The guy was saying that AI was going to be a serious problem decades before anyone else was even considering it as a remote possibility. How is that in any way "consistently wrong with all their predictions"?
>The guy was saying that AI was going to be a serious problem decades before anyone else was even considering it as a remote possibility
That's not accurate at all. AI research has been around since the 1950s and pioneers of the field identified risks early on, including Alan Turing, Norbert Wiener, and I. J. Good.
The problem with Yudkowsky is that he lays out elaborate doomsday scenarios with extreme confidence, except none of it is grounded in realistic physical constraints, timelines, or empirical data. It's all divined a priori from Yudkowsky's ad hoc "rationalist" principles.
You are saying 1) other people have said the same thing and 2) you don't like the particular way he said it. Those can both be true, but that isn't even close to "consistently wrong with all their predictions".
He made specific predictions about what problems AI would cause, not just a vague "AI will be dangerous". Those specific predictions were entirely incorrect; they both said that things would happen that didn't, and failed to foresee any of the actual problems with AI that have happened.
Yudkowsky said AI would be a problem when very few people taken seriously in the mainstream were saying it was going to be a problem. Saying "specific predictions are wrong" is missing the forest for the trees here.
Well, I don't agree AI is dangerous, at least no more dangerous than electricity or the Internet. But even so, saying that AI is dangerous is not at all an original or interesting thought, especially for a guy who started talking about it in the early 2000s. Go back and watch 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) or The Terminator (1984).
The discussion isn't about whether it's an "original or interesting thought", it's about whether Yudkowsky is "consistently wrong with all their predictions". You keep shifting the topic.
Yes, repeatedly, since well before this particular AI summer.
One previous attempt at AI was "expert systems", and while the term fell out of use it's functionally about the same as basically all modern business systems, and doing that wrong led to a lot of people being prosecuted for crimes they didn't commit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal
Even without that lawsuit, there have been various concerns that "the algorithm" (of Twitter/X, FB, Instagram, YouTube, Google, everyone) has propagandising biases that damage society. I don't know how to sift fact from politicking with that.
Disagree, words drift but they still mean things. Nobody building accounting software in the 90s called it AI (or even an expert systems, barring the most inventive salescritters).
Besides what kind of slippery slope argument is this? All software is AI, so if you do harm with software, AI is a harmful technology? Seems like a not very helpful model of the world.
That's not accurate at all. AI research has been around since the 1950s and pioneers of the field identified risks early on, including Alan Turing, Norbert Wiener, and I. J. Good.
The problem with Yudkowsky is that he lays out elaborate doomsday scenarios with extreme confidence, except none of it is grounded in realistic physical constraints, timelines, or empirical data. It's all divined a priori from Yudkowsky's ad hoc "rationalist" principles.