[sph]

We don't have "Skynet, Dune automation, Terminators, Neuromancer, and every other cultural trope using the label of AI" today simply because LLM technology doesn't seem to directly lead to those, but the end goal of AI research is the creation of those.

It annoys me to no end that people keep looking at the finger while pointing at the moon. No, we don't have Skynet today, but you can believe Sam Altman would have loved to see Skynet appear out of ChatGPT. That is the end goal, and it's worth discussing now, not when it's too late.

[keiferski]

We’ll have to agree to disagree then. Personally I think treating sci-fi tropes as likely outcomes is a major distraction from the actual real likely and near term outcomes from LLMs. There are enough real problems there, we don’t need to indulge everyone’s fictional scenarios too.

[sph]

Sci-fi tropes are not black and white. It's a spectrum from what exists today to the impossible. 20 years ago many would have claimed being able to have a machine generate decent code from a sentence is science fiction.

When talking about artificial superintelligences, you don't want to study their potential effect on humanity the day they appear, because it is too late.