Hacker News

points by legitronics 1 day ago | 0 comments

I think they mean we don’t have a deathstar. We can make the atoms here shitty. We can’t annihilate them or scatter them out of their own gravity well.

Life in theory could restart with our weapons, but what’s the point with the other scenario.

[–] strange_quark 1 day ago

Being scared about novel AI weapons sounds like the people who were scared that turning on the LHC would create a black hole that would suck in the Earth.

[–] kragen 1 day ago

The most important difference is that this time it's the people who know the most about the topic who are concerned, and the people who know the least about it who are blasé. (Also, Yann LeCun.) With the LHC it was the other way around.

[–] strange_quark 1 day ago

If you truly believe this, I am begging you to touch some grass, preferably very very far away from Silicon Valley. It’s nice out here.

[–] CalRobert 1 day ago

Do you have an argument to make or only snide condescension?

[–] kragen 1 day ago

My demographic claim? It's obviously correct, as anyone with the most casual acquaintance with the question knows. The worried people, like Geoffrey Hinton, Bill Gates, and Dario Amodei, might be wrong, but they certainly aren't ignorant outsiders. (Neither is Yann LeCun, of course, which is why I mentioned him: he's an important exception to the rule.)

How would touching grass help? Do you think the grass is better informed about AI risk than you are?

...that's plausible, actually.

Probably a site called "Hacker News" is not the smartest place for you to be implicitly asserting that thinking about things is bad, or that those nerds who do it are out-of-touch losers. Maybe you want to be on Rugby News instead.

On Hacker News, by contrast, what is valued is thoughtful discussion grounded in the kind of rigorous theoretical knowledge that comes from extended concentration, usually but not always indoors, where it won't rain on the computers.

[–] jacquesm 1 day ago

Bill Gates is too busy trying to save his reputation from his Epstein association to be believed, he's a billionaire concern troll and Amodei is far more worried about his stock price than he is about humanity. Those two are discounted. That doesn't mean we don't have a problem, but they are just hitching their wagons to horse that happens to be running in a direction that is temporarily useful to them.

[–] kragen 1 day ago

That's plausible, although I don't think it's actually correct. But there's a pretty extensive set of AI luminaries who are concerned who can't be dismissed so easily.

[–] FreakLegion 35 minutes ago

There are as many 'luminaries' on LeCun's side as there are on Hinton's. Andrew Ng, Pedro Domingos, Schmidhuber, and the list goes on.

Any time it seems to you that there are more people on the side of an issue that you happen to be on yourself, a good rule of thumb is to assume confirmation bias.

[–] N7lo4nl34akaoSN 1 day ago

Spreading fear of an awesome power whose true danger is unproven is Religion 101.

[–] jryle70 15 hours ago

It's very disappointing to hear BS like this coming from a very intelligent crowd such as HN. How many people in the US do you think know who Epstein was, let alone what is contained in his file? How many in the world? If Bill Gates is worried about his reputation, Microsoft has sealed the deal long time ago.

As for Dario, of course he's worried about the stock price. I would if I were in his shoes. That's literally part of a CEO's job. He is also one who has consistently raised the issue with AI safety. He was OpenAI's head of AI safety after all. Anthropic is considered security risk by the US. Is that "temporary useful"?

[–] akoboldfrying 1 day ago

> I think they mean we don’t have a deathstar. We can make the atoms here shitty. We can’t annihilate them or scatter them out of their own gravity well.

What a silly distinction to make.