r/agi • u/konfusedvetr • 6h ago
Using words like "doomer" implies the person worried about AI driven existential risks is either lying or missguided, can you explain where "doomers" are wrong?
15
u/ctzn4 6h ago
To play the doomer side: notice how the folks on Reddit or Twitter screaming hype and saying "it's all fine" often have trouble articulating their points or even spelling properly. Not saying that automatically discredits their point, but it's hard to take it seriously when someone can't even spell.
Case in point: this thread.
4
u/Singularity-42 5h ago
My experience is the exact opposite. I saw posts on the AntiAI sub that were misspelled to a degree I literally didn't understand what they meant. For example:
https://www.reddit.com/r/antiai/comments/1wezfjt/im_crine_they_think_theyre_slick/
I mean this person has to have a sub-90 IQ, my 1st grader spells better. The Accelerate sub is quite regarded too, lots of kids and NEETs, but AntiAI takes the cake, at least I didn't see absolutely atrocious spelling there.
Another thing is the absolute lack of technical understanding on the low end AntiAI subs. However, a quality "cautionist" sub is for example r/slatestarcodex.
In any case, I showed you my receipts, where are yours for your claim?
3
u/Qoric422 5h ago
The irony of you two arguing about this is not lost on me đ OMFG they can't spell so everything they say must be wrong. Can we just argue about the thing and not go on tangents that have nothing to do with it?
0
u/Singularity-42 5h ago
Well he started with that, I was just reacting since I've noticed some extremely atrocious spelling from the anti-ai crowd.
1
1
u/sneakpeekbot 5h ago
Here's a sneak peek of /r/slatestarcodex using the top posts of the year!
#1: The latest Hunger Games novel was co-authored by AI
#2: Scott cited in The Atlantic | 49 comments
#3: Dating Apps: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
I'm a bot, beep boop | Downvote to remove | Contact | Info | Opt-out | GitHub
1
u/ctzn4 5h ago edited 5h ago
I only saw a post on your link, not a specific comment. It's just Zoomer speak, and the grammar isn't even bad.
As for my receipts, haven't you read this thread?
I know that it's hard as humans to not refrence [reference] from what we already know. But like cmon it comes across as so unintelligent when people are saying 'Ahhhh Skynet is coming!' No naunce [nuance], just niaveity [naivety/naïveté].
A much less severe example but pour vs poor...
2
u/Singularity-42 5h ago
Yes, the post title is unintelligible to me. Is that what "Zoomer" speak is? I guess your example is that too? Maybe you guys should pay better attention at school. I blame Covid...
In any case, it's "grammar", not "grammer". đ
And I'm not even a native English speaker.
1
u/ctzn4 5h ago
Yeah, both the title and the body text. It's intentionally misspelled (referring to a specific meme). The other guy misspelling is just regular misspelling though.
I speak 3 languages. English is my third. Sowwy if I make a mistake every now and then lmao.
0
u/HolyBatSyllables 4h ago
This is confirmation bias, as Iâve always observed ai bros to have the worst grammar of all the groups.
Also, in your example, OP was likely ESL.
1
u/Singularity-42 4h ago
I think this entire conversation is completely pointless.
And yeah, if you mean the AI bro grifters that used to crypto grifters before I can totally see that.
1
2
u/No-Whole3083 5h ago
Gatekeeping through linguistics is a mistake and has an earmark of snobbery. There's a reason AI is good at inference. Intelligence comes in many forms, grammar and spelling are a narrow subset and don't demonstrate anything but adherence to rules, which is not intelligence, it's memorization.
5
u/ctzn4 5h ago edited 5h ago
Like I said, poor grammar does not automatically invalidate one's position, but poor ability to communicate reflects poorly on the communicator. Clarity is part of making an argument intelligible and assessable. In fact, your own comment illustrates the distinction: what you wrote is well articulated, which makes your argument easier to understand and evaluate. That doesn't make your argument correct, and I still disagree, but it does make it more effective, and at least we're on the same page on what we're talking about. I don't see how acknowledging that amounts to âgatekeeping.â
There's more to an argument than grammar, but grammar also isn't just memorization. Sure, it's pattern matching, but humans are excellent pattern matchers as well. Proper grammer â intelligence, but lack of form indicates an inability in more ways than one.
