[mrandish]

> why are so many experts so worried about AGI?

FYI, I find this line of reasoning to be unconvincing both logically and by counter-example ("why are so many experts so worried about the Y2K bug?")

Personally, I don't find AI foom or AI doom predictions to be probable but I do think there are more convincing arguments for your position than you're making here.

[bbor]

Fair enough, well put to both of these responses! I’m certainly biased, and can see how the events that truly scare me (after already assessing the technology on my own and finding it to be More Important Than Fire Or Electricity) don’t make very convincing arguments on their own.

For us optimistic doomers, the AI conversation seems similar to the (early-2000s) climate change debate; we see a wave of dire warnings coming from scientific experts that are all-to-often dismissed, either out of hand due to their scale, or on the word of an expert in an adjacent-ish field. Of course, there’s more dissent among AI researchers than there was among climate scientists, but I hope you see where I’m coming from nonetheless — it’s a dynamic that makes it hard to see things from the other side, so-to-speak.

At this point I’ve pretty much given up convincing people on HackerNews, it’s just cathartic to give my piece and let people take it or leave it. If anyone wants to bring the convo down from industry trends into technical details, I’d love to engage tho :)

[fullstackchris]

I've written (and am writing) extensively why I think AGI cant be as bad as everyone thinks, from a first principles (i.e physics and math) standpoint:

https://chrisfrewin.medium.com/why-llms-will-never-be-agi-70...

Still have like 2-3 big posts to publish.

Long story short its easy to get enamored with an agent spitting out tokens out but reality and engineering are far far more complex than that (orders of magnitude)