[dmarcos]

Every single technology in history has had people claiming potential existential risks that didn’t materialize. Burden of proof is on people making the risk claims. Those have to be specific and unique to that technology to grant special actions.

[bpascal]

i'm not trying to be rude, but i really don't get what you mean by this? (https://www.amazon.com/Superintelligence-Dangers-Strategies-...) there's been people making specific and unique risks to this technologies for years, before AI was even present. anthropic was literally founded because they were worried about existential risk? also, previous technologies have had existential risks? do you deny that nuclear weapons could have killed humanity? obviously, there have no been existential risks that have killed all of humanity, because by definition, that can only happen once. it will literally be impossible for someone to ever point to an example of that happening, because they will be dead by the time that happens.

[red_green_yell]

See printing press and internet!

[dmarcos]

And video games, democracy, novels, TV, cars, photography, cryptography, the Beatles… pick your favorite and read commentary / opinions of the time. Many thought that came with unique risks never seen before and must be stopped!

[aesthesia]

How many of those concerns came from the people building the technologies? John Carmack wasn't up in arms about how Doom was going to destroy society. Charles Dickens didn't think novels rotted the brain. Johannes Gutenberg wasn't concerned about the effects of a free press.

[dmarcos]

None of the previous concerns were true and nothing indicates current ones are. It’s extrapolation, hypothetical apocalyptic imagined scenarios and piles of assumptions on how the technology could evolve. What makes even less credible in the AI case is that there’s financial / power to be gained by those making the claims.

And to your point. Don Quixote, the first modern and greatest novel of all times, is about a guy that lost touch with reality from reading too many books

[ascorbic]

None of the previous concerns were true, largely because they came from laypeople who didn't understand the technology. A prominent exception is nuclear weapons, where their creators did worry their creations could end up destroying the world. I think most people would agree those concerns were justified, and it's not any lack of capability that means we're still here.

The motivations aren't unique here. Restrictions on the development of almost any technology benefits incumbents by providing a moat.

[red_green_yell]

Employees inside frontier labs have the chance to make life changing money if they can make it to an IPO before the music stops. Have you considered that might be the reason they are so eager to claim "ai dangerous - regulate ai"? The nuclear scientists at los alamos did not have generational wealth incentivizing them to raise "concerns" to the public.

If your only evidence that the claim "ai dangerous - regulate ai" is true is "insiders who stand to make billions if they can regulate away the competition" told me so, that is pretty weak evidence indeed.

If a group of concerned scientists (without $$$ in stock options) demonstrated that anyone with one year of HS chemistry, an Amazon account, and a ChatGPT max plan could build a bioweapon 10x more lethal than an AR15 mass shooting or driving a truck into a crowd (because it is certainly more than 10x harder to make a bioweapon than either of these things, even with a theoretical AGI), then that would be worrisome. This is really not that high of an evidence bar but even it has not been met, but oh no we should start regulating yesterday.

[aesthesia]

I mean, Cervantes was parodying medieval romances. That's what Don Quixote was reading, not modern novels.

The point is, it should give you at least some pause when the people most familiar with a technology are among those making the strongest statements about its potential dangers. Extrapolation has worked extremely well in predicting what AI will be capable of over the past 5 years; how confident are you that it will fail before we reach apocalyptic scenarios?

[dmarcos]

Cervantes was capturing the zeitgeist of the time: reading too many books can make you mad as they were becoming accesible to anyone. We know it’s not true.

People at anthropic don’t have any secret that many people outside already have. Again the burden of proof is on the person making a claim. That you feel concerned or scared doesn’t grant you special privileges to control or dictate a transforming technology.