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by Terr_ 161 days ago
[Recycled from a dupe submission]

> This is why I pro­pose uni­lat­eral dec­la­ra­tion as a strategic countermove [... tearing] away the veil of any-minute-now mil­lenar­i­anism to reveal deployed tech­nology

I think that in an ideal world, this would thoroughly embarrass the over-promisers by forcing them to put-up-or-shut-up, and it's fun to imagine... however I worry that it won't work out that way. Instead of deflating the nonsense in its tracks, it'll just give it more momentum and worsen the eventual mess.

> What do I mean by AGI ?

Can we fight it with a better term? Something like... Oh, I dunno, maybe "Artificial Narrative Intelligence", in the same sense that we could say A* is a kind of pathfinding intelligence.

I say "narrative" because we've got these machines that grow "fitting" documents, and are often used with stories to "decide" what happens next. For example, the story setting is a Support Page, the Customer Character says X, and the Very Helpful Robot Character then does Y and says Z in response, etc.

However just because these stories fit surprisingly well doesn't mean it's doing the kind of "thinking" we really dreamed of.

> You some­times read about employees of AI com­pa­nies absorbed by their own products. Nobody on Earth has spent more hours talking to YakGPT than Katie Echo! Nobody can pump more code out of Shan­non­Soft than Johnny Narcissus! Recalling my Twitter expe­ri­ence, I think boasts (and posts) of this kind should inspire caution.

To me a lot of that feels like just the thing-of-the-day LinkedIn Lunacy, albeit running at an unusual intensity.