[PoignardAzur]

> Contrary to the AI doomer’s expectations, the world isn’t going to go down in flames any faster thanks to AI. Contemporary advances in machine learning aren’t really getting us any closer to AGI, and [...] What will happen to AI is boring old capitalism. Its staying power will come in the form of replacing competent, expensive humans with crappy, cheap robots.

This type of reasoning is really getting on my nerves lately.

Predicting the future is hard, yeah. But your predictions don't become systematically more accurate just by tackling "boring" and "capitalism" to them.

A lot of technologies can change our societies in emergent, non-boring ways. Climate change is an emergent effect of fossil fuel usage that you wouldn't predict by just looking at 19th century factories and imaging how they would evolve with "boring capitalism". The internet is extremely non-boring and has had profound effects on our society. Nuclear mutually-assured destruction is an extremely non-boring existential threat.

It could be that the dangers of AI is from the military, or the police, or terrorists, or from corporations seeking to replace labor, other conventional threats we already have a reference frame for, yes. Or it could be a completely novel from of disaster, like the equivalent of a school shooter getting AlphaFold 8 to make a novel virus that kills 70% of the population before we even realize there's a pandemic going on. Just because this isn't something we're used to doesn't mean it's fundamentally unlikely to happen.