The ACM award is for their professional academic achievements - this fetishism to dig into another person’s personal life and find the most weird thing they said as the thing that paints over all of their life’s achievements as evil must stop.

It’s silly and dangerous. Because you don’t like thing A and they said/did thing A all of their lofty accomplishments get nullified by anyone. And worst of all internet gives your opinion the same weight as someone else (or the rest of us) who knows a lot about thing B that could change the world. From a strictly professional capacity.

This works me up because this is what’s dividing up people right now at a much larger scale.

I wish you well.

>this fetishism to dig into another person’s personal life and find the most weird thing they said as the thing that paints over all of their life’s achievements as evil must stop.

This has nothing to do with his professional life. He has made these comments in a professional capacity at an industry AI conference... The rest of your comment is a total non sequitur.

>And worst of all internet gives your opinion the same weight as someone else (or the rest of us) who knows a lot about thing B that could change the world. From a strictly professional capacity.

I've worked professionally in the ML field for 7 years so don't try some appeal to authority bs on me. Geoff Hinton, Yoshua Bengio, Demis Hassabis, Dario Amodei and countless other leaders in the field all recognize and highlight the possible dangers of this technology.

> This has nothing to do with his professional life.

you mean his personal life?

oops, yes.

It just feels like a smear on his character: Imagine working on RL incrementally without any lofty goals or preconceived evil.

I do agree that there is some level of inherent safety issues with such technologies - but look at atomic bomb vs fission reactors etc: history paves a way through positivity.

Just because someone had an idea that eventually turned to have some evil branch off way further from the root idea doesn't mean they started with the evil idea in the first place or worse, someone else won't.

People left careers in AI in the 1990s because they came to realize that the tech would probably eventually become dangerous. Many more (including the star student in my CS program in the 1980s) never started a career in AI for the same reason.

Sutton and everyone else who has advanced the field deserve condemnation IMO, not awards.

>the most weird thing they said

Reminds me of a quote from Jean Cocteau, of which I could not find the exact words, but which roughly says that if the public knew what thoughts geniuses can have, it would be more terrified than admiring.

> all of their lofty accomplishments get nullified by anyone

I don't think it's a question of whether their achievements are nullified, but as you mention, how to weight the opinions of various people. Personally, I think both a Turing award for technical achievement and a view that humanity ought to be replaced are relevant in evaluating someone's opinions on AI policy, and we shouldn't forget the latter because of the former.

(Also, this isn't about Sutton's personal life - that's a pretty bad strawman.)

By "view that humanity," do you mean alignment with the effective altruism cult?

Repressive laws on open AI/models—giving elites total control in the name of safety?

And this alternative perspective from the cult should disqualify someone from a Turing Award despite their achievements?

No, a "view that humanity ought to be replaced" is Sutton's, not an EA view. I'm not quite sure how you read that otherwise, except that you seem very angry. I sure hope our alternatives are better than human extinction or total control by elites...

I think he is trying to take the positive side of what is probably an inetability.

Or we could just you know, not build the thing that will probably kill us all and at minimum will obsolete all our labor value.

Given that strategy has never worked in the history of the world, it's probably a good time to figure out how we will put the right guardrails in place and how we will adjust to the new normal.

If "we" don't build it, someone else will.

This is so silly. Do you imagine temporal difference learning is some kind of human successionist plot?

The video is not about his technical work but rather his view that AI will or should take over the future.

But the Turing Award is for his technical work.

Sure, and his other views - in the scope of his professional expertise but also quite relevant to, uh, other humans - seem relevant in an HN thread about the Turing award. This place isn't exactly restricted to technical discussion of the details of RL algorithms, and it's pretty fair for humans to have views on whether we ought to be replaced.

It's not just one Youtube video, it's a repeatedly expressed view:

https://x.com/RichardSSutton/status/1575619655778983936

Valuing technological advance for its own sake "beyond good and bad" is an admirably clear statement of how a lot of researchers operate, but that's the best I can say for it.

The statement I take issue with is that Sutton "is not to be celebrated or trusted". Which I can only interpret to mean that the speaker does not think that Sutton should be celebrated or trusted. (And they've chosen to state it in a kind of pompous way.) Which I think is too strong on both counts. I (and apparently the ACM) think that Sutton should be celebrated for his technical accomplishments. Also, I think he probably can be trusted on a lot of technical matters. Should he be trusted on matters of whether there need to be safeguards on AI research imposed by the state? Maybe not, but those are only a subset of all the matters.

Very disappointing. I do not understand how people earnestly defend the successionist view as a good future, but I thought he might at least give some interesting arguments.

This talk isn't that. There are no substantive arguments for why we should embrace this future and his representation of the opposite side isn't in good faith either, instead he chose to present straw-man versions of them.

He concludes with "A successful succession offers [...] the best hope for a long-term future for humanity. How this can possibly be true when ai succession necessarily includes replacement eludes me. He does mention transhumanism on a slide, but it seems extremely unlikely that he's actually talking about that and the whole succession spiel is just unfortunate wording.

> ai succession necessarily includes replacement

How is AI going to make its own chips and energy? The supply chain for AI hardware is long an fragile. AGI will have an interest in maintaining peace for this reason.

And why would it replace us, our thoughts are like food for AI. Our bodies are very efficient and mobile, biology will certainly be an option for AGI at some point.

>How is AI going to make its own chips and energy?

OK, so do you support laws preventing chip manufacturers and energy providers from becoming reliant on AI?

Robotics is a software problem now, see the Tesla, Figure or Unitree humanoid bots. An AI can be totally embodied and humans will have little or no value as labor at all.

> How is AI going to make its own chips and energy?

Pay naive humans take care of those things while it has to, then disassemble the atoms in their human bodies into raw materials for robots/datacenters once that is no longer necessary

I'm not trying to be edgy or misanthropic but I don't understand why would you attach emotional value to the abstract concept of existence of humanity over next millennia. Isn't it the same kind of extrapolation of kin selection instincts far into the domain of values as for example favouring your race over others?

To me robots are just as cool.

At least his Twitter profile no longer has the bitcoin-meme-red-eyes thing.

Have you ever met Sutton? He is the most heart-warming, caring and passionate hippy I have ever met. He does not want all humans to die. The talk you link also doesn't support your claim. Perhaps I missed it, in that case, do leave a timestamp.

In the talk, he says it will lead to an era of prosperity for humanity, however without humanity being in sole control of their destiny. His conclusion slide (at 12:33) literally has the bullet point "the best hope for a long-term future for humanity". That is opposite to you saying he "doesn't care if humans all die".

If I plan for my succession, I don't hope nor expect my daughter will murder me. I'm hoping for a long retirement in good health after which I will quietly pass in my sleep, knowing I left her as well as I could in a symbiotic relationship with the universe.

Here's the difference, you are not personally building the device which will cause your demise and your succession. We as humanity ARE doing that and have agency to choose NOT to do that.

It is interesting that you bring this to the attention, but I don't see why we should not trust or celebrate someone if they have views that you don't agree with.

Edit: especially since I think your implied claim that Sutton would actively want everyone to die seems very much unfounded.

> doesn't care if humans all die

That seems to be a harsh and misleading framing of his position. My own reading is that he believes it is inevitable that humans will be replaced by transhumans. That seems more like wild sci-fi utopianism than ill-will. It doesn't seem like a reason to avoid celebrating his academic achievements.

> doesn't care if humans all die

His last slide literally says “best hope for a long-term future for humanity”. That’s literally the opposite of what you’re claiming.