Fun fact, there is no historical evidence of an adult human ever dying from a cheetah attack. They are naturally shy, and a lot smaller than you may realize.
Cheetahs are very fast, but humans have way more endurance.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_versus_Horse_Marathon
> The Man versus Horse Marathon is an annual race over 21 miles (34 km), where runners compete against riders on horseback through a mix of road, trail and mountainous terrain. The race, which is a shorter distance than an official marathon road race, takes place in the Welsh town of Llanwrtyd Wells every June.
> ...
> The event started in 1980, when local landlord Gordon Green overheard a discussion between two men in his pub, the Neuadd Arms. One man suggested that over a significant distance across country, man was equal to any horse. Green decided that the challenge should be tested in full public view, and organised the first event.
While the horses had a string of wins from 2008 to 2019, 2022 to 2025 had three wins for humans and one win for a horse.
The next race event: https://www.green-events.co.uk/man-v-horse
There are horse endurance races where the winner arrived in 7,5 hours after 160km[1]. That's a sub 2-hours marathon almost 4 times in a row (not to mention with a guy on your back).
[1] https://eatnstays.com/uaes-almazrouei-wins-almutadil-cup-at-...
I don't think the Mongol cavalry would lose races to humans over any distance of steppe
Try not to read the Wikipedia as it might spoil the short story, there’s the pdf available on the web somewhere
When Dario and others say things like "this is happening and we should probably figure out what to do about it" what ends up happening is people hear "this is happening," see that the person warning them is the person doing the thing, and then short-circuit. "Why can't you just stop then?"
Dario's point, and the point of the people actually trying to solve the problem, is that AI is not just Anthropic and OpenAI. It's the knowledge that you can put more compute in, and get more capability out.
It is a technology now. It exists, in the world. Wishing will not make it go away. Being angry at it will not make it go away. Lying about how much water it uses will not make it go away. If Anthropic and OpenAI Shut down tomorrow, Accenture will not say "oh guess that llm thing won't work, let's go back to hiring humans!"
It is a truth that you can multiply matrices and get something that is economically useful. We cannot un-know this.
Physics allows it, so it will happen. So we should probably figure out what the heck to do about it. If your answer is something along the lines of "restrict it" then 1. let me know how that goes when other people don't, and 2. I really would rather prefer a world where we have the machines do the work the machines can do, not a world where we have human makework. If this means we need to figure out redistribution, let's talk about redistribution!
The only reason that infrastructure buildout is happening at all is the ideological capture of a small handful of obscenely wealthy people, who are fueling this buildout by spreading the extreme paranoia you’re echoing here.
I do not understand why no one else can see the circularity of this reasoning. There is nothing inevitable about tying up all of this productive capital in the pursuit of AI. There are many, many other projects requiring similar capital and human effort, with much more obvious payoffs, such as decarbonizing the world’s energy systems.
“It’s physically possible to provide abundant electricity without burning fossil fuels” is more provably true than any of the insane science fiction bullshit that undergirds the AI buildout, and yet, the entire clean energy industry is still having to build insane financial Rube Goldberg contraptions to make incremental progress.
“Inevitability” is a lie, period. This entire thing is extremely historically contingent, and we could easily stop this train tomorrow.
So, the Baruch Plan?
The Manhattan Project was $~2B in 1945 dollars, and a national-scale industrial mobilization. Now North Korea has the bomb. That's with nuclear material, which doesn't get easier and easier and easier to work with every year.
Compare to the price to train GPT-2 in 2019 ($43,000), and in 2026 ($73) [0].
I still believe Dario asks these questions in good faith. Nobody believes that about e.g. Sam Altman or Elon Musk. They compared themselves to Oppenheimer because it helped them get attention. When it started an actual regulatory conversation, they were suddenly less worried.
Conversely I think it's a bad definition, it's a show of what is the frame of the mind of the person who states that: "I want to show my control by destroying my things, look how powerful I am" which sounds like a toddler. That's how you portray psychopathic/narcissistic disorders in movies.
Not for fridges, I think that was a bad example. But it seems accurate at the level of geopolitics, where e.g. Iran shows it controls Hormuz by closing it with mines and other weaponry.
