Intelligence is not Enough | Bryan Cantrill | Monktoberfest 2023 

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Given that the talk nor your comment managed to actually get Yudkowskys claims in context, I'm kinda unsure if this is deliberate lying or if the basic concept is so hard to grasp. The basic concept is fairly simple, you have to make a choice, either you ban making things that kill all of us with threat of force... Or you don't. Ban means you have to be ready to bomb data centers if they are used to endanger humanity. If you are not prepared to do that, there is no ban, and none of this discussion matters. Yudkowsky stated he doesn't think ban is realistic, so any talk of slowing down the extinction of humanity is meaningless, and the bombing datacenters was largely in the context of demonstrating how far we are from treating AI seriously. But yeah, reassuring lies are about all we have left, I'm just sad the anger is directed at the folk that tried to prevent the disaster.

That's the best speaker-biog for Bryan Cantrill I've ever seen.

No, he won't. This is what gives him life. I am like him when I am explaining stuff.

I agree with this take. It's been said before but I think it's worth repeating that the issue of AI doom is obscuring the more serious concerns surrounding the negative social consequences AI might have that fall short of what people would be likely to classify as "doom". So the question should be completely reframed to "How do we prevent AI from making the world a much shittier place". In some respects, this is impossible, because what makes the world shitty for one group will probably be favored by others and so it is inherently subjective, with those that have a vested interest in the success of AI projects (notably, those that have invested in the commercialization of the technology) being obviously much more likely to think the success of AI would make their own lives significantly less shitty because it would mean they would presumably come out with a lot of money. I suspect this is the fundamental concern, do you like your job and think it's important it be done by a human and also think that AI will make it easy for others to take the easy path and get a cheap, AI generated replacement much more quickly, thereby destroying some amount of purpose in your life and also making the world a less artistically, aesthetically, or spiritually beautiful place? If you fall into that camp (and I do as a programmer but I suspect many artists and writers and similar professions fall into the same camp here) then you probably feel that AI is just another step down a long and grinding path to some sort of philosophical doom or death of the human spirit, rather than an actual physical doom, which I think if you really pushed you would find many that speak of a physical doom really don't mean it like that at all. On a purely technical level, the physical doom scenario is much less likely and there are problems that remain totally unsolved with no real evidence of significant progress, so the embodiment or AI or it's manifestation in the physical world in a way that would enable it to cause our physical destruction seems to me to be highly unlikely at this time.

Get the Narcan!

Cringy bits?! Those were great!

@@aeriquewastaken I didn't find what Bryan has to say cringy, but the bits he cites are nevertheless cringy to me. So overall, I much preferred the rest of the talk.