I genuinely don’t understand the people who are dismissing those sounding the alarm about AGI. That’s like mocking the people who warned against developing nuclear weapons when they were still just a theoretical concept. What are you even saying? “Go ahead with the Manhattan Project - I don’t care, because I in my infinite wisdom know you won’t succeed anyway”?
Speculating about whether we can actually build such a system, or how long it might take, completely misses the point. The argument isn’t about feasibility - it’s that we shouldn’t even be trying. It’s too fucking dangerous. You can’t put that rabbit back in the hat.
Here’s how I see it: we live in an attention economy where every initiative with a slew of celebrities attached to it is competing for eyeballs and buy in. It adds to information fatigue and analysis paralysis . In a very real sense if we are debating AGI we are not debating the other stuff. There are only so many hours in a day.
If you take the position that AGI is basically not possible or at least many decades away (I have a background in NLP/AI/LLMs and I take this view - not that it’s relevant in the broader context of my comment) then it makes sense to tell people to focus on solving more pressing issues e.g. nascent fascism, climate collapse, late stage capitalism etc.
I genuinely don’t understand the people who are dismissing those sounding the alarm about AGI. That’s like mocking the people who warned against developing nuclear weapons when they were still just a theoretical concept. What are you even saying? “Go ahead with the Manhattan Project - I don’t care, because I in my infinite wisdom know you won’t succeed anyway”?
Speculating about whether we can actually build such a system, or how long it might take, completely misses the point. The argument isn’t about feasibility - it’s that we shouldn’t even be trying. It’s too fucking dangerous. You can’t put that rabbit back in the hat.
Here’s how I see it: we live in an attention economy where every initiative with a slew of celebrities attached to it is competing for eyeballs and buy in. It adds to information fatigue and analysis paralysis . In a very real sense if we are debating AGI we are not debating the other stuff. There are only so many hours in a day.
If you take the position that AGI is basically not possible or at least many decades away (I have a background in NLP/AI/LLMs and I take this view - not that it’s relevant in the broader context of my comment) then it makes sense to tell people to focus on solving more pressing issues e.g. nascent fascism, climate collapse, late stage capitalism etc.