It turns out if you're thinking about a problem twenty years before everyone else you tend to be the first person to make lots of arguments. So I don't see how "without restating his specific points" is supposed to be feasible. If Eliezer has already made all the strongest points, are people supposed to invent new ones?

> If Eliezer has already made all the strongest points, are people supposed to invent new ones?

I like this post because the rebuttal to “there’s a kind of cult of personality around this guy (1) where everybody just sort of agrees that he’s categorically correct to the extent that world leaders are stupid or dangerous not to defer to the one guy on policy” is “Yeah he really can see the future. The proof of that is he’s been blogging about a future that’s never come to pass for the longest time”

1 https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Ndtb22KYBxpBsagpj/eliezer-yu...

Yeah the thing about the future is that it's in the future? Considering all the people who say things like "AGI will take a century" and "superintelligence is impossible", like, Eliezer also did not call ChatGPT but this world surely looks more like the one he predicted than the one his detractors predicted. There's a reason so many of the people working at current AI orgs got into AI by reading Eliezer.

Also: how dare they have fun.

You make a good point, the correct response to “there’s a legitimately strange long-running cult around this Eliezer guy that long predates his proclamations about ChatGPT” is “yeah, have you heard about this Eliezer guy?”

Edit: You do make an interesting point though, Eliezer can predict the future. He is the only one that predicted that technology would advance to the point that humans will at times debate about the future.

Further, nobody but Eliezer Yudkowsky was able to predict a future in which Eliezer Yudkowsky would be popularly considered instrumental to the future of artificial intelligence. It is spooky how no other futurist predicted his rise to prominence, which is further proof of his prescience.

Sure. You can read the book "Superintelligence" by Nick Bostrom. You can also just ready things that Geoffrey Hinton has said, or Stuart Russel (both prominent AI researchers).

Not everyone makes exactly the same argument, of course, and Eliezer Yudkowsky is both one of the first to make AI safety arguments, and also one of the biggest "Doomers". But at this point he's very far from the only one.

(I happen to mostly agree with Yudkowsky, though I'm probably a bit more optimistic than he is.)

It was plain to many people that AI research was dangerous before Eliezer started say so publicly in 2003. Mostly these people kept silent though and chose not to enter (or not to persist in) the AI field.