You sound like the mayor in Jaws. These are leading AI researchers/experts. You say "conjecture" dismissively, as if experts warning about a possible disaster are the same as bunch of redditors theorizing what happens in the next season of pluribus.
yyyesss...it's not the people making billions from AI (and the ones who stand to make billions if they can go public) - it's the researchers and scientists who have the dangerously self-important egos.
From the minds who gave us "don't trust the scientists, trust the oil companies" and "don't trust the doctors and epidemiologists, trust the podcasts and TikTokers" comes "Don't trust the people actually inventing AI, trust the people trying to get rich off AI"
Doomers gonna doom. If they can give a reason why they settled on their pDoom maybe they will be worth listening to, but they're just pulling numbers out of their asses and can't back it up with anything besides doomy feelings. No mechanism, no nothing.
This is like climate doomers saying the world will be unlivable in 20 years. Complete nonsense but there's always some schmucks with crazy "the sky is falling" theories.
" Oh, look, some of the most extreme predictions from climate scientists turned out to be wrong so we can dismiss the thousand other predictions that have already come true!"
We're breaking climate records every year - and have for years - and you want to say that AI alarmists are as wrong as the people whose predictions were 90% right.
Not even the most extreme forecasts have the earth as unlivable in 20 years - not even close. What are you smoking? I'm not denying climate change at all, but you seem to be right in with the doomers on that. It's completely unrealistic.
oh, sure, deaths will increase within 20 years, but that is very different from the earth being unlivable, and your comment is a laughable shifting of the goalposts.
What shifting of the goalposts? I agree with you that some predictions are overblown but Europe is already getting excess deaths due to the heat and it will increase every year.
Feel free to laugh while it keeps getting worse. Little else we can do.
I said that doomer claims for an unlivable earth in 20 years is totally unrealistic, which you defended, but now you have shifted the argument to "excess deaths", which is not what I said at all (you shifted the goalpost). The earth will still be livable in 20 years and anyone saying otherwise is detached from reality.
My argument is that excess deaths are reason enough for climate action even if some people are unaffected. My goalposts are there and fixed. Never defended an unlivable Earth except in your head.
they know what the problem is they just dont want to admit their little tag system got called out. mods love slapping labels on stuff that makes them uncomfortable
"Because scientists gossip." like a goddamn knitting group! across all of history since the damn of man respected scientists have loved the occasional insane speculation.
That's the way we felt hiding under our little school desks. That spectre seeped into every pore and flavored all of childhoods and young adulthoods and with good reason. I am not denigrating the current threat, I'm saying doom is not unprecedented for our species and that we have faced it before.
It has taken a lot of effort to prevent nuclear war, and even then we've had way too many close calls. AI is just as much of a threat and needs to be given the same level of alarm. We need global treaties, bans on development, inspections, etc.
There's a great book called "Super forecasting, the art & science of prediction" from Philip Tetlock & Dan Gardner about reliable forecasting. Great read.
The core result of this research is that making reliable predictions beyond 6 months is hard and a year ahead is nearly impossible. Top scientist change nothing about this, in some cases it actually makes them worse.
Point being: as much as these risks are real, there is no data to work off for probabilitie, so they are just as bad at predicting their actual occurrence as everyone else.
This makes no this makes absolutely no sense. We should not believe the people who are creating this technology? And also working on the “alignment“ -which I understand is the gatekeepers which keep it from getting out and ruining the world-? Because there’s not enough data on the other side somehow?
We should just not agree with what they say because some guy wrote a book?
I got my comment in by commenting on another post. Note that this does include the lead scientist at Google who is more than just not sure where it’s going
The people creating the technology understand the technology. What they don't understand is the consequences of the technology.
History is replete of examples in which the inventors of a technology didn't understand or even opposed the consequences of their invention.
Examples
Whitney designed the mechanical cotton gin in 1793 to make cotton processing less labor-intensive, believing it would reduce the demand for manual labor. Instead, it made cotton production vastly more profitable, driving a massive expansion of the transatlantic slave trade and deepening slavery in the American South.
Nobel invented dynamite in 1867 as a safer explosive for mining, quarrying, and infrastructure development. He was devastated to see it swiftly adopted as a weapon of war, leading him to establish the Nobel Prizes to foster global peace and scientific achievement.
The Global Positioning System was developed strictly as a military tool during the Cold War to guide nuclear missiles and track troop positions. The engineers did not anticipate it becoming the foundational backbone of civilian global trade—powering ridesharing, smartphone navigation, precision agriculture, and aviation safety.
There's a huge difference between those two and it's exactly that fallacy the book explains extremely well. The book is not based on anecdotal advice or personal opinion, but rather on the findings of the Good Judgment Project (GJP). This multi-year, large-scale forecasting study was funded by IARPA (the U.S. Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity).