It presumes a sentient, rational counterparty. Being able to shoot a horse isn't the same as being able to ride it.
It's a political concept. It requires agency from the actor recognising the threat. We're pretty close to being able to hurl a giant rock at Mars. That doesn't by a long shot mean we "control" it.
If there were a human settlement on it, on the other hand, being able to credibly threaten Armageddon does give the thrower control.
In the original context of Dune Paul controls the spice because he can destroy it and his will would survive but it would destroy the way of life of the other cultures. So saying "Paul controls spice" only makes sense because another entity needs it and what's really meant is "Paul controls society".
If you so readily dismiss Herbert's definition of control posit a competitor and we can pressure test it. Also, "correlated with a toddler's world view" is not the epic rhetorical refute you think it is.
LOL you took something that was interesting to think about then took that idea and smashed it against a wall of stupidity.
the idea that humans need machines more than machines need humans is self evidently stupid - you're like those machines in fiction; the only way you could have said something so stupid is if you have a malicious intent to pollute the world with your deliberately stupid nonsense. there is no onus on that guy to provide a counterpoint to disprove your stupidity. the sheer audacity you display is astounding.
I think you missed the point. It's absolutely nothing to do with what's good to do, only brute facts of power. What things can or can't you cause to happen? And indeed, toddlers and psychopaths have a scarily good understanding of what power is.
If I live in a world where I can afford a freezer with food in it, it's practically guaranteed I can destroy my fridge without starving to death after. Heck, even if I was completely broke I could destroy my fridge and would have a pretty good (+99.999%) chance of not dying in the next year from starvation.
I get I'm nitpicking your point a bit, but I actually think most of our machines we could destroy and still be fine. We'd need to make sacrifices to our quality of life of course..
None of that was predicted.
VI is close to what we have now, software that has some fixed intelligence, it can only really imitate what it has been taught and is not very adaptable. Useful for kiosks, drones, essentially just a tool rather than something we would see as a separate being.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12168228
I even wrote up a whole article that specifically called RL loop based development as the future:
https://medium.com/@andrewkemendo/the-ai-revolution-will-be-...
> Reinforcement Learning tasks rely on ridiculous amounts of data. Whereas with traditional software architecture, where you accomplish tasks through explicit task instruction, RL trains for tasks based on millions of tests through a reward system. Most importantly once you have trained it to some minimum level, if you deploy it correctly, then it should continue improving — so long as you bake feedback into the UX. Imagine that instead of telling excel what to do, you and every other user will have a conversation with excel, improving the system incrementally.
I like imagining similar discourse when a more basic tool was invented: "A hammer is like a genie, it's all powerful, but, when you hit something with it, it interprets that super-literally, and it hits it."
We need better scifi! And like so many things, we already have the technology.
This is Stanislaw Lem, the great Polish scifi author. English-language scifi is terrible, but in the Eastern bloc we have the goods, and we need to make sure it's exported properly.
It's already been translated well into English, it just needs to be better distributed.
What sets authors like Lem and the Strugatsky brothers above their Western counterparts is that these are people who grew up in difficult circumstances, experienced the war, and then lived in a totalitarian society where they had to express their ideas obliquely through writing.
They have an actual understanding of human experience and the limits of Utopian thinking that is nearly absent from the west.
It is tempting for anyone raised in the West, and immersed in Judeo-Christian culture. And for anyone, in general, as it offers an epic narration of a personal entity.
Yet, the reality might be messier - IMHO closer to biology than to a weird mixture of computer science and theology. There is no ultimate intelligence (see Karpathy’s starfish shapes), just a collection of adaptability, learning, generalization and self-reference. Also, even an extremely smart being (or process) can be fragile.
So, less God, more WAU from SOMA or the Ocean from Solaris.
The issue is simple. Just like us (who are arguably complex, look at what we're building over here, this AI computer stuff!), entities have simple core needs (like food, water, power, etc.).
An infinitely smart AGI has the potential, nay, likely cause, to require infinite resources. We're already seeing the effect in the computing sector on e.g. chips, there's no reason to think this trend won't continue...