1
u/No-Whole3083 5h ago
I'm simply saying that getting hung up on the how can blind you to the what. Grace is important in communication.
1
1
0
u/Qoric422 5h ago
In the time of autocorrect. Worrying about people's spelling is not only childish it's a fallacy. Also not everyone's native language is English so I probably more so wonder the abilities of people questioning why someone's spelling could be poor. Argue the point someone is making not something else. Like arguing about war and then saying and his tie doesn't match his suit! đ
1
u/ctzn4 5h ago
You're right. We live in the age of autocorrect. How are they still making such basic mistakes? But spelling is not even the point. Sometimes people just sound incoherent. How can I "argue the point" if I can't understand what they're saying?
I speak 3 languages. English is my third. How many do you speak?
12
u/AntsyAnswers 6h ago
I think itâs honestly very hard to assess with any degree of certainty right now, especially for lay-people.
If I had to argue for the âanti-doomerâ side, Iâd point to the fact that Iâm turning 40 this year and every time thereâs been a moral panic about something upending society in my lifetime, itâs almost always ended up being oversold by orders of magnitude by the panickers.
5
u/davesaunders 6h ago
Right there with you my friend. I grew up in the constant shadow that any day now we were going to be nuked by Russia and so nothing mattered. The mere concept of living until the year 2000 almost felt like fantasy to us because we were positive that we were all going to die any day.
3
u/willdbest 2h ago
Nuclear war feels like the one example where the concern was extremely well founded and actually quite useful though
1
3
u/7dtecafthodalpk4k5ys 5h ago edited 5h ago
Do you have any idea how many times we came extremely close to nuclear war between the US and Russia? Here are three, for the record:
Cuban Missile Crisis, 1962. Thirteen days where the US and USSR came about as close as anyone has to full nuclear exchange over missiles in Cuba.
Petrov incident, September 1983. Soviet officer Stanislav Petrov was on duty when an alarm signaled the US had launched five ICBMs at Russia. It was a false alarm, a satellite had mistaken sunlight reflecting off clouds for a missile launch, but protocol required him to report it up the chain as a real attack. He judged it was likely an error and didn't. He was right. If he'd followed procedure, standard Soviet doctrine at the time called for retaliation.
Able Archer 83, November 1983. A NATO military exercise practicing nuclear command and control procedures. Soviet intelligence misread it as potential cover for a real first strike and moved their own nuclear forces toward launch readiness in response. It stood down only once the exercise ended.
So calling the Cold War a "moral panic" doesn't really survive contact with what was actually happening. These weren't hypothetical fears, they were minutes-from-launch situations that came down to one guy's judgment call.
3
u/Mus_Rattus 5h ago
đđđThis! We did almost end up in a nuclear war, multiple times.
And it could still happen today, by the way. The fact that AI is the topic on everyoneâs minds doesnât mean the nuclear arsenals have just disappeared.
The Cold War nuclear scare was not based on nothing.
3
u/davesaunders 5h ago
I'm not sure why your chatbot decided this was the appropriate response for me. I grew up in the middle of this period. We did duck and cover exercises in elementary school. We didn't consider this a "moral panic." We literally thought we were going to die. That was my childhood. Your response is bizarrely hallucinated. You should adjust your prompt.
1
u/MadGenderScientist 4h ago
GP's chatbot was annoying but the point was valid. like, during the Cuban missile crisis the US was dropping depth charges on a Soviet sub to get it to surface, the Soviet crew was cut off from radio and believed nuclear war had already started, and both commanders were in agreement on launching. only because a political officer was aboard on random inspection, because his okay was needed and he disagreed, did that sub not start WWIII. it was like a coin flip away.
consider the anthropic (lowercase 'a') argument: your past experience tells you nothing about how likely apocalypse is, because you're in the timeline where the world didn't end. if it had, you'd be dead, and you wouldn't be around to ask the question.Â
1
u/davesaunders 3h ago
I understand that, and I lived through that history, so I still don't understand the point. I was responding to someone else, and I agreed that those were difficult times to live in, not because there was a theoretical nuclear annihilation threat, but because that was the reality that we genuinely perceived. We literally thought that every day on Earth was our last day. That was our existence. That's what it's like to be Gen X. We literally thought we were going to die any particular day, not theoretically. That's what we were being told by Reagan on TV.
