I have a difficult confession to make — a shameful incident that I have never spoken of, even to those closest to me. Late one night in my first year at university and having found computer science to be my life’s calling, I was in the back of the large computer science lab, talking with some fellow underclassmen. We were snidely decrying the lack of technological understanding in the broader population, with the kind of arrogance and hubris that youth and precociousness can uniquely summon. Somewhere in this discussion, a terrible idea was hatched: what if we went next door to the general computer lab, and told the humanities students there that a computer virus was spreading through their machines? Would they believe it?

[…] We should heed the wisdom of the late Carl Sagan that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence: the claims from Coxon and his ilk are the most extraordinary a technologist can make, and we must demand evidence commensurate with the claims. That said, we should not expect the public to understand LLMs, critical infrastructure, bioweapons, extinction biology, etc. — that burden must lie with those making the claim. The lesson that I learned (shamefully) decades ago is that domain experts, by way of their expertise, implicitly hold the public’s trust — and we must not abuse it. It is incumbent upon us to be circumspect in our claims — and maximally so when raising the alarm.

  • postscarce@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    1·
    4 days ago

    I have no doubt that they would push for any regulation to advantage them, and they have the resources to achieve that. We still need to try. And the fear of an AI apocalypse isn’t something they just dreamed up recently to make their product look ‘good’ (or powerful, or whatever), nor was it just fished from sci fi. The worries about this scenario were why Altman, Amodei and Musk (among others) got into this business in the first place. They see ASI as inevitable, they sincerely believe it will be powerful enough to destroy humanity, and they each have a messiah-complex which makes them think that only they are intelligent and incorruptible enough to be in charge when it happens.

    Of those three premises, I very much doubt any billionaire CEO is incorruptible, but the inevitability of ASI and the power that it would have if it was created are harder to dismiss. If there is even a minuscule chance that they are correct, then AI development should be stopped, until they can prove that it is safe and beneficial to everyone.

    Edit: and I take it as a compliment that you only give me a 10% probability of being a bot. :-)