Lets circle back to the hydrogen argument, will we blow ourselves up. Real concern, abated by hard numbers. Different atmosphere, different concentrations, different pressure, different possible outcomes.
Today, we don't have those numbers. We don't have those calculations. I don't disagree with the point at the end "about how people can exploit other people, or through carelessness introduce immoral behavior into automated systems". These are issues, too. But saying there are other issues, don't worry about this big issue over here, is the absolute worse argument possible.
That's hand waving.
That effect is underwritten by economic demand and moderated by economic costs. There are more reasons to expect the trend to asymptote than somehow turn into an infinite process.
How would it make the combinatorial explosion in state space search go away, to pick one example?
And if it doesn't, is it then an infinitely smart AGI?
The concept seems to assume all problems humans struggle with can be solved. The halting problem is one witness that this is probably not true.
As for simple needs, humans also have complex ones around social interactions and the need for mental stimulation.
You can even get a literal tiger into a carrier, even though it can kill you easily. You just drug its food and wait till it passes out. This is because you are smarter than it, and know that tranquilizers exist and how to obtain them, which is a strategy that cats of any size are not even able to conceive of, and probably can't understand what happened after it's been done to them.
Human zoo keepers are actually smarter than that. For months, they train the tiger to go into the carrier to get food. Then on transport day, they shut the door behind it. Unclear if this works for future transport situations.
This is the premise I rejected immediately and, if you agree with me, it takes down the whole house of cards. Let me explain. The rationale has nothing to do with "quantum shenanigans."
I have been called religious but will readily concede that of course a physical brain is possible without a soul. What is impossible is to replicate a soul with purely physical matter. Therefore we may understand that "superintelligence" is possible, and maybe inevitable on the long thread of time, but - crucially - it will never be able to approach that supernatural element present in us (the spark of the godhead) and therefore never be able to replace humanity.
In that sense it is like any other natural disaster that threatens to make us extinct, but it is not some "superhuman" nor anything close.
It is better to develop a theology that can incorporate human-level or super-human level intelligence that isn't a zero-sum game.
What do you mean by 'supernatural' - and (assuming your definition is the standard one of 'not detectable by any measurement') by what mechanism that could possibly affect physical matter? (the onus is on you to prove the positive claim that there exists the supernatural or soul to begin with, which there is currently no evidence for).
The concept is self defeating by its own definition, either it is physical in some capacity (and therefore can be measured and replicated through yet unknown means) or it is not (and therefore indistinguishable from not being there at all).
Feeling that there 'must be' a soul is not enough to prove that it exists.
The feeling of experience is not enough to prove that experience is in anyway supernatural.
> What is impossible is to replicate a soul with purely physical matter.
What? Why? Where is the proof of this?
First and foremost, I'll give you an in. There is a difference between material, and processes like waves, waves I would argue are non-physical things manifested in physical material: you might want to start there.
But all roads lead to Rome from that line of thinking too, so you might need to come up with something far more clever.
> What do you mean by 'supernatural'
I would just say something outside our current capacity for understanding. How does that quote go...something like "sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic". "Not detectable by any measurement" isn't right because we clearly detect it in some way since we are discussing it now.
> Feeling that there 'must be' a soul is not enough to prove that it exists.
We don't have any proof that consciousness is part of the brain and is produced by it either. We also can't even prove other people are conscious besides ourselves. In this domain the idea of "proof" becomes less relevant.
In a simulation of a storm, does anything get wet? In a simulation of a mind, is there a real conscious? A real soul? Or just a simulation of one?
My guess is our brains act as a receiver for some "field" of consciousness. Of course it's just a guess, same as yours or anybody else's conceptions of consciousness and the spiritual world.
Strict adherence to Occham's razor would have us dispense with the former, but the latter is useful empirically.
There is some dogmatic insistence in GP, but equally dogmatic throwdowns on the other side of the argument are often passed over as trivially obvious.
I don't know what's what, but I think this insistence is a useful counterweight.
Onuses are on whomever says they exist ;)
> Strict adherence to Occham's razor would have us dispense with the former, but the latter is useful empirically.
Did you mean to say “matter” where you said “mind” and vice versa? It’s obviously the reverse of what you said; everything consists of matter, but what specific arrangements of matter you want to call a “mind” is obviously the abstraction.
