[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.

[duped]

The madman needs access to the means to eliminate the undesirables. I don't see that as something AI has unbridled access too.

This is the classic hardware v software problem. Software can be arbitrarily smart, but it can only interact with the world using the hardware it's connected to. AI can't do anything more meaningful than what is defined by the devices it controls, and I don't think we're stupid enough as a people to connect AI to a doomsday device.

[amanaplanacanal]

I dunno. Give an AI Internet access and it would have theoretical access to a lot of things not even obviously connected to the internet.

[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.

[pantalaimon]

Our civilization is very reliant on agriculture to feed the 8 billion people on the planet.

With climate change droughts become more common and the capability of agriculture to feed all those people breaks down.

[mongol]

No doubt it can cause mass starvation on a scale we have never seen before. But that is some else than an existential threat to humanity, unless exactly everyone starve to death.

[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.

[aroman]

Given the history of technology investing, companies being valued in the 10s of billions is itself not a proof of anything other than investor excitement.

I agree that even today's "AI" can be used to cause massive societal harm, the same as many recent technologies that have yet to destroy humanity (weapons of mass destruction, for instance).

That said, I think a consensus view in the AI community is great skepticism that the current AI progress is actually a recipe for AGI. We've made great progress in AI over decades, often followed by long winters when it became clear the current methods would not get us to the next threshold.

Human intelligence is remarkable precisely because it needs extremely scarce data to generalize, and because it is self-aware. As far as I know, OpenAI's approaches aren't on a path to replicate those capabilities artificially.

I'd welcome links and articles from experts that might correct my POV on this.

[duped]

There's a century wide gap between "useful products that use AI techniques" and "sentient programs." Pretending to be sentient is a party trick, automating large portions of white collar work isn't. But it still isn't AGI.

> 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 not humanity-ending, it doesn't require AI, and AI doesn't make it more efficient.

[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?