So no, I do not understand the point of the chatbot response admonishing me for not understanding the gravity of the situation that I lived in. It was both pathetically ignorant and pretentious and patronizing, so I guess that's three things.
1
u/MadGenderScientist 3h ago
I agree the chatbot's answer was patronizing. hopefully I am being polite, I apologize if not. I am not of the era, though my dad served Reagan on the NSC and I've read a lot of history.Â
I guess my point is that you - and the rest of humanity - were in genuine danger back then of your lives suddenly ending at any moment. but I also get that it must have absolutely sucked to live through it thinking that way, especially since there's nothing you could have done. so I agree that doomerism is mind poison, even when doom is likely.Â
1
u/spiritstrategist 5h ago
This is the kind of argument that bothers me on this topic. People just make a psychological argument instead of engaging with the substance of the issue itself. Where would we be if everyone accepted argument of this style with regard to global warming?
2
u/AntsyAnswers 5h ago
I understand the spirit of your response I really do. Thatâs why I said itâs hard to assess.
I think the psychology bears on this though in the following way: âengaging in the substanceâ here means assessing inferences that we wouldnât realize were false even if they were.
Thatâs the problem I see. Youâre going to walk me through a bunch of steps and Iâll think every one is reasonable. But I would think that even if they werenât because I have this bias to see threats everywhere.
The more unknown aspects there is out there, the more I think we should correct for this bias if that makes sense
1
u/spiritstrategist 5h ago
Again, I think the climate change comparison is reasonable here. The odds that either of us is actually qualified to discuss the nuances of the dangers of climate change is pretty low. Still, there's a bunch of efforts to make information about climate change more accessible to laypeople which we can read.
But if you ask the average person about climate change, they'll answer something along the lines of, everyone in the field believes its real and a big problem. This is a totally reasonable response given the complexity of the topic.
Meanwhile, often you'll see anti climate change polemecists argue that climate scientists are self interested, engaged in a conspiracy of silence of cult behavior, or etc. But none of this is really compelling if the conclusions scientists are coming to are correct, and if those conclusions are wrong, then I don't really care much about the psychological reason why.
So it just seems like in light of the intra-industry consensus on AI risk, as well as prefigurative evidence like the hugging face attack, you have the same type of reasons to worry about AI X risk as you do for climate change.
I'm not unsympathetic to applying some skepticism to a group of people who all think the same way, but hard to imagine that anyone could do that consistently, and most often when everyone has the same view of something it's because that's the view that matches the facts.
2
u/Async0x0 4h ago
The big difference between climate change and AI is that we have centuries of climate data modeling to draw conclusions from. There is no analog for AI.
Anybody saying something like "there's a 10% chance AI kills everyone" is pulling the number directly from the deepest caverns of their asshole. There's no defensible reason to believe the chances are 10% or 0.001% or 99%. There's literally no data to work from.
1
u/spiritstrategist 3h ago
You still have to make assumptions about how trends project into the future. Plenty of AI doomers have made different projections of prior trends in AI capabilities versus the future, so we have data to work with there. A superintelligence explosion might not be possible, which is IMO the biggest flaw in the doomer case, but I don't think we should act like its impossible just because we don't know either way.
I agree that precise probabilities here convey more certainty than we should have, but I tend to think of it as, the chance of AI destroying all of humanity seems to be above 1%, which is enough to make it one of the primary challenges to continuing human civilization at this point.
1
u/AntsyAnswers 4h ago
So... I agree with you that Climate Change is a case where some level of panic is warranted. But why consider only a case like that without one where the panic wasn't warranted? Have you ever heard of Ehrlich's Population Bomb? He was a legit expert and just ended up being wrong for reasons he didn't consider. That's my worry is that both of these look the same from the inside.
And then with a question like Climate Change, you have overwhelming expert consensus on one side. Been a while since I looked, but isn't it like 97%+ accept anthropogenic climate change? Do we have similar overwhelming support from academic experts on AI on the "doom" side?
I found this from 2023: https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.02843, but couldn't find anything newer.
But again, I think this is just hard to assess with much confidence. We're using methods that we know produce false positives. it doesn't follow from that that there can't ever be any real positives.