Ockam’s razor is not really applicable here. Unless, that is, you want to ascribe something mythical to the mind that exists beyond matter — then it’ll trigger.
...wat?
> Strict adherence to Occham's razor would have us dispense with the former, but the latter is useful empirically.
No: you have that reversed. Matter can be reasoned about, matter is a useful abstraction, e=mc^2. energy = matter*speed of light^2. No such formula exists for the mind.
> I don't know what's what, but I think this insistence is a useful counterweight.
Why is insistence a useful counter weight to factual arguments?
Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34257025 - Jan 2023 (1 comment)
Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People (2016) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18499973 - Nov 2018 (248 comments)
Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13240811 - Dec 2016 (580 comments)
Maciej Ceglowski – Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13120213 - Dec 2016 (4 comments)
Interesting to trace these 10yr old AI posts from then to the present moment. The other one with a similar vintage would be “Should AI Be Open” [2] from Dec 2015, which is fascinating to juxtapose against the recent public battles.
[0] “BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding“: https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.04805
[1] “Improving Language Understanding by Generative Pre-Training”: https://cdn.openai.com/research-covers/language-unsupervised...
[2] “Should AI Be Open?” | Slate Star Codex: https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/12/17/should-ai-be-open/
>Such skull-and-dagger behavior by the tech elite is going to provoke a backlash by non-technical people who don't like to be manipulated. You can't tug on the levers of power indefinitely before it starts to annoy other people in your democratic society.
How right the author was.
In fact, if we consider the strongest version of the safety argument for AI, namely one in which the danger is not coming from robots but rather from a disembodied AI controlling our global finances and/or infrastructure, the assumption still does not correspond to reality.
AI is easier than people 10 years ago thought it would be. It's also easier to align than people feared it would be. It's the humans using the AI that are hard to control.
If and when the feedback loop on self improvement becomes more efficient and the window on training significantly narrows then things getting out of control rather quickly seems likely. Especially that it's likely we'll have a metric fuckton of compute by that point.
But even if you find them persuasive, there is something unpleasant about AI alarmism as a cultural phenomenon that should make us hesitate to take it seriously.
First, let me engage the substance. Here are the arguments I have against Bostrom-style superintelligence as a risk to humanity"
--
The framing here seems to me to equate "AI risk" and "AI alarmism" with buying in to belief in "Bostom-style superintellgence".
I'm not sure if the author meant to put anyone who is alarmed by developments in what we're calling "AI" into the same bucket as "AI obsessives want to make it into a programming problem, by designing a God-like machine", but I think this conflation is unfair and, frankly, dangerous.
I don't know what superintelligence is. I don't even know what intelligence is. And I don't really know what either "artificial" or "general" mean either when talking about "AGI".
You can believe, as I do, that these things can be, and will inevitably will be if we don't radically correct course, used to do very bad things independent and short of being "God-like". When you have systems which can hypothesize, synthesize, and test thousands if not millions of potential infectious agents in bulk [0], and can then order the ingredients for you from dodgy websites via some "claw", and then when you put these systems under the unsupervised control of millions of people with varying levels of stability and altruism, something extremely bad is exceedingly likely to happen.
I understand that 2016 is ages ago and things change, but I came away from the article with the impression that if I'm worried about AI risk then I'm a clown like the three pictured in the "Outside Argument" section (you're a Google-Glass-wearing cringe nerd if you're alarmed). Maybe that's my fault and I'm not smart enough to understand the actual point of the article. If I have misinterpreted, I welcome the correction.
1. It's hard to put a cat in a box despite us being smarter than a cat, so we're safe. (Counter: we're pretty good at putting cats in boxes when it matters.)
2. It was hard for Australia to kill Emus, so we're safe. (Counter: Australia could probably kill all Emus if it mattered enough, and we definitely accidentally kill off species when one of their inputs for life matters enough to us.)
3. Some smart humans get paralyzed by hedonism or existential angst instead of optimizing for arbitrary goals implied by their arbitrary value sets, so we're safe. (Counter: others overthrow the Czar, land rockets, etc.)
