When every man is torn apart
With nightmares and with dreams
Will no one lay the laurel wreath
When silence drowns the screams
Confusion will be my epitaph
As I crawl a cracked and broken path
If we make it, we can all sit back and laugh
But I fear tomorrow I'll be crying
Ultimately, we have made it, through arms control agreements, working to limit the spread of nuclear weapons, and so forth. We can do the same for AI.
You don't have help. But perhaps you could at least avoid discouraging people unnecessarily?
*EDIT*: There are about 5 replies to this comment making roughly the same point. I'm not sure which to reply to, so I'll just reply here.
I'm not claiming that our execution as a species around nuclear weapons has been flawless. I'm not claiming that we are out of the woods with regard to nukes. I'm just trying to push back against defeatism and fatalism. Some felt a sense of inevitable doom during the Cold War. It's been decades now, and nuclear doom still isn't here! Our situation is dire, but not hopeless.
Spinning the present situation or the history of nuclear arms as a high-five, "go team human!" success story is... quite the take (Vasili Arkhipov, Cuban missile crisis generally, the current doomsday clock being "the closest the Clock has ever been to midnight in its history").
> You don't have help. But perhaps you could at least avoid discouraging people unnecessarily?
More germanely, you don't have to worry yourself, but at least avoid discouraging people with legitimate worries who want to take precautions. Even the present situation with nuclear weapons, precarious as it is, would likely be more precarious were it not for the political pressure of the people worrying in the 1950s and 1960s and up to today.
>Spinning the present situation or the history of nuclear arms as a high-five, "go team human!" success story is... quite the take (Vasili Arkhipov, Cuban missile crisis generally, the current doomsday clock being "the closest the Clock has ever been to midnight in its history").
I edited a response to this in my grandparent comment.
>More germanely, you don't have to worry yourself, but at least avoid discouraging people with legitimate worries who want to take precautions. Even the present situation with nuclear weapons, precarious as it is, would likely be more precarious were it not for the political pressure of the people worrying in the 1950s and 1960s and up to today.
Sorry, I may have mis-communicated. I want people to take precautions! That's why I linked to PauseAI: https://pauseai.info/ I'm trying to push back against defeatism.
I lived through roughly the latter half of the cold war and both of my parents were soldiers. I lived in West Germany etc.
No we have not escaped the nuclear thing. If anything, the current Russian tzar is rather more unhinged than any of his predecessors.
I doubt many here know what perestroika and glasnost mean or why those Russian words were so important back in the day.
I don't fear AI (where on earth would an "autonomous" AI manage to find the power requirements). Darleks can't really fly and LLMs will stop when you pull the plug!
I do fear numpties with a red button and a tenuous grip on reality.
>No we have not escaped the nuclear thing. If anything, the current Russian tzar is rather more unhinged than any of his predecessors.
Understood. This is a dire situation. But it's not hopeless. Same for AI.
>I don't fear AI (where on earth would an "autonomous" AI manage to find the power requirements). Darleks can't really fly and LLMs will stop when you pull the plug!
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. The idea that we're almost certainly doomed is an extraordinary claim. I haven't seen extraordinary evidence for it.
That was never the claim, firstly, so successful straw man there, and secondly, even if it was, would it really be that shocking? Population bottlenecks have happened for less. All habitat eventually shrinks. All species go extinct.
We have not made it. We have survived so far but the threat remains. Stockpiles and warheads have shrunk, so it wouldn’t be nearly as bad as in, say, 1983, but we’re still one mistake or misunderstanding away from the worst day in human existence.
And worse, somehow we’ve managed to declare victory without achieving it, and there’s no longer any real attention on actually fixing the problem.
If AI follows the same example, we’ll take some measures to lessen the impact of Armageddon and then carry on saying “problem solved!”
We have had nuclear weapons for less than a century. It takes one guy, one time for it to all go to shit. We are not out of the woods yet and we will never be.
Except we did had a bunch of close calls [1]. Also, we've been warned about climate change for at least 30 years and were unable to avoid it. So OP's remark is entirely deserved.
Until proven otherwise, we are not part of a movie where the hero saves the day at the end. I thought 9/11 made it pretty clear to everyone?
