| It’s really surprising to me the amount of doubt that’s been voiced over the last few weeks that a technology could possibly be dangerous. For me the perspective is straightforward: even if chatgpt is not it, there is the physical possiblity for a relatively small improvement on human intelligence just like we’re a relatively small improvement on chimps, or on neanderthals. That’s just simple for me to get my head around. Along with that, there are easy to follow “monkey’s paw” scenarios: the easiest way to end poverty is to extinct all humans, the easiest way to end suffering is to extinct life on earth. I can’t quite formulate a straightforward way to eliminate suffering while maximizing my humanist values. This is the alignment problem. We’ve got Yan LeCun saying that slowing down or thinking about safety would just mean the chinese get ahead. He’s also saying we understand LLMs more than we understand airplanes. We’ve got people completely ignoring past examples of technological destruction or technological safety like nonproliferation or Asilomar. We’ve got people saying GPT is simultaneously revolutionary and going to change everything, thus it’s critical we forge forward… but also is too dumb to change anything (makes up info, etc), and thus we should not worry about being concerned with safety. What is it about our field that is so gung ho? Are these all bad faith FOMO arguments? It’s hard to understand. —— The one way i can make sense of it is as a religious experience. Our culture has deep persistent roots in christian eschatological mythology, and of course the coming of a benevolent next wave of intelligence slots into this nicely. Taleb states this clearly[0] that those who are pure of heart will be welcomed into the kingdom of heaven. Not a huge fan of this style of accidental religiosity. [0] https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1642241685823315972?s=20 |