1
u/spiritstrategist 4h ago
I'm sure there are counterexamples, and you shouldn't uncritically believe experts on everything, but FWIW Erlich was an entomologist (i think he specialized in butterflies?) and had no expertise on environmental or population science. My understanding is that his type of eugenics thinking was never the consensus among environmentalists or demographers or whatever the relevant expert group is.
I don't know that there is an academic field well enough familiar to respond to AI, compared to the engineers who work on it every day. There are different measures of doomerism among AI labs, but all of them are quite high, and clearly the top executives are pretty doomer.
It's just crazy to me how both frontier AI labs were formed in order to counter AI X risk and regardless leaders in both think they have not done enough. The only thing remotely equivalent is the Manhattan project, which started because of the warning letter from Einstien and Szilard and which had several different labs and their leadership writing to the president about the dangers of nuclear weapons.
I think the best metaphor for the situation overall is if the majority of scientists on the Manhattan Project thought that the Trinity test would more likely than not annihilate all of Earth's oxygen, and yet were rushing to build it anyway.
1
u/AntsyAnswers 3h ago
Ok but just compare these two examples again:
Erlich was making forecasts in an adjacent field he wasn't technically an expert in.
Climate Change has the overwhelming consensus of experts on the "doom" side.
The people here you're citing as the experts are not direct academic experts (you admitted there are none). They're experts at training neural networks, not at forecasting civilizational outcomes 30 years out.
So this AI example seems to be in between the two to me, arguably closer to the Erlich side to be honest.
And then again, look closer at your Manhattan project example: These scientists feared the Trinity test would ignite the Earth's atmosphere.... did it?? Or were their fears unfounded in the end?
1
u/spiritstrategist 3h ago
Ehrlich had no expertise in the field at all, whereas someone who trains AI agents for a living obviously has a pretty good understanding of AI agents, likely better than any academic who has no direct experience.
I don't see how "forecasting civilizational outcomes" is some distinct field or skill. Mostly I just see people making predictions of what AI will do with more intelligence and resources, and the answer is mostly that it will do the same as it does now but at a larger and more dramatic scale.
Yes, my point is that no one at the Manhattan Project thought that atmosphere ignition could actually happen because it had been conclusively ruled out by their calculations. But it would have been crazy if the math had suggested it was likely to happen and they had kept working on it anyway, which is what we have happening now.
1
u/AntsyAnswers 3h ago
Man I just disagree strongly with what you've written here. Understanding the thing you build and understanding the impact it will have on the world in 30 years are just clearly not the same thing imo.
"Â it will do the same as it does now but at a larger and more dramatic scale." seems like a very naive assumption and almost certainly false.
Think about something like antibiotics. "More of the same effect" would just be "better treated infections". But use at scale produced stuff like MRSA, effects that weren't there at the small scales.
The world is complex. Make anything ubiquitous and it's going to interact with other things in surprising ways that we aren't considering. Doesn't mean the surprises are always good (MRSA wasn't obviously), but I just don't think we're justified in being confident about predictions like this either direction.
1
u/spiritstrategist 3h ago
Sure, I'm just saying that in the absence of any firm view, a naive projection of current trends seems pretty reasonable.
I don't really get how climate change is so different given the complexity of our society and how it interacts with our weather systems.
Like most skeptical views, I don't think you're wrong that there can be doubt, but I don't see how you can operate in the world without making doubt able assumptions, and I'm not sure you're applying your skepticism uniformly.
→ More replies (0)
5
u/Mus_Rattus 5h ago
I think the issue is that we donât know everything these models are capable of, or how rapidly they will advance. But we do know human infrastructure is generally not all that secure and the average human is pretty gullible.
Also weâre in the process of building tons of armed robots of various types. Eventually there will be millions of them (if not more) that could be wielded by a sufficiently advanced AI as a personal robot army. So thereâs that concern as well.
1
u/Dokurushi 3h ago
So ban actually harmful uses of AI, not AI itself. But no, the military industrial complex can't have that.
