I mean what if he's actually the second coming of Christ. We can make up "what if"s all day but it's meaningless to even discuss them if you don't have a shred of evidence to support the claim.
> I mean what if he's actually the second coming of Christ.
Makes sense. Cue Don LaFontaine: In a world, where one man sacrificed himself for all of humanity… And they learned nothing of his lessons… In a country where people lie in his name as an excuse to hate their fellow man… Where they mock him by wearing his moment of death as jewellery¹… He’s back and adopted a new identity to slowly fuck them all and make the world burn… Johnny W Pussyfoot is Jesus in: The Second Coming.
So much of the AI Hype is religion encoded. It's relevant because the AI companies are invoking the ideas. If you go around telling people that AI is going to cure cancer, bring about global prosperity, and give you an uploaded immortality then you cannot be surprised when some people start thinking of it similarly to the second coming.
I'm consistently amused by the fact that there's still this weird faction of populists on even tech-oriented sites like HN and /r/programming and lobste.rs and Mastodon who have this almost antivax-level stance on AI. I'm not precisely sure what explains it, because many of them actually are smart people and good programmers.
AI very likely will cure many cancers and very possibly (assuming combined with good politicians) will bring about global prosperity. A high percentage of AI company employees and executives and open source developers and researchers sincerely believe it will and so they say they believe it will. They have good reason to believe it, and they will likely be proven correct. If 400 (or 40, or 4) years pass and it's still mostly just creating spreadsheets, I will concede, though.
Makes sense. Cue Don LaFontaine: In a world, where one man sacrificed himself for all of humanity… And they learned nothing of his lessons… In a country where people lie in his name as an excuse to hate their fellow man… Where they mock him by wearing his moment of death as jewellery¹… He’s back and adopted a new identity to slowly fuck them all and make the world burn… Johnny W Pussyfoot is Jesus in: The Second Coming.
¹ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJSZcxXe7IQ