Ask HN: Are leaders genuinely afraid of AI or do they have an agenda?

Re:Ask HN: Are leaders genuinely afraid of AI or do they hav... by bell-cot on Friday March 31, 2023 @02:22PM (#35391145)

Mixes of:

   - Agenda
   - Straight-forward Fear of AI
   - Fear that AI might trigger some really-not-so-bad social changes or upheavals...which *are* so bad for them & their friends
   - Mirroring the fears of their peers

Well worth noting: the "leaders" talking about AI are not magically wise, nor especially foresighted, nor widely experienced. They've mostly gotten to be leaders by being utterly obsessed with getting ahead in the human social hierarchy, and devoting their lives to doing that in some narrow social niche or other. There are human-nature reasons why the leaders in ~every historical major industry failed to be leaders in the industry which replaced it.

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Re:Ask HN: Are leaders genuinely afraid of AI or do they hav... by okareaman on Friday March 31, 2023 @03:47PM (#35392482)

My reason for posting was I was appalled by this interview, which I think was quite irresponsible. I've lost all respect for Lex Fridman for playing the hapless dupe "just asking questions" and not pushing back harder.

Eliezer Yudkowsky: Dangers of AI and the End of Human Civilization | Lex Fridman Podcast #368

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AaTRHFaaPG8

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Re:Ask HN: Are leaders genuinely afraid of AI or do they hav... by mikewarot on Friday March 31, 2023 @06:22PM (#35394527)

I'm over halfway through it, and it seems to me that Lex just can't wrap his mind around the warning that Eliezer is trying to give him. He's so in love with AI that he just can't fathom how things could go wrong.

I'm convinced the threat is real, but have no idea what the timeline is. I hope, like most things, we'll skate by, and just stop calling it AI once it happens, and treat it like any other tool. I strongly doubt that is true.

I suspect what will actually happen is that peak oil will catch us off guard, and we won't have the spare power available to train GPT7, and that will avert the singularity.

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Re:Ask HN: Are leaders genuinely afraid of AI or do they hav... by mikewarot on Saturday April 01, 2023 @09:23AM (#35400124)

Having finished the episode, it seems quite clear to me that Lex just doesn't understand the argument, or doesn't want to understand. He's so used to the idea of falling in love with an AI that he can't see the danger.

I see the danger, let me give an analogy.

What if, according to the laws of physics, it were possible to make a thermonuclear weapon out of beach sand using a microwave oven.

That's something so absurd that we'd never figure it out, but AGI could. That scale of dangerously destabilizing knowledge could show up at any time from a superintelligent AGI.

Its bad enough that nation-states have the resources to make civilization ending weapons. I think AGI could super-empower those with access to it.

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