4. Modern AI is data-trained, so recursive improvement requires more data, so we're safe. (Counter: AI-crafted, synthetic data is a thing.)
5. We don't (yet) know how to improve our brains with brain surgery, so we're safe. (Counter: same as #4 above, which unlike us/evolution AI is being deliberately trained to understand and perform.)
6. Children take a long time to grow up, so we're safe. (Counter: the author's own "Premise 5: Computer-Like Time Scales", where they correctly note that computers can be arbitrarily faster than us.)
7. Individual smart humans on a desert island would be cooked, so we're safe. (Counter: nothing says the capability of a single AI must stop at that of an individual human, or that of a small group of smart humans; humans brains got dropped into a savannah and eventually they launch rockets.)
8. If AI doom is not a real threat, believing in it makes you believe some other not-real things that seem crazy or distasteful. (Counter: do we have a clear argument why it is not a real threat yet, in the list above?)
2. At what cost? Much like the climate change above, you'll have people on the AI side even when it's out in the field extincting us.
4. Adding, over time synthetic data and its generating algorithms can become unaligned with human needs/behaviors (an example would be our current stock market, numbers must go up!).
8. Going back to climate change, it was predicted a long time ago, and while the explosion of automobiles has greatly improved human lives the risks of climate change could erase a lot of that. Might have been better if we dealt with the problem before we have to give the thermometer worried looks.
It's a horror game and it explores all kinds of fascinating and disturbing scenarios. Simulations of human minds. Artificial worlds. Human minds in robot bodies. Genetically modified humans. Man-machine hybrids etc.
(A great exploration of the substance/structure matrix, by the way. My favorite question in AI and consciousness. Is the special sauce in the material, or its shape, both, or neither?)
The very question of aligning the AI with humans assumes that we have a very robust definition of what human means in the first place.
Ostensibly the AI was aligned. It did succeed in keeping humans alive! But it did that in all sorts of ways that mostly made them wish it hadn't.
Sidenote: It breaks my heart that all the great underwater-settings in media are hotbeds of horror scenarios. I think Subnautica broke the mold for this, here's to hoping the next generation of aquanauts take to the depths from that series.
To concepts you menton, I would add grey goo and x-risk.
Spoiler warning for those that havent played--
I forget the details exactly, but one scene stuck with me. It was a screen in one of the labs, where an experiment was running over and over. It was an uploaded consciousness of one of the test subjects, stuck in an interview room. He kept realizing he was trapped in a simulation and would start panicking. The computer would reboot him, trying another sequence to get him to not realize he was an AI. I think you as the player are given the option to turn him off forever, iirc.
Specifically (and no spoilers, but I will be talking structure), you see parts A -> B -> C.
I believe that part C makes the sequence of A -> B much less effective, by essentially removing a lot of the tension caused by seeing A, believing what it shows, and then immediately cutting to the reality of B.
C only really takes away some of that tension, and I feel like it was added because of concerns about how a simple A -> B -> fade to black, would leave players feeling. Arguably it's the truest representation of part of the game's message, but to me feels like a bit like it's shying away from really making you face the specific truth highlighted well by B.
Alternatively, keeping all the elements but playing them as A -> C -> B, would keep the message intended by seeing A -> B, and make it gentler for the player to receive, but ultimately remove the powerful effect of the buildup from A leading immediately to the reveal of B.
Dropping C entirely would lose the confirmation of 'Seeing both sides', however I believe A -> B is a more powerful vision, and players can come to question whether C even exists by themselves.
Also, I just love this phrase:
> "I woke up in my bed today... a hundred years ago."
Its possible AI and computing may never be able to reach that level of capability, but we can't know that. One thing that's great about SOMA is that the AI isn't nessessarily very capable and that's part of the problem, its very powerful but its not doing a good job with its enormous task.
We are awash in self-replicating machines. The biosphere is already a grey-goo apocalypse. Any new competitors have a serious moat to cross to out compete any existing self-replicators.
We are awash in intelligent agents. Our society (and meta society) is full of superhuman agents already. There is a huge moat for any new intelligence paradigm to cross.
What I am afraid of is the existing superhuman agents (companies, governments and religons) will produce AGI or superintelligence and then proceed to use it as cognitive mitocondria, even further deepening thier supremacy in the cognitive ecosystem.
