingenuity", "inventiveness" or "curiosity".

I don't blame them, I also believed that until very recently. I thought there was something unique and special about sentience and consciousness, but my thinking has changed in that I don't think machines need to develop the sentience we experience to still surpass us cognitively along all dimensions.

But iff you really examine what grounds your beliefs, and then consider that AI very well could surpass humans even in domains like curiosity and real creativity (at several orders of magnitude faster), it starts to look like a very, very uncomfortable future for humans IMO.

I saw this quote on Twitter:

> Best outcome: we become pets

> Worst outcome: we become cows

I don't get this take at all. Do you feel inferior that bears are stronger than you? Or that a machine can lift more weight than you? Or that a calculator can calculate faster than you?

These AI things are machines which are completely under our control. Even if they become more intelligent than us, that doesn't mean that it has authority over us. There are plenty of very intelligent humans which work under the authority of much less intelligent humans. Many engineers are smarter than their CEOs.

What makes you think that just because an AI is more intelligent that it will not be completely subject to our authority? It's just a tool in our hands.

> What makes you think that just because an AI is more intelligent that it will not be completely subject to our authority? It's just a tool in our hands.

Because it would be like 100 chimps trying to make a million humans subject to their authority.

Geoffrey Hinton, considered "The Godfather of AI" for his pioneering work on neural networks, and who now says he somewhat regrets his life work due to the existential risks, has said similar things, e.g. "How many examples do you know of a more intelligent thing being controlled by a less intelligent thing? There are very few examples"

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