| This is a fascinating variation on the forest/trees, and false dichotomy. The AI "doomerism" taken up in this piece is one we see replicated a lot, it offers up a scarecrow: that the new risks to our civilization worth talking about, require AGI, agents, even ASI. Cory should know better. He nearly gets there, recognizing that the corporation represents an entity with agency that is misaligned. But he somehow elides past that fact that AI is plenty capable of doing meaningful and novel harm, and may be capable of existential harm, already, as it is—both absent AGI/ASI, and, in ways which are genuinely novel and against which we consequently have no good defenses: as individuals, as societies, as a civilization. Incremental AI is at heart "just" the latest force-and-effort multiplier. But it is an exponential multiplier; and it is applicable in domains which have not been subject top such leverage before. Examples are not at all scarce and some are already well known, e.g. the specific risks from the intersection of AI and "biohacking" and other kinds of computational biology. I'm a fan, but Cory, pal, you're slipping into something that looks a bit like intellectual laziness and polemics here and not to evidence thinking through the shape of the problem. We can be at risk both from the novel applications and leverage of AI; and from their oligarchic kakistocratic owners. It's yes-and. (And, by the way—we can also again be genuinely at risk from agents, something that quacks like AGI, and may quack like ASI: we don't know what that is yet. All of these must be tracked. It's not an OR.) |