Readit NewsThis is like arguing an Airbus cannot possibly fly because it is 165 tonnes of aluminum, steel and plastic.
The proof is in the fact that it flies, not what it is constructed from.
And LLMs do not.
> "But it looks like reasoning to me"
My condolences. You should go see a doctor about your inability to count the number of 'R's in a word.
SMBC is quite funny on the AI risks eg. https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/signal-2
It's called absurd because it does not deserve to be humoured the effort of writing out those arguments.
> Here's some names in the field. 15/19 think the risk is significant
A list that is largely a pile of clowns and morons, many with direct financial interests in amplifying the "danger"/power of AI.
This is why the doomsday cult is not taken serious.
What you’re suggesting here isn’t any different than submitting a fraudulent resume because you disagree with the required qualifications.
What you're missing here is that this is an individual's answer to a systemic problem. You don't apply when it's _one_ obnoxious employer.
When it's standard practice across the entire industry, we have a problem.
> submitting a fraudulent resume because you disagree with the required qualifications.
This is already worryingly common practice because employers lie about the required qualifications.
Honesty gets your resume shredded before a human even looked at it. And employers refusing to address that situation is just making everything worse and worse.
Anyone who's done any kind of substantial document research knows that it's a NIGHTMARE of chasing loose ends & citogenesis.
Trusting an LLM to critically evaluate every source and to be deeply suspect of any unproven claim is a ridiculous thing to do. These are not hard reasoning systems, they are probabilistic language models.
Yet. They have clearly voiced their desire for this.
> it just won't be state funded.
This isn't just "The government is not funding research into this", this is the government maintaining a list of thoughtcrime and banning researchers from using words.
The "Mugging" going on is that "AI safety" folks proclaim that AI might have an "extinction risk" or infinite-negative outcome.
And they proclaim that therefore, we should be devoting considerable resources (i.e. on the scale of billions) to avoiding that even if the actual chance of this scenario is minimal to astronomically small. "ChatGPT won't kill us now, but in 1000 years it might" kinda shit. For some this ends with "and therefore you need to approve my research funding application", for others (including Altman) it has mutated into "We must build AGI first because we're the only people who can do it without destroying the world".
The problem is that this is absurd. They're focussing on a niche scenario whilst ignoring horrific problems caused in the here and now.
"Skynet might happen in Y3K" is no excuse to flood the current internet with AI slop, create a sizeable economic bubble, seek to replace entire economic sectors with outsourced "Virtual" employees, and perhaps most ethically concerning of all: create horrific CSAM torment nexuses where even near-destitute gig economy workers in Kenya walk out of the job.
Yet "AI safety" folks would have you believe so.
It feels like a lot of "Existential AI Risk" types are divorced from the physical aspects of maintaining software - eg. your model needs hardware to compute, you need cell towers and fiber optic cables to transmit.
It feels like they always anthropomorphize AI as some sort of "God".
The "AI Powered States" aspect is definetly pure sci-fi. Technocratic states have been attempted, and econometrics literally the exact same mathematical models used in AI/ML (Shapely values are an Econometrics tool, Optimization Theory itself got it's start thanks to GosPlan and other attempts and modeling and forecasting economic activity, etc).
As we've seen with the Zizian cult, very smart people can fall into a fallacy trap of treating AI as some omnipotent being that needs to either be destroyed or catered to.
It's not like that. It is that. They're playing Pascal's Wager against an imaginary future god.
The most maddening part is that the obvious problem with that has been well identified by those circles, dubbed "Pascal's Mugging", but they're still rambling on about "extinction risk" whilst disregarding the very material ongoing issues AI causes.
They're all clowns whose opinions are to be immediately discarded.
Why yes, it does.
Even setting aside that most AI hype: Yes, automation is in fact quite sinister if you do not go out of your way to deal with the downsides. Putting people out of a job is bad, actually.
Yes. The industrial revolution was a great boon to humanity that drastically improved quality of living and wealth. It also created horrific torment nexuses like mechanical looms into which we sent small children to get maimed.
And we absolutely could've had the former without the latter; Child labour laws handily proved it was possible, and should have been implemented far sooner.
What's even the material point here? That "the left" pierced the taboo on speech censorship? Trump's currently wiping his ass with the separation of powers enshrined in the constitution. He does not care about taboo.
Doing a proper fact check is as much work as doing the entire research by hand, and therefore, this system is useless to anyone who cares about the result being correct.
> I don't see why this changes.
And because of the above this system should not exist.