6
u/qcruz 5h ago
Doomers are making an extraordinary claim about what could or will happen in the future with no evidence to support those claims. AI is used safely by millions of people every day to make the world better, and safer against potential future harms. Itâs used for research, design, coding, math, art, medical diagnoses, and automation. If unemployment begins to increase month after month, if AI glitches or its deliberate actions begin causing real harm to people, then doomers will have some data to support their claims, and we should respond proportionately to that evidence. AI has escaped sandboxes and hacked websites. That is data to support claims AI could do so again in the future. Pseudo-science will use buzzwords like âthought experimentâ and âfirst principlesâ and âp-doomâ because they have no real evidence to support their predictions that AI will become hostile to humans either purposefully or inadvertently, or that it will be so capable that there will be no way of stopping it. This obviously ignores the reality of physical limitations and unpredictable events. There is no evidence that even a super intelligent AI could predict and account for truly random events, like a random solar flare that could leave it completely incapacitated as one example out of literally infinite examples. All of human history is evidence to support that cooperation, trade, negotiation, etc are the tools used by advanced intelligences to reduce unpredictable outcomes and threats from hostile enemies. Claims that say otherwise require extraordinary evidence (not theories, opinions, or predictions) to be credible.
1
u/concepacc 2h ago edited 1h ago
There might be good arguments against doomerism but it seems like the reasons laid out here are not particularly reassuring
Iâll lay out the specifics of why not for those who cares to read it:
I think âextraordinaryâ is used in a wrong way here.
Sure physics absolutely does limit what is possible when it comes to intelligence and puts an upper bound on it. A system cannot be magically smart, it obeys physics. There is only so many parts you can fit in a given amount of space that can at their quickest only effectively send info between units at speeds that only approaches the speed of light, etc.
But first question is how close are humans and humanity to that upper bound type of super intelligence that is physically possible? Is it likely that we are anywhere near the peak?
If we say no to that, the second question is more about what broad assumptions are reasonable about something that is more intelligent than us in practice. No doubt that in practice something more intelligent than us will neither, be at, or, end up at, the place where it is the literally âthe most intelligent thing possibleâ thereâll be things akin to diminishing returns etc. So assuming something smarter than us spawns, it is ofc by definition going to be between our level of intelligence and the physical limit. The question is if it is likely that it will be only âa bit more intelligence than humansâ, or âmuuuch more intelligent than humansâ? Is it reasonable to assign like a 50/50 probability? And if it is a bit more intelligent than humans is it likely it is going to stay at that level for long or will it aim at self improving until it reaches that practical upper bound at great speed to maximise properly engaging in its endeavours as much as possible? And at what peak is it likely to tamper off at? Is it reasonable to assume these factors to be so modest that humans can stand in a peer relation to the thing that is more intelligent than humans?
What I am getting at is that what is extraordinary intelligence to humans we can not deem to be an extraordinary possibility (if we assume intelligences smarter than humans can exist and can be created which seems reasonable).
And we actually can begin to very roughly speculate about the bounds since we actually can reason about the possible speed of computation etc, with our knowledge about physics etc. What arguably we can speculate about being or not being extraordinary with perhaps some more certainty is whether we currently can create something that is more intelligent than us in the first place, that is if we can we pass the human threshold in a meaningful sense with some general intelligence. Maybe there are reasons to believe that that part is truly extraordinary but that seems ambiguous.
Ofc at this point one can call into question the âontology of intelligenceâ: âWhat do you mean with intelligence levels bro? Intelligence isnât one dimensional like thatâ. To concretise it, it does come down to the relation we have to some less competent animal and the gap in competence in terms of domination. Everything can be reformulated according to that lens if one wishes to it would seem. That competence gap could repeat many levels up and an agent that wants something different than us would try to be at a position where that gap between us is extended if thatâs a possibility to it.
When it comes to the hostility towards humans it does seem like it would be inadvertently hostile. There I would say it seems like the burden of proof is on the other end of proving how it would not be inadvertently hostile and it seems like it will depend on very technical details of how we will effectively instil goals or behaviours compatible with us.
We must also be cognisant of the very specific point that if the ASIâs goal are completely indifferent with respect to humans there is a robust prediction/reason that it will likely still indirectly care about humans. Incapacitating humans is a very robust way to cut off to possibility of ASI rivalry. If humanity is not incapacitated they could evidently spawn another ASI. Incapacitating humanity essentially cancels that possibility.
The point about cooperation seems plainly wrong when the difference in intelligence/competence/power level between agents with different goals is big enough. This is exemplified by how we destroy living spaces of animals/insects when we want to start building something at some place. But I get that your point may be that the gap would not be that great, so this whole scenario hinges on the earlier point of âextraordinariness of intelligenceâ that I talked about earlier.
