[agentofoblivion]

Maybe I'm not "the average HN commenter" because I am deep in this field, but I think the overlap of what these famous experts know, and what you need to know to make the doomer claims is basically null. And in fact, for most of the technical questions, no one knows.

For example, we don't understand fundamentals like these: - "intelligence", how it relates to computing, what its connections/dependencies to interacting with the physical world are, its limits...etc. - emergence, and in particular: an understanding of how optimizing one task can lead to emergent ability on other tasks - deep learning--what the limits and capabilities are. It's not at all clear that "general intelligence" even exists in the optimization space the parameters operate in.

It's pure speculation on behalf of those like Hinton and Ilya. The only thing we really know is that LLMs have had surprising ability to perform on tasks they weren't explicitly trained for, and even this amount of "emergent ability" is under debate. Like much of deep learning, that's an empirical result, but we have no framework for really understanding it. Extrapolating to doom and gloom scenarios is outrageous.

[NumberWangMan]

I'm what you'd call a doomer. Ok, so if it is possible for machines to host general intelligence, my question is, what scenario are you imagining where that ends well for people?

Or are you predicting that machines will just never be able to think, or that it'll happen so far off that we'll all be dead anyway?

[agentofoblivion]

My primary argument is that we not only don't have the answers, but don't even really have well posed questions. We're talking about "General Intelligence" as if we even know what that is. Some people, like Yann Lecun, don't think it's even a meaningful concept. We can't even agree which animals are conscious, whatever that means. Because we have so little understanding of the most basic of questions, I think we should really calm down, and not get swept away by totally ridiculous scenarios, like viruses that spread all over the world and kill us all when a certain tone is rang, or a self-fabricating organism with crystal blood cells that blots out the sun, as were recently proposed by Yudkowsky as possible scenarios on Econtalk.

A much more credible threat are humans that get other humans excited, and take damaging action. Yudkowsky said that an international coalition banning AI development, and enforcing it on countries that do not comply (regardless of whether they were part of the agreement) was among the only options left for humanity to save itself. He clarified this meant a willingness to engage in a hot war with a nuclear power to ensure enforcement. I find this sort of thinking a far bigger threat than continuing development on large language models.

To more directly answer your question, I find the following scenarios equally, or more, plausible to Yudkowsky's sound viruses or whatever. 1/ we are no closer to understanding real intelligence as we were 50 years ago, and we won't create an AGI without fundamental breakthroughs, therefore any action taken now on current technology is a waste of time and potential economic value; 2/ we can build something with human-like intelligence, but additional intelligence gains are constrained by the physical world (e.g., like needing to run physical experiments), and therefore the rapid gain of something like "super-intelligence" is not possible, even if human-level intelligence is. 3/ We jointly develop tech to augment our own intelligence with AI systems, so we'll have the same super-human intelligence as autonomous AI systems. 4/ If there are advanced AGIs, there will be a large diversity of them and will at the least compete with and constrain one another.

But, again, these are wild speculations just like the others, and I think the real message is: no one knows anything, and we shouldn't be taking all these voices seriously just because they have some clout in some AI-relevant field, because what's being discussed is far outside the realm of real-life AI systems.

[henryfjordan]

So what if they kill us? That's nature, we killed the wooly mammoth.