I don't think the end of the world would even be a bad thing; a lot of people assume that it would be disastrous but I think it's much more likely that it the "end" would just be a fragmentation that would be pretty uncomfortable, but not to the point of being horrific. I actually think that people are more resilient and creative than they think and if they were faced by a global economic collapse so strong that big tech would go bankrupt, they would bounce back pretty quickly. It's just that we've seen so many movies about the end and have been conditioned to believe that we're helpless that we think otherwise.
This is ARC Raiders/Embark Studios. Games made by hoards of anonymous contractors and maintained by a skeleton crew incapable of iterating meaningfully on their product.
I remember reading these direct quotes from SA in 2016 from the New Yorker and thinking, yeah, this guy is just miserable:
> “Well, I like racing cars. I have five, including two McLarens and an old Tesla. I like flying rented planes all over California. Oh, and one odd one—I prep for survival. My problem is that when my friends get drunk they talk about the ways the world will end. After a Dutch lab modified the H5N1 bird-flu virus, five years ago, making it super contagious, the chance of a lethal synthetic virus being released in the next twenty years became, well, nonzero. The other most popular scenarios would be A.I. that attacks us and nations fighting with nukes over scarce resources. I try not to think about it too much, but I have guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks from the Israeli Defense Force, and a big patch of land in Big Sur I can fly to.”
> "If you believe that all human lives are equally valuable, and you also believe that 99.5 per cent of lives will take place in the future, we should spend all our time thinking about the future. But I do care much more about my family and friends.”
> "The thing most people get wrong is that if labor costs go to zero... The cost of a great life comes way down. If we get fusion to work and electricity is free, then transportation is substantially cheaper, and the cost of electricity flows through to water and food. People pay a lot for a great education now, but you can become expert level on most things by looking at your phone. So, if an American family of four now requires seventy thousand dollars to be happy, which is the number you most often hear, then in ten to twenty years it could be an order of magnitude cheaper, with an error factor of 2x. Excluding the cost of housing, thirty-five hundred to fourteen thousand dollars could be all a family needs to enjoy a really good life.”
> "...we’re going to have unlimited wealth and a huge amount of job displacement, so basic income really makes sense. Plus, the stipend will free up that one person in a million who can create the next Apple.”
This doesn't seem like someone who's miserable at all to me. They seem like someone who has a wide variety of hobbies and is and is intellectually interested in futurism
Yeah, I have an half baked thought about billionaires like this that they truly want the best for this world even if they have to seek it by immoral means.
Funny you bring this up because I always think back to a story, in the New York Times if I recall correctly but perhaps the Journal or SFC, talking about how him and his friends got upset when asked to leave a high end french restaurant due to him wearing sneakers. They pulled a "Do you know who he is?" well before he was even tied to OAI. Always left a bad taste in my mouth and stuck with me a decade on.
Tangentially, without being too specific, I have someone incredibly close to me that has recently had interactions with the upper echelons of OAI's exec team and... the stories are not kind. I imagine when your company is being run by a morally bankrupt tech bro you are short on integrity.
After 10+ years of hearing anecdotes about sama I am starting to wonder if maybe the word on the street is true and he really is just as selfish and blind as people make him out to be. At this point, the optics surrounding OAI vs. Anthropic are just plain bad. They should have gotten rid of him before when they had the chance.
I don't follow public figures or news anywhere near enough to have a meaningful opinion on Sam Altman, but I find one interesting snippet here, which is that there is a straightforward prediction in there. He did say ten to twenty years and it's only been ten, but still, I can't think of a single good or service that families need or commonly want that is an order of magnitude cheaper. It makes me wonder if he's become any less confident of this or any other prediction.
I don't want to be holier than him or thou or anyone else, but it is the kind of thing I've found of myself quite a bit. I made a lot of confident predictions about the future 15-25 years ago on the Internet, and even though I'm not a public figure and nobody will ever hold me to task for being wrong, I can see it for myself. The predictions are still there. They weren't universally wrong, but I didn't do much better than chance. It's a big reason I no longer bother to make predictions. I have no idea what the future will bring and I'm comfortable with the uncertainty. It doesn't feel like very many people on the Internet are.
“I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness...
The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance”
Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
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