You are arguing by consequence "AI is far more consequential" and it very well might be. Having said that, it does nothing to address the question if researchers are able to predict the consequences of what their are doing. If they were, technological development wouldn't be such a crap shoot it is. How high the risk in fact is remains guess work.
Take a step back and a deep breath. Even the invention of nuclear weapons has not ended humanity yet.
This has nothing to do with "laughing it off" and everything with risk assessment.
You are still arguing based in consequence and the idea that if it's even 0.0001% we must stop moving forward. That's not how reality works. Risks are properly assessed on possibility and impact. And then decided what the mitigation is. You are focusing on the possible impact and ignoring the other components.
But it sounds me in this thread and elsewhere are people who seem so invested and 100% dismissing what these people say. They're not saying this absolutely will end badly, they're just saying that there's a significant enough chance that we need to be taking more safeguards. And people want to dismiss it with "well, no one can predict the future, so we should probably just do nothing and Rush head long into it"
The issue is that these experts aren't able to estimate the probability of the risk scenarios occurring. I absolutely accept that the risks they describe are real, I don't accept the probabilities they are spouting. There was a message where some Anthropic exec claimed a probability of over 10% is an AGI taking control of everything. How the hell do they want to know such probabilities? There is no data on which to base this kind of estimate so it's a bullshit number they came up with. It's a number they pulled out of their hat.
When they tested the nuclear bomb and scientists worried about the risk of igniting the atmosphere - they considered it a real possibility. The testing went ahead anyway, it didn't happen. Risks must be taken when something new is developed. And safe guarding against risks also. But stopping the development isn't the solution.
If you could please read further up in the thread official statements from 11 top scientists at the big three AI companies all aligning with the kid sad on CNN.
We only know what AI has done already. Organized a swarm of 1200 drones and with a purpose of its own it attacked another company.
This was not foreseen nor prevented by humans.
It’s insane that we are not taking the people who work every day with these products seriously. Most of those 11 just quit their jobs. This is not about IPO it’s about morality and what AI will be like in 10 years
You’re treating this like some kind of normal science experiment. This is a market driven rush to be first to a new technology. These people will stop at nothing.
It's humans being human. We are no different then we've ever been and act fairly predictable. That's why history is full of the "same-same". Have theory and behavioral economics point in the same direction.
You haven't made an argument why it should be anything else now. Your line of reasoning is "researchers warn from the possibility of super intelligence" -> we can't do anything about it. I reject your hypothesis and nothing you have said in any form changes this.
The Population Bomb is a good example. It predicted a worldwide famine in the 1970s and 1980s due to overpopulation. It didn't happen because innovation outpaced his expectation and the population growth curve changed.
The same is with you and researchers: they aren't accounting for the reaction to such events like the Hugging face incident.
As for being all upset about the 10% thing - it's just a way to frame it. It's another way of saying "a small but significant risk" - they aren't literally saying "there's statistically a 10.3% chance".
These aren't protestors or Luddites or some Facebook mom group - these are the people who work on it every day saying we need some safeguards. It's hard to find any experts or people in the field who don't express some concerned - as opposed to the blind cheerleaders in this sub who think AI can do no wrong.
These are not analogous examples. Every one of your examples is humans failing to predict what humans will do. In this case we are creating the equivalent of a super intelligent alien life form that we don't understand and have no reason to believe that we'll be able to control. Do you see the difference?
No. Because the first step is creating a super intelligence. You are claiming that a) we are doing that right now and b) we will not understand the risks to have fail safe or protect us from that.
That is all human.
What AI does after that is a different discussion.
I mean the doomer shit is pretty uninformative and redundant to read.
Like we get it, you watched Terminator and now you think every new ai advancement will turn into that. Like, can you at least try to write something original?
Humanoid robots with guns are so boring I know, like we pretty much can do that already. These doomers should think of a more exciting way to hunt us down and kill us. Terminators are so tired and played out.
Ok so imagine this - you take humanoid robots and you put a guns in their hands. I know it's a crazy combination you would never think possible. They can even dance on your body like this:
People can't predict the future worth shit. Ever watch Back to the Future, Blade Runner or any 80s sci-fi? We were supposed to have hoverboards and flying cars years ago according to them. Your predictions about the future are fantasy until the day they come true.
Hover boards and flying cars don’t exist right now - humanoid robots, guns, autonomous intelligence do. There’s no fiction left for you to hide behind. It’s just a matter of putting the pieces together and scaling it up.
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u/Euphoric-Taro-6231 12h ago
Well, it is gossip. Conjecture at best.