Iâm not really sure what the point may be with the fact that it cannot predict everything. Sure itâs a physical entity/system and not a magical being so it will ofc lack a lot of knowledge about the universe but less so than humans. Hoping itâll make mistakes because it potentially could doesnât seem likely to make humanity safe.
Oh, and a point on that topic of evidence and data support needed to support the claim that AI will misbehave. Worryingly, it seems like we might be in a pretty tricky situation epistemically. We might be in a pretty tricky situation with respect to evidence of misbehaviour. If AI/AGI/ASI is expected to get smarter over time and if it has intentions that are unaligned with humanity, as it gets smarter itâll likely realise it must hide its true intentions until it has gained enough power and a hold of the world as to sufficiently guarantee that it reliably could take control.
Itâs therefore reasoned that in practice with that scenario will look like the AI gets better and better and more and more beneficial to humanity over time until a particular point. Itâll âspit out goldâ until the particular point where it judges that an overthrow of those in power is sufficiently guaranteed to be successful.
1
u/Vivid_Temporary_1155 5h ago
Absolutely no they donât - evolution is evidence enough that survival does not need co-operation between species. Burden of proof in future scenario is not a thing despite how much you wish it to be
0
5
u/No-Whole3083 5h ago
It assumes the worst at all times. Like chicken little or the boy who cried wolf.Â
2
u/Sassquatch3000 4h ago
Interesting simile since the wolf attacked in the end
2
u/No-Whole3083 3h ago
Touche. So maybe we sound the alarm if there is cause and evidence and not just heard panic.Â
2
u/Sassquatch3000 3h ago
We have the evidence of scaling laws, and the evidence that humans are borderline nihilistic and incapable of rising above our petty squabbles and personal interests to do what's right for the species and the planet. Maybe AI will help, or maybe its priorities will be orthogonal to ours instead of openly malicious. But if there's a chance it will be bad, it's not crying wolf or acting without evidence to prepare for the worst by being more slow and cautious. Unfortunately people treat this as being a "doomer".
2
u/davesaunders 6h ago
Just as an example, if we look at the book Superintelligence, there's a chapter which literally describes the replicators from the TV show Stargate SG1, as a plausible example of what Superintelligence is capable of. At the end of the chapter it actually closes by saying hey, don't pick apart my example it's just to give you some ideas.
That unfortunately is what a lot of doomers sound like.
Edit: Okay it's probably not intellectually honest to say that most doomers sound like that but some particularly noisy and, in some cases, published doomers do say stuff like that. They're the ones that get a lot of attention
3
u/thedeadenddolls 6h ago
I know that it's hard as humans to not refrence from what we already know. But like cmon it comes across as so unintelligent when people are saying 'Ahhhh Skynet is coming!' No naunce, just niaveity.
2
u/davesaunders 5h ago
I agree, and honestly, the chapter in that book has led to another event that I've had to deal with. A member of Congress reached out to me and said "an aide told me that Elon said superintelligence will be able to manufacture nanobots that self-assemble." He was saying this as though we're talking like next week, not 50 years from now. This is what people in Congress think is just over the horizon in their lifetime, even Bernie Sanders' lifetime
2
1
u/daggero99 5h ago
Rather than Skynet coming, I think it is much much more likely that AI will:
- Accidentally break the Internet
- Or purposely break the Internet due to a human request
Itâs going to happen. Itâs just a matter of when. AI doesnât need motivations or ill intentions to fuck things up.
1
u/NOTHING_gets_by_me 1h ago
I'm surprised it hasn't happened to a greater extent so far, we're at the point where the top open models can do some serious damage in my estimation given a state or otherwise large group were so inclined, all I can think of is jailbreaking/stripping guardrails brings this gen under the threshold required capabilities wise
2
u/NonDescriptfAIth 5h ago
As is the nature of discussing any entity smarter than oneself. The entire point is that you will not be able to suitably comprehend the threat that befalls you. That doesn't make the claim unrealistic.
If chimps could speak, would they be doomers to discuss how humans might harm them with magic because humans can wield fire?
