The phrase "grift behind AI doomerism" suggests that either the book author or the reviewer (or both) don't have a clue. AI will cause real and huge problems.

I think that depends on whether your definition of “doomerism” is the same as theirs.

Cars have killed millions of people. Add to that the consequences of electricity, industrialization, urbanization, and even capitalism itself. But billions and billions of people are not only better off -- living lives of outrageous luxury when measured against recent history -- but they wouldn't have existed at all.

Everything good comes with tradeoffs. AI will likely also kill millions but will create and support and improve the lives of billions (if not trillions on a long enough time scale).

That's one vision of how things play out. But I do think it's possible that AI ends up killing every last person, in which case I think "everything good comes with tradeoffs" is a bit too much of an understatement.

Even if AI doesn't kill every last person, I think it will almost certainly increase the wealth gap. I agree that the tradeoffs will most likely not be worth it.

Ah, so if that's what you mean by AI downsides, then you might find this useful:

https://www.wikihow.com/Leave-a-Cult

I came to this conclusion on my own, so, no.

But the main figures behind the Ai doomerism are nutjobs either applying bayesian math in a bad way or right wing extremist believing that black people are inferior for genetics reason (I know it's an overreach that doesn't represent all the population of Ai doomers, but the most important people in that sphere are represented by what I said).

Furthermore, they're people without a history in academia or a specific past in philosophy. Although i do agree that investigating Ai dangers should be done, but in an academic context

Why is this downvoted? It’s clearly a reference to the zizians and MIRI and Bayesian nutjobs is an absolutely correct assessment.

Keep on telling yourself that.

Stuart Russell and Geoffrey Hinton have both expressed concerns that AI could lead to human extinction and neither are nutjobs

I wasn't explicitly referring to the more "sane" people expressing doubts regarding Ai.

Hinton at least says that other issues in Ai should be dealt with, rather than just being an Ai doomer who only fears Ai takeover he actually realizes that there are other current issues as well

At this point, how many times should we have been dead for eliezer?

Like almost all the other doomers, Eliezer never claimed to know which generation of AIs would undergo a sudden increase in capability resulting in our extinction or some other doom, not with any specificity beyond saying that it would probably happen some time in the next few decades unless the AI project is stopped.

Idk, a few years ago when chatgpt came out he was saying things like "if we're still alive in 3 years (...)" where chatgpt 3.5 was still a glorified transformer. And modern llms still are. It's the constant fear mongering that stings my nerves.

And well, I'm not surprised nobody knows which generation of Ai could undergo an increase causing our extinction, it's not even sure if there could exist such a thing, let alone know which generation

He has been saying for a couple of years that although it is possible any day now, it is more likely 10 or 20 or 30 years from now than it is today.

It is not a contradiction be confident of the outcome while remaining very uncertain of the timing.

Ok, I think I might get a heart attack sooner or later, it's a possibility, although not very high.

If I said so, you might ask me if I saw a doctor or something similar to make me suspect that, and that's my issue with him. He's a Sci fi writer that's scared of technology without a grasp of how it works, and that's OK. He can talk about what he fears, and that's OK. It still doesn't mean we should take him seriously just because.

My pet peeve is that when trying to make laws regarding Ai - at least in Europe - some considerations were done regarding how it worked, what it was (...), how it's being talked in academic literature. I had a lawyer in a course explaining that, and while not perfect you eventually settle on something that more or less is reasonable. With yudkowsky, you have a guy that is scared of nanotech and yada yada. Sure, he might be right. But if I had to act based on something, it would look much more the eu process to make laws and less the "Ai will totally kill us from now to 30 years trust me". Perhaps now I'm more clear

And don't get me started with the rationalist stuff that just assumes pain is linear and yada yada

Eliezer has written extensively on why he thinks AI research is going to kill us all. He has also done 3-hour-long interviews on the subject which are published on Youtube.

And perhaps YouTube is the appropriate place to talk about the probabilities he pulls out of thin air such as chatgpt 5 killing us with less than 50% chance, the badmath he showed to us a few years ago on reddit, and him proposing to trust bayes rather than the scientific method

At least he could learn to use some confidence intervals to make everything appear more serious /s

I'm very much in favor of research in Ai safety, maybe done with less scare and less threats of striking countries outside of the gpu limit agreement (and less bayes, God)

That's more or less what I was referring to, but I should have been more clear

Yesterday I had someone here tell me timnit gebru didn't contribute to hard science

She has a PhD in electrical engineering and has worked at Google before researching on Ai with a more philosophical approach

Putting aside the nebulous notion "contribution to hard science"...

She became famous for adopting a strain of strident and problematic activism, using it to attack her colleagues and making claims just as wild as some of the ones she cherry picks to critique.

It's not at all surprising that she ended up an extremely divisive figure. And meanwhile, the state of the art sped far ahead of where she drew her line in the sand.

It's hard to find discussion of her that isn't strongly biased in one direction or another (surely, my own comment included). In my experience (sample size 1), when she gets brought up (or involved), the quality of the discussion usually plummets.

Oh, and I don't necessarily agree with all what she says, I don't want to know what happens when someone which 100% agrees with her enters the room