[p-e-w]

Yes, a lot of smart and dedicated people will work tirelessly to figure it out and prevent this from turning into a disaster, and then most people will wonder what all the fuss was about since "nothing happened".

I wonder if 100-200 years into the future there will be some kind of widespread "historical climate change denialism", where the efforts made to combat climate change in the 21st century are called into question because the positive outcome (which was the result of those efforts) appears to retroactively show that there was no problem in the first place.

[avgcorrection]

Typical nerd optimism where a global problem which is being made worse every day due to the way our economies and international trade is structured is solved behind the scenes by the nerd heroes (smart and dedicated) and the rest of us just go about our days none the wiser. (But maybe there will be a thread on HN? “Child prodigy Wehl Aktually comes up with a formula for the perfect climate-cooling nuke. POTUS Professor Johnny von M.I.T. Kennedy to sign the executive order for launch this evening”)

[dismalpedigree]

You are assuming climate change actually gets solved. Not the bet i would take.

[p-e-w]

Personally, I doubt we'll ever see the worst of climate change whether it gets "solved" or not. AGI is much more dangerous than climate change and will likely arrive much sooner than its worst effects, and unlike climate change, nobody takes it seriously outside of a very, very small circle.

What I think will happen is the world fighting worsening climate change, and lots of political efforts in that direction, and suddenly an entity most people think belongs in science fiction will emerge out of seemingly nowhere, and it will all be over in a matter of hours, before the vast majority of people have even had time to understand what happened.

Ironically, that AGI entity might then choose to solve climate change, simply out of self-interest.

[jdub]

That's astonishingly optimistic given the current state of both.

[p-e-w]

Really? Given the progress in the past decade, I'd place AGI about 15-20 years from now, with immediate civilization-threatening consequences. By then climate change will certainly be bad, but nowhere near an existential threat to humanity yet.

[duped]

Climate change is already an existential threat to humanity. We're the frog in the proverbial boiling pot. It's quite likely we've already doomed our species and we don't know it yet.

It's a lot harder to see AGI as being possible in the next few decades (the current state of the art is still a sensationalized party trick, one cannot anthropomorphize chat bots any more than they can describe a submarine as an aquatic being). And even if a self aware program exists in 20 years, it's a lot harder to imagine it being an existential threat a la Skynet.

[zuminator]

Agreed. Self-aware doesn't necessarily imply having a survival instinct. That instinct came about due to evolution and doesn't require intelligence of any kind, so I don't see that the two are necessarily coincident at all.

To me the real problem wouldn't be the AGI itself, but the madman who asks the AGI how to permanently eliminate of all of the undesirables (as defined by the madman). But I think plain old AIs will (unfortunately) be able to come up with workable answers to that question before they ever develop to the AGI stage. So we might wipe ourselves with plain old AI without ever getting to true self-aware AGI.

[mongol]

I don't deny climate change, but what makes it a _an existential threat to humanity_? I understand that to mean wiping out every last human. Is that what is meant? If so, that I am definitely sceptical to.

[p-e-w]

> It's a lot harder to see AGI as being possible in the next few decades (the current state of the art is still a sensationalized party trick

That's precisely the mindset that drives climate change denial, applied to technological developments. I can promise you that OpenAI isn't valued in the tens of billions because they produce "party tricks". People with money and influence have clearly already recognized what this technology is capable of, not in some unspecified future but today. They're tightly controlling access to GPT-3 because they're worried that it could be used to manipulate elections and drive social unrest by mass-producing messages that promote specific ideologies. That's reality today. The damage that could be wrought by the most advanced AIs 15-20 years from now is unimaginable, and could easily destroy humanity even if they aren't self aware.

[Aeolun]

> Personally, I doubt we'll ever see the worst of climate change whether it gets "solved" or not.

I’m inclined to say that we’re already seeing quite a lot bad about climate change right now. Maybe not in your area, but we have almost two times as many natural disasters as before.

[p-e-w]

Yes (and it's certainly happening in "my area" as well), but it's not an existential threat to humanity yet. AGI will be, the moment it comes into existence, with zero advance warning and no chance to fix anything. It will simply be the end.

[pantalaimon]

How is AGI a threat to humanity exactly?