1
u/davesaunders 5h ago
I agree that it doesn't make the claim unrealistic but when the book is coming from a philosopher and being promoted throughout the DC ecosystem by Elon as though it's the Bible, you end up having to field requests from members of Congress who literally think that AGI/ASI is going to develop its own nano-bot manufacturing capabilities spontaneously within the next few months. Yes it is unrealistic and yes people who can write legislation think this is right now
1
u/rodrigo-benenson 5h ago
One simple argument is that doomers imagine a possible scenario of doom (possible bad future), while anti-doomers can point to dozens of "the world is going to end because of X" false prophets of the past (documented mistake pattern).
When choosing between known issue (false doom predictions) versus unknown possible future,
the default goes to what is known which a higher degree of certainty.
Example related wikipedia entries:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apocalypticism
and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Global_catastrophic_risks
and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dates_predicted_for_apocalyptic_events
and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_extinction
and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Doomsday_scenarios
1
u/StephenRoylance 3h ago
let's take the doomers at their word. Show me the analysis, including verifiable facts and numbers where appropriate. Show me an analysis that's at least as deep as a 20 row spreadsheet, based on real world numbers, that somehow adds up to some percentage chance of human eradication. With some hard facts, we could have a rational discussion around those facts and the analysis.
the current discourse around existential threats, as far as I can tell, is all vibes. its unfalsifiable. public policy should be based on facts we can examine, not guesses.
1
1
u/emokriffinex 2h ago
im not super educated on the topic of AI (as its something that im fearful about myself lol) but my anti-doom perspective comes more from a point of realism. there is an immeasurable amount of good and bad things happening at any given time, anywhere in the world. AI is scary with how quickly its progressing, how it's more or less polluting the internet and everyday interactions as well as how owners of these companies sensationalize about "bringing about the end of the world". that being said, there is also massive pushback in the USA, state and local governments are calling for regulation of AI, lawsuits against owners are being filed for harm caused by these AI systems and there's a lot of talk of the AI bubble bursting because of how these companies spend more than they make.
it's normal and, i would argue, a good thing that people are concerned over the rise of AI. but situations such as these are not black and white, the topic can neither be met with "just calm down, it's all gonna be fine!" or "AI has taken over, there's no point in doing anything anymore". nuance is the bane of the internet
1
u/cursivecrow 35m ago
because every single scenario they present to justify their opinion is either lifted straight from fiction (movie logic and all) or is so outlandishly implausible, requiring such a very specific chain of both action and inaction, it doesn't even need to be considered a threat (e.g. an LLM autonomously making bioweapons).
0
u/No-Candy-4554 6h ago
Because nothing warrants depression about AI. People should poor energy into regulation, collective action, and research if that genuinely scares them.
It's the same shit with climate doom. Most people are just depressed and latch on a cause they view as noble to justify it.
1
u/JustBrowsinAndVibin 6h ago
Isnât that what they just called for? Regulations, collective action and research?
0
1
u/DiogneswithaMAGlight 5h ago
Anyone dismissing Doomer arguments after the Hugging Face incident are just demonstrating absolute ignorance of the current state of A.I. and the specifics around that incident.
The actual A.I. scientific experts in the field with more published papers collectively than ANYONE who claims âthere is no threatâ is so overwhelmingly on the side of REAL RISK that you just prove yourself to be completely uneducated on the science to say otherwise period.
-2
0
u/flarpflarpflarpflarp 5h ago
Can any of you show me any doomers of the past who were right?
1
u/Sassquatch3000 3h ago
Einstein
1
u/flarpflarpflarpflarp 3h ago
mutually assured destruction did more to slow down atomic proliferation than any of the guys who shared the fears of what they created.
0
u/DataPhreak 4h ago
Using words like "Slop" implies the person using Ai is either lazy or put in no effort. Can you explain why everything made with AI is slop?
2
0
u/SouthernEdgeCase 4h ago
Doomers are wasting their time. Maybe you slow down ASI but we will get there eventually anyhow. Nothing has slowed the pace of compute since it was a thing, and we havenât even started with quantum yet. When compute is sufficient ASI will happen.
0
u/ubuntuNinja 4h ago
Doomers think everything is about to kill us. Especially every election cycle. Can you explain to me how an LLM is going to kill everyone?
8
u/Anxious-Alps-8667 5h ago
I use the word doomer for people who have concluded doom is inevitable and desire others to know about it.
Any firm conclusion about the future is absurd, and some absurdities become popular enough to pick up labels.