Some who are often quoted as if they are doomers are quoted out of context. I wouldn’t say there is zero chance that AI does something very harmful. That would be naive and I wouldn’t say that about any potentially powerful technology.
Rationalism and EA is one of the best funded intellectual movements in history, and it’s very loud. It’s also a bit cult like with many true believers. Leading frontier labs also have a vested interest in pushing regulations that would restrict competition. All this means it has a disproportionate command of the discourse.
AI risk is not zero but climate change, bioterrorism, decay of our political systems, and atomic war all rank higher IMO. Nonlinear climate tipping points, with the most scary being the clathrate gun hypothesis, are much more likely than any sci fi AI takeover scenario.
AI could either help or harm climate change. It could use more energy and burn more carbon but it could also help us crack fusion or significantly better batteries for grid scale renewable leveling. There are efforts like the latter already underway.
The most likely very bad scenarios I see for AI are mass persuasion and AI supercharged addiction. Both are extrapolations of negative outcomes for the Internet that have already manifested, but supercharged by AI.
Maybe I'm wrong, but your comment seems to suggest that you are skeptical of ASI. Do you have any arguments to support that?
Btw, wouldn't AI increase the risk factors you mention such bioterrorism or nuclear war? It seems like we're not far off from AIs being able to enhance the capabilities of bad actors in the near future.
Because we were sold ASI for Sonnet 4.8. the for Gpt 5.3. then itvwas Astra and Fable. I use AI coding agents. Maybe I don't have access to SOTA, but I use the closest models that were supposed to be great. They're not. They still need to compact the context. They're still susceptible to poisoning. You still need to restart them from a memory file to clean up the context, and the only way to use agents 'swarm' is to give them a very short life.
I don't think my position is the one that needs arguments tbh. I'm even lowering my standards, moving my goalposts closer to the AGI crowd. I will admit we've reached AGI when a LLM can play a 1800 elo FIDE (not 1800 on a fake AI only elo rating) with a specialized harness made by a human. Previously I insisted the specialized harness had to be written without human supervision, now I don't care.
I'm agnostic about whether ASI is possible. I don't have a dog in this fight other than a pro-human bias. I have used coding agents as well and I'm certainly aware that they are limited (at least in my domain).
I think the main argument for ASI is something like (i) extrapolating the progress from the past 10 years into the future, (ii) rapid progress apparently still being made, and (iii) seeing no obvious theoretical limitations.
poopcat · · focus · HN ↗
api · · focus · HN ↗
Some who are often quoted as if they are doomers are quoted out of context. I wouldn’t say there is zero chance that AI does something very harmful. That would be naive and I wouldn’t say that about any potentially powerful technology.
Rationalism and EA is one of the best funded intellectual movements in history, and it’s very loud. It’s also a bit cult like with many true believers. Leading frontier labs also have a vested interest in pushing regulations that would restrict competition. All this means it has a disproportionate command of the discourse.
AI risk is not zero but climate change, bioterrorism, decay of our political systems, and atomic war all rank higher IMO. Nonlinear climate tipping points, with the most scary being the clathrate gun hypothesis, are much more likely than any sci fi AI takeover scenario.
AI could either help or harm climate change. It could use more energy and burn more carbon but it could also help us crack fusion or significantly better batteries for grid scale renewable leveling. There are efforts like the latter already underway.
The most likely very bad scenarios I see for AI are mass persuasion and AI supercharged addiction. Both are extrapolations of negative outcomes for the Internet that have already manifested, but supercharged by AI.
whaaswijk · · focus · HN ↗
Btw, wouldn't AI increase the risk factors you mention such bioterrorism or nuclear war? It seems like we're not far off from AIs being able to enhance the capabilities of bad actors in the near future.
orwin · · focus · HN ↗
I don't think my position is the one that needs arguments tbh. I'm even lowering my standards, moving my goalposts closer to the AGI crowd. I will admit we've reached AGI when a LLM can play a 1800 elo FIDE (not 1800 on a fake AI only elo rating) with a specialized harness made by a human. Previously I insisted the specialized harness had to be written without human supervision, now I don't care.
whaaswijk · · focus · HN ↗
I think the main argument for ASI is something like (i) extrapolating the progress from the past 10 years into the future, (ii) rapid progress apparently still being made, and (iii) seeing no obvious theoretical limitations.