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6mian | 1 year ago

What to be worried about? Technical progress will happen, sometimes by sudden jumps. Some company will become a leader, competitors will catch up after a while.

discuss

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cess11|1 year ago

"Technical progress" has been destroying our habitat for centuries, causing lots of other species to go extinct. Pretty much the entire planet surface has been 'technically progressed', spreading plastics, climate change and whatnot over the entirety of it.

Are you assuming that this particular "progress" would be relatively innocent?

6mian|1 year ago

On the other hand, the same "technical progress" (if we're putting machine learning, deforestation, and mining in the same bag) gave you medicine, which turns many otherwise deadly diseases into inconveniences and allows you to work less than 12 hrs/7 days per week to not die from hunger in a large portion of the world. A few hundred years ago, unless you were born into the lucky 0.01% of the ruling population, working from dawn to sunset was the norm for a lot more people than now.

I'm not assuming that something 10k x better than GPT-4 will be good or bad; I don't know. I was just curious what exactly to be worried about. I think in the current state, LLMs are already advanced enough for bad uses like article generation for SEO, spam, scams, etc., and I wonder if an order of magnitude better model would allow for something worse.

vladms|1 year ago

Many species went extinct during Earth's history. Evolution requires quite aggressive competition.

The way the habitat got destroyed by humans is stupid because it might put us in danger. You can call me "speciesist" but I do care more for humans rather than for a particular other specie.

So I think progress should be geared towards human species survival and if possible preventing other species extinction. Some of the current developments are a bit too much on the side of "I don't care about anyone's survival" (which is stupid and inefficient).