[0xE1337DAD]

If true, this sounds like a good thing, albeit poorly handled. AGI is a world changing technology, the likes of which we haven't seen since "the internet." Being safety first and deliberate about it with a lesser focus on profit seems like the right call.

[survirtual]

Being safety first means others with more nefarious values may achieve it first. AGI will eventually arrive at the same singularity point, but between initial creation and that point, it could be extremely destructive. What would happen if authoritarians authored it first?

Would if have been better to go safety first with nuclear weapons so that Germany might develop them first in WW2?

I find that by going very fast and in the open, humanity has the best chance of producing safe AI. Slowing down and making it closed will result in a much worse outcome. Who gets to make the decision on who gets to utilize that kind of knowledge power? Why is such a small group of people being given power over all of the collective human sacrifices and knowledge to get to where we all are?

[api]

If we’d done that with the Internet we’d still have dialup while we debate the safety of higher speeds and the danger of viruses spreading faster or whatever.

I’m not arguing that safety is nonsense. I’m arguing that humanity doesn’t know how to both move and be safe, at least at scale. We can do it as individuals when we exercise caution in an endeavor, but in groups we either move or we do not move. When we admit the cautionary forces it becomes a vetocracy of fear and everything stops.

This is why it usually takes an unhinged maniac to make progress at anything, like the psycho behind the company launching the rocket today.

We are not good at this.

Edit: forgot to add that things are even more complicated because sometimes there are hidden risks to not acting. Take nuclear power, which we basically paused when we encountered the risks. By doing that we blew our chance to head off climate change.

[elzbardico]

Be careful with reasoning by analogy and mistaking what is basically an ideology, namely the progress ideology, for some kind of natural law.

[0xE1337DAD]

There must be some middle ground between reckless advancement without safeguards and hamstringing the technology through an abundance of caution.