LeCun has "zero concerns" about AI wiping out humanity, recent "rogue" incidents
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LeCun has "zero concerns" about AI wiping out humanity, recent "rogue" incidents
Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.
dzink · · focus · HN ↗
Another huge chunk are too distracted by having to scrape by for a living and work multiple jobs or raise kids and survive financially until exhausted. That second group will keep increasing as the first flows into it.
The rest are aging, disabled, or too young and pegging themselves majorly in the first category until they hit the second.
The people aware enough to hold on to their brain and do something with it in their time available are trying to figure out AI and how to make money with it. The variable rewards of promoting AI are turning into an addiction with some of them, especially if grasping for straws with little inherent insights into the problems prompted.
So if you are able to fly above the AI-generated addictions and have the privilege of time to do it, see what you can do.
lukifer · · focus · HN ↗
If we grant that we are on track to make something smarter than humans (I think so): it's almost a face-saving white lie to spin yarns about a Skynet nuclear apocalypse, or a 7D chess move to mass-assemble a nanovirus with 100% lethality without anybody noticing. I do think those scenarios are worth taking seriously; but what's harder to communicate, is just how effectively a superhuman AI (or a diverse ecology of agent swarms) might be able to manipulate human behavior. It's something few of us are able or willing to truly process (not least because how many of us live in denial of how much our nervous systems are already hacked by technomodernity).
The appropriate analogy for what's to come may look less like the anthill carelessly demolished to make room for a highway, than the domesticated worker ants from Tchaikovsky's "Children of Time".
Aurornis · · focus · HN ↗
Parts of the AI safety community like to get on a high horse and look down on the rest of humanity this way, while also getting manipulated by the growing number of charlatans, grifters, and junk content within the AI safety community.
This field has become rife with figures who prey on AI doom and use it to push their own celebrity and in same cases even darker grifts. It preys upon a certain personality type who views themself as superior to others, intellectually more capable, and juxtaposes it all with the dimmest view of the rest of humanity they can get away with.
This discourse dividing the world into geniuses who see the future and the clueless masses watching TikTok all day is a theme that has shown up in different forms across history. The people who often anoint themselves as the intellectually superior ones and make it central to their discussion are often not the ones making good predictions or policy ideas, they’re just using the trend to feel superior or build an audience.
lukifer · · focus · HN ↗
But I feel no need to dismiss him as a "grifter", for a simple reason: as much as there are perverse incentives in our attention economy (audience capture in particular), the most effective grifters are the ones who believe what they are saying. Grifters who are knowingly dishonest are less persuasive. Far more pernicious is the confabulation of self-deception: cherry-picking evidence to support your narrative, while dismissing evidence which would contradict it.
It is entirely fair to call this out when it occurs among "doomers", and it would be naive to think it doesn't. But the same forces are at work amongst the skeptics as well. And maybe it's my own subjective bias, or algo-filtered information ecology, but I see far more dismissal of risk/doom by skeptics, accusations of delusion or cynical bias (ad hominem in the formal sense), than I've seen the other direction. I see very little refutation of the arguments ("here's why instrumental convergence can't overtake a human-provided goal"), and much more character attack ("they're in the pockets of Big AI, it's a marketing ploy to make the models look more impressive than they are").
[0] <a href="https://danluu.com/zitron/" rel="nofollow">https://danluu.com/zitron/
Aurornis · · focus · HN ↗
He’s built an audience and gained fame through his writings where he gathers people who think they know better than the unwashed masses. Once that becomes your bread and butter, it becomes hard not to believe what you’ve been preaching. People will come to deeply believe that which brings them fame and fortune.
I don’t think your grifter purity test is therefore all that useful. It actually doesn’t matter in the end if the person believes it or not, the end effect is the same.
> I see very little refutation of the arguments ("here's why instrumental convergence can't overtake a human-provided goal"), and much more character attack ("they're in the pockets of Big AI, it's a marketing ploy to make the models look more impressive than they are").
Hard disagree. There has been much refutation and quality analysis at every point. The AI safety people pull back to arguments about character as their defense.
The AI 2027 site for example drew numerous high quality refutations. Many people’s analyses showed in the first week that the mathematical model was useless as changing the supposed inputs resulted in the same outcome. All of these criticisms were met with a flood of attacks based on reputation, claiming that we should defer to Scott Alexander and other writers of the AI 2027 article due to their stats and reputation.
Meanwhile, defenses like yours that try to reduce the critics to ad hominem attackers continue to open the door to actual grifters coming in and extracting money and fame from the AI safety community. The otherwise completely inexplicable link between AI safety communities and Slutcon or the use of AI safety group buildings to host orgies (I can’t believe I’m writing this) is the current example of this. When it keeps happening over and over, some self-awareness is needed. I can’t buy the endless defenses that we must ignore or even defend all of these things that are happening that are clearly insane to anyone who hasn’t become trapped in the groupthink defenses of the core parts of these communities.
At some point the routine of “Tut tut, you are not allowed to make that criticism bruise as hominem!” becomes a smokescreen that the grifters are weaponizing to get their defenders mobilized. Some times, the person’s actions and reputation do need to be taken into account.
pka · · focus · HN ↗
I am curious about this. Any high quality refutations that directly engage with the arguments and the findings of published safety papers?
> Many people’s analyses showed in the first week that the mathematical model
Even if the model is faulty it just changes the timeline, no? (they predicted the OpenAI outbreak will happen in January 2027 fwiw, so they don't seem too far off)
> Slutcon or the use of AI safety group buildings to host orgies
I mean it's a bit weird, sure, but so what? What exactly is bothering you about these orgies?