Human intelligence doesn't scale upwards well. Individual humans only get this smart, and there are gains from getting multiple humans to work together - but the more of them you add, the larger is your communication and coordination overhead. In no small part because humans are self-interested agents that simply aren't designed to compose their capabilities seamlessly. You can't get a vastly superhuman intelligence simply by piling together more humans.
Human intelligence doesn't scale sideways well either. Unskilled labor is cheap and plentiful, but if you have a human with a very specific skill, the process of getting more of that capability is very long and very involved. Often, it's easier to redesign an entire process to run on worse humans than it is to train more humans for better performance.
Institutions are more capable than individuals, but far less capable than the sum of individuals within them. At many corporations, the majority of individual productivity is absorbed by management overhead and corporate rot.
AI isn't bounded by those limitations.
AI can scale intensively and extensively. AI can be scaled up by upping the compute budgets. AI can be replicated and copied indefinitely. AI doesn't have the innate human "I don't live to work, I work to live" overhead. AI can outclass human intelligence by a long shot.
The "moat" that's there is already being eroded by modern day LLMs. Betting that future AI systems can't cross it is folly.
What proves that AI doesn't have the same limitations? There's only so much computation you can do in given space, and all communication is limited by universal speed limit.
Which doesn't bode well for the future of human intelligence. Computing hardware gets better at what it does generation to generation, but no one is about to release Human Brain 2.0 any time soon. Human mind is not a fast-moving target.
Principal-agent problem isn't a physical law. It's a limitation that AIs don't have to suffer from. Humans have to delegate to other humans - but for AI, "principal" and "agent" might just be the same exact system instanced twice.
These are claims about future AI, not actual facts. Part of the counter argument is the world will already be awash in AIs institutions and individuals make use of. An ASI would arise in a world that is already full of formidable intelligences that provide a check on what it can do. This is what happened with the evolution of replicators/life. No species was able to fully dominate the biosphere because there are too many other capable replicators, and there are always tradeoffs in capabilities.
We imagine the possibility of an unrestrained god-like ASI ruling the solar system. But it's just that, an imagination backed by the assumption that self-recursive improvement leads there. Problem is, the real world never turns out to be that simple.
It's probably the case that alien ASI replicators aren't devouring the universe either because of various restraints.
Our current AI is more like a fancy Google search than some kind of machine God.
David Silver who worked on AlphaGo has recently raised money to try similar approaches with general intelligence. (https://www.cnbc.com/2026/04/27/deepmind-ineffable-intellige...)
How do we get to ASI? That's what recursive self-improvement is about.
If AGI is reachable, then we can make AI that, in turn, makes improved successor AIs. The performance goes up. It's not bounded by human intelligence - it's bounded by how much the previous generation of AI could improve upon itself.
We don't have a stable recipe for RSI yet, but AI development is already AI-assisted. It's just that the "improvement" loops of today are long, and require plenty of human input. Betting against RSI is betting that it'll stay that way forever - that tightening the loop and removing humans from it is fundamentally impossible.
I was like... nanotechnology and grey goo already exist. It's called biology. The scenarios I was reading were silly. They violated conservation laws and laws of physics. But people were believing it and calling for limits on nanotechnology research.
I remember arguing with smart people on this, and that was when I started to realize that there's two kinds of dumb. I had the same realization later when I argued with an incredibly intelligent guy who was absolutely convinced the moon landings didn't happen. See, there's dumb-dumb and smart-dumb, and the people who thought grey goo would eat Earth or that the Apollo landings were a hoax were the latter. Smart-dumb is high-IQ rationalization of ultimately irrational and absurd ideas, and the smarter you are the more effectively you can do this.
I've met some really shockingly brilliant fools over the years who believe in all kinds of outlandish conspiracy theories, absolute literalist religious fundamentalism, idiotic political doctrines that directly contradict basic logic and all of lived human history, and so on. All of them can engage in sophisticated airtight rationalizations.
I sometimes wonder if this is one of the evolutionary forces constraining intelligence. In my experience, smarter people are somewhat more likely to believe highly sophisticated and complex stupid things, and they are much better at convincing others of these things. That's probably more dangerous to them, their family and friends, and the species than dumb people believing simple silly things that are easily debunked.
