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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Also scamming 101 for that matter, you want your mark to feel an immediate threat of overwhelmingly negative consequences so they'll buy whatever you're selling to prevent it. Silicon Valley directly makes tens of billions of USD literally serving scams to the public already, so I think it's fair to take most claims of doom with a pinch of salt.
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"?
[–] kragen 1 day ago
[–] strange_quark 1 day ago
[–] CalRobert 1 day ago
[–] kragen 1 day ago
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
[–] kragen 1 day ago
[–] FreakLegion 37 minutes ago
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
[–] BoxOfRain 21 hours ago
[–] jryle70 15 hours 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"?