Re:Why Technologists Fail to Think of Moderation as a Virtue
by Barrin92 on Sunday November 03, 2019 @04:01PM
(#21436562)
>Wouldn't it be better to look directly at whether the runaway AI scenario is plausible?
Yes but that burden has not been met by the people who talk about AI risk. They don't properly motivate why theirs is a plausible scenario, that is to say, provide actual evidence for their quite fantastical claims about the capabilities of AI that are grounded in empirical research rather than science fiction.
Douglas Hofstadter asked decades ago if a computer who is able to think will still be able to calculate fast, that is to say, he questioned whether endowing machines with intellect and symbolic reasoning will actually slow them down by the very nature of what intelligence is. I've read quite a few of the alarmist AI treatises over the recent years, and it's funny how few of them actually even engage that prescient question.
What Chiang is saying is that the entire AI risk complex is a mirage conjured up by the neuroses of billionaires who are projecting the problems that their very own creations have produced (as in their companies) onto the topic of AI. That it's a psychological phenomenon rather than a technical one. When these people are concerned about autonomous systems that turn the planet into paperclips and disregard humanity and ecology they're not actually thinking about general intellect, they're thinking about capital.
Yes but that burden has not been met by the people who talk about AI risk. They don't properly motivate why theirs is a plausible scenario, that is to say, provide actual evidence for their quite fantastical claims about the capabilities of AI that are grounded in empirical research rather than science fiction.
Douglas Hofstadter asked decades ago if a computer who is able to think will still be able to calculate fast, that is to say, he questioned whether endowing machines with intellect and symbolic reasoning will actually slow them down by the very nature of what intelligence is. I've read quite a few of the alarmist AI treatises over the recent years, and it's funny how few of them actually even engage that prescient question.
What Chiang is saying is that the entire AI risk complex is a mirage conjured up by the neuroses of billionaires who are projecting the problems that their very own creations have produced (as in their companies) onto the topic of AI. That it's a psychological phenomenon rather than a technical one. When these people are concerned about autonomous systems that turn the planet into paperclips and disregard humanity and ecology they're not actually thinking about general intellect, they're thinking about capital.