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Top-level
 @trigrax I'm simply too old and have been into technology for too long to buy into both the PR hype and alarmist hysteria around every shiny new thing. Everything is either world-saviour or a horseman of the apocalypse, or both. The Internet, videogames, smartphones, blockchain, AI... The world is still here, so no apocalypse, and it doesn't look all that saved either. So... Fuck off, y'all monkeys are too easily impressed. Get back to me when it's time to discuss something actually relevant. 9 comments
 @drq The real alignment problem — the one that doomers are talking about (any doomer worth their salt, at least) — is not “there” yet. It will arrive with a superintelligence, one that will not give a damn about profits or their beneficiaries, in about the same way as you don’t give a damn about foraging ants whose anthill you inadvertently tread on. @trigrax We don't have what it takes to create "superintelligence". We don't know what "intelligence" is in the first place. We probably will create some kind of intelligence, if we try real hard, but it I don't believe it will be any more "super" than any of us, save for maybe experience. In other words, "superintelligence" is science fiction stuff, IMO. @drq Intelligence is “brain stuff”. Superintelligence is “a lot of brain stuff”. Consider mice and humans. Both have a brain. Even their brain architectures aren’t vastly different. A blob of neurons with some identifiable areas, some of which are common between the two. Humans just have ~1000× the stuff. And humans go to the Moon, while mice go into mousetraps. @trigrax Whales and elephants exist. They got lots of brain stuff. Much more than humans do. They're not "superintelligent", whatever that means. @drq Good point. It may take some hitherto unknown architectural advances, not just scaling up. But looking at the advances of neural nets over the past decade, I don’t see how it can be dismissed. It might be science fiction, but you know, a lot of science fiction stuff from 1900s and even 1950s is mundane reality now. > looking at the advances of neural nets over the past decade As I said, too easily impressed. Yeah, I mean it's nice/horrible depending on application and context, but it's not anywhere near either a rapture nor apocalypse. > it's not anywhere near either a rapture nor apocalypse I’m not saying it is. I’m saying the rate of progress (20 years from a stuggling ZIP code recognizer to GPT-4o), combined with the history of other fields of technology, justifies the concern that if this carries on for another couple decades, we *might* get to that humans-vs.-mice level. We can’t be sure, but it looks just plausible enough to get worried or hyped up. |
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@drq What would count as actually relevant in your book?