Which of these experts are doomers?
Two of them who won it for stealing ideas Schmidhuber came up with over a decade ago and not giving credit.
Or is it a new move:
- people with safety concerns just don’t understand the tech.
- “here’s a list of people with safety concerns who demonstrably do understand the tech very well”
- Those particular experts are bad people so we shouldn't listen to them.
I'm really not committed to a side of this debate, and if I check my own bias, it's probably on the Steven Pinker "progress is good" side of things. I just keep hearing bad arguments from the AI-optimist side, and your comment is just another example.
The point could be that they are legitimate AI experts, but narrow-minded: their thinking utilitarian, their reasoning motivated. Unlike the original inventor, whose thinking was abstract enough to originate a novel method, but at the same time not pragmatic enough to even get the credit that he is owed. It's not an entirely unfamiliar scenario in tech, is it?
An analogy for those people would be an engineer who designs machine guns, or fighter planes. They may be really great at figuring out how to make the gun shoot farther, or the plane fly faster. At the same time, they may not have a very good grip on the idea that, in the end, someone's gonna get killed by their invention.
Such an engineer will probably have a pretty decent rationalization that would enable them to keep getting paid for doing what they love: inventing these fun machines for throwing bits of lead across the air and/or flying around. Whoosh!
"Because I make killing machines. And they were both damn fine killing machines."
But that's kinda beside the point. I'm more concerned that you missed the primary logical error that I committed in my analogy: the AI experts in question aren't doing the rationalizations but the scaremongering.
This is a problem in a public forum. You're not debating one-on-one. You're debating N-on-M. When you think you have a point nailed down - people with safety concerns understand the tech, say - then someone else comes in and argues against you from their viewpoint.
(If it's the same person, then yes, it's either a "move", or it's just that they're arguing just to argue, and not listening at all. If so, just move on - one cannot reason with a brick wall.)
I’m my opinion if feels Marc is intentionally misleading people to protect his interests. He can’t be that silly.
I’ve already seen someone on here now parroting the “thermodynamic” argument Marc was using.
It’s as if he’s delivered a stupid arguments playbook to many trolls.
- people with safety concerns just don’t understand the tech. - “here’s a list of people with safety concerns who demonstrably do understand the tech very well” - you’re pandering to authority.
A related move:
- greater intelligence leads to greater concern for universal values. - “here’s a list of very intelligent people who disagree” - there are a lot of very intelligent people in cults too, you know.
I don’t think I’m a doomer but they do seem more coherent than the people saying there’s no cause for concern.