I have been trying to think seriously about this for the last 5 months or so. Before this, my biggest worries about AI were the future of work, carbon footprint of rapidly scaling infrastructure, and financial speculation.
But the Mythos incident, the Hugging Face incident, and spending a lot of time around AI safety/Rationality/EA spaces has led me to rethink my beliefs considerably. I'm 24 and I'm highly concerned about whether I and my civilisation is still around on my 40th birthday, or even my 30th. (Though I'm much more concerned about near-term effects of bad human actors using powerful non-superintelligent frontier AI to do dangerous things.)
At the same time, I acknowledge that I'm a very anxious, neurotic person, and that these AI safety spaces seem to attract people with pessimistic worldviews. I am not the intellectual peer of the foremost AI safety thinkers in the world, not by a longshot, but I do recognise unfalsifiability when I see it. Whatever argument you give a doomer as to why doom might not happen, they can always come up with a reason why your argument doesn't work, often boiling down to "Big-S ASI is omniscient and basically omnipotent". But hey... they're possibly not wrong.
I want to calibrate my timelines and doom probabilities holistically, which means I need to exit those spheres for a moment and ask other AI spaces (like r/artificial) what they think.
What do you think?
[link] [comments]