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by nuguy 2734 days ago
I never said anything about your religious beliefs, only that your need for hard proof one way or the other is similar to the need displayed by people who want to believe in god and who dont want to believe in global warming. there are many such examples but the bottom line is that demanding me to show you a sentient computer right now is not reasonable. We have the ability to reason about things without developing formal, mathematic proof about it. And in this case, there is no possibility that anyone could ever prove that AI is possible or impossible. Nobody can prove what it will do. If accept nothing less than hard proof then you are opting out of survival in basically any situation whatsoever. Sometimes logical reasoning is all you have and this is a case of that.

Yeah and before the measurements were done, before enough time had elapsed for meaningful change to be measured, all there was was people like me screaming at people like you, trying to make you see. When ai comes you’ll have your proof but it will be too late.

1 comments

No that's not how it works. Currently a belief in the inevitable arrival of AGI is a secular religious faith with no basis in hard science. We have plenty of real problems to worry about (like anthropomorphic global climate change) before we waste time making public policy to prevent something that may never happen anyway. Your concerns are silly, akin to worrying about an alien invasion when we don't even know if extraterrestrial life exists.
You are an outlier. Even Hassabis and Hinton believe that agi is inevitable. I’ve never met anyone who thought otherwise. The only disagreement is about the timescale and the result of its existence. If nothing I’ve said can convince you that ai is possible, then i would just ask you to consider that the human brain exists and that we will eventually figure out how it works.