[sadtoot]

do you think vinge and kurzweil in the 90s and 2000s were imagining the singularity occuring exactly at the advent of LLMs? are you supposing that LLMs are the only viable path towards advanced AI, and that we have now hit a permanent ceiling for AI?

AI doesn't scare you because you apparently have no sense of perspective or imagination

[kibwen]

> AI doesn't scare you because you apparently have no sense of perspective or imagination

We can imagine both of the following: 1. space aliens from Betelgeuse coming down and enslaving humanity to work in the dilithium mines to produce the fuel for their hyperdrives, and 2. the end of civilization via global nuclear war. Both of these would be pretty bad, but only one is worth worrying about. I don't worry about Roko's Basilisk, I worry about AI becoming the ultimate tool of Big Brother, because the latter is realistic and the former is pure fantasy.

Don't be afraid of the AI. Be afraid of the powerful men who will use the AI to entrench their power and obliterate free society for the rest of human history.

[HKH2]

> Don't be afraid of the AI. Be afraid of the powerful men who will use the AI to entrench their power and obliterate free society for the rest of human history.

Right. We already know that certain agencies are out of control right now. The use of AI will certainly accelerate that. Surveillance is getting cheaper, privacy is getting more expensive, and laws are weapons.

[hackerlight]

If we're talking about the next few decades, I share your opinion. But beyond that I don't. We will eventually have to control and align systems more generally capable/smarter than us (assumption). I don't have your confidence that this will be as easy or risk-free as you're making it out to be.

[dragonwriter]

> do you think vinge and kurzweil in the 90s and 2000s were imagining the singularity occuring exactly at the advent of LLMs?

Kurzweil explicitly tied it to AI, though the particular decisive not-yet-then-existing-AI-tech that would be the enabler was not specified, unsurprisingly.

[goatlover]

I believe he thought reverse engineering the brain in conjunction with computers powerful enough to model brains was the path to AGI and the singularity by 2045.