On AI...
Is AI potentially dangerous? Very. It's already dangerous in a number of ways. The biggest right now is probably mass production of personalized propaganda, mass surveillance, and mass manipulation. There's also the potential that bad actors could use it to accelerate their ability to make things like garage WMDs (biotech, chemical weapons, etc.). None of this requires hard take-off superintelligence. It's just inherent risks to a powerful technology.
These are not entirely new risks. They were already present in the Internet and computing. AI just raises them to a higher level.
The extreme hard take-off stuff is silly, and it actually distracts us from talking about the much more realistic dangers and coming up with reasonable solutions that don't also throw away the huge benefits of these technologies.
One of the differences between MIT and other schools is that MIT has paid staff to promote in the media anything their faculty does. A book by professors at most universities has zero promotion and most of the time will go nowhere.
The monkey's paw. You know, you don't need superintelligence for that.
Civilization was already doing this. "What if we just gave ourselves exactly what we wanted." Well, it turns out often that's not so good!
2016 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13240811
Well we can do the wager. If it's a nothingburger, then the worst case scenario is that we approached AI too cautiously. (Ha. What are the odds of that?)
If it's not a nothingburger, then we all die, unless the whole world agrees on the correct course of action in advance and coordinates perfectly. Hmm.
Well, maybe we don't all die, but the world is irreversibly transformed into something incomprehensible and repulsive.
Although, I don't really think we needed AI's help for that one. We should probably figure out how to align ourselves before we try to preach to the next species. I'm not exactly holding my breath though :/
I don't understand the monk question though.
If there exists a path of runaway superintelligence, the trajectory we've experienced has been following it to a tee. Their predictive power was affirmed.
All the "AI is a nothingburger" predictions of the last decade, including many here even in the last year, have aged incredibly poorly.
If you're actually curious, here's a good summary: https://x.com/ESYudkowsky/status/2043601524815716866
We were dismissed as cranks before and now we’re just ignored by whomever is promising the most money to investors.
So, par for the course. Everyone in AI has lived through all the cycles so far so this is just the biggest one yet.
Afaik no-one that is actually working on AGI is anywhere close atm.
Whether adding +5% per model release is enough to get a broadly superhuman system remains to be seen. But my take is that there's no such thing as "not working on AGI" in the frontier labs. Everything that's being put into modern frontier systems is AGI groundwork, one way or the other.
Because if so, I'm pretty sure any frontier LLM is better at evaluating AI capabilities than you are.
I'm not saying that AGI is impossible, but the focus on LLM's is probably not the right approach. I don't think we will ever make it until we understand the human mind better.
An average LLM of today has better reading comprehension than an average human, and the gap only grows release to release.
"Understand the human mind" turned out to be a distractor. The bitter lesson won: you can take a "good enough" AI architecture, burn a shitton of data into it with an unholy amount of training compute, and get halfway to AGI - no "understand the brain" required. LLMs are so fried in imitation learning on human-generated data they even inherit humanlike failure modes.
Let's talk about Billionaire Alignment, Economic alignment, Human alignment.
Classware should be M.A.D. -- in that it shouldnt even happen.
no we don't...
not sure where this notion comes from that if enough public figures are worried about something, then we must also
What would be a way to recursively self-improve algorithms for matrix multiplication (foundations of machine learning and inference)?
But if you think of the optimization space: different physical representations, different approaches (photo, quantum, etc), more parallelism - there's undoubtedly a lot of headroom even on the matrix multiplication side. I would imagine there's a lot left on the table when it comes to the abstractions we've built. Infinite? No, but lots of potential.
And what does a machine with a few orders of magnitude more power come up with? I'm not readily able to predict what something like that could create (maybe it's tapped out, but I doubt it).
It seems to come down to an article of faith (as referenced in the article) that there's a lot more potential to be extracted in our current exploitation paths. Which I think is probably reasonable.
Heck, even if a theoretical machine tops out at 3-5 orders of magnitude faster/more complex, I'm sure that could do some amazing things that look like magic to us.