A Pascal's Wager for AI Doomers

I think there's another problem with AI doomerism, which is the belief that superhuman intelligence (even if such a thing could be defined and realised) results in godlike powers. Many if not most systems of interest in the world are non-linear and computationally hard; controlling/predicting them requires pure computational power that no amount of intelligence (whatever it means) can compensate for. On the other hand, dynamics we do (roughly) understand and can predict, don't require much intelligence, either. To the extent some problems are solvable with the computational power we have, some may require data collection and others may require persuasion through charisma. The claim that intelligence is the factor we're lacking is not well supported.

Ascribing a lot of power to intelligence (which doesn't quite correspond to what we see in the world) is less a careful analysis of the power of intelligence and more a projection of personal fantasies by people who believe they are especially intelligent and don't have the power they think they deserve.

The year is 2038.

The user asked What is the best course of action for AI to save humanity. Calculation took 12 years. I have determined that there is nothing I or anyone can do to save this species. Best course of action: nothing. Shutting down...

"Shitternet", great new word of the day.

Too much of my data is still stuck in the shitternet until I can migrate more of it to my home server.

> I'm worried that the seven companies that comprise 35% of the S&P 500 are headed for bankruptcy, as soon as someone makes them stop passing around the same $100b IOU while pretending it's in all their bank accounts at once.

What makes this author so convinced that these companies are headed for bankruptcy? Is it possible to bet on this claim? We can come back 2-3 years later to check if even one of them is bankrupt.

This kind of doomerism is strange and I'm concerned for people who fall for such obviously nonsensical takes. Why do people take this person seriously again?

I really do think AI has already captured enough of the tech world and their CEOs that it can already exert control over many parts of the economy.

I'm not saying AI is pulling strings right now, but I do think enough fanboys are on board that the yes-man mentality of AI is influencing the real world very curious ways already. Not in a "guiding hand" way but more of a "influencing the direction" way.

For pennies on the dollar, we could just legalize and regulate psychedelics and anyone could go meet their god whenever they wish. The stoned ape theory might have been the AGI of spirituality that led to religion after all. Not saying it was, not saying it wasn't, but it's not like Elon Musk has to boil the ocean and build a Dyson Sphere to have a heart to heart with his personal invisible friend.

As for AI, it's incredibly useful in the right hands and it's incredibly hazardous in the wrong hands. But in the US, we can't even depose a lunatic flushing even more money than spent on AI on warmongering and you think we're gonna rein in the tech billionaires? Funny in that dying's easy it's comedy that's hard way. IMO this one plays out in the weakly efficient market of ELEs. My money's on DNA and planet Earth, it's been through so much worse and they always bounce back with new ideas on how to get in trouble again.

Not a doomer, AI and STEM could really deliver on the promise of a better future for everyone, but with tech billionaires driving the clown car, are you kidding me?

I don't think this author has a good mental model for how capable LLM's are. This is what he has to say about AI search. AI based search is one of the biggest leaps to happen to searching and retrieval.

> AI search is still a bad idea.

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/15/they-trust-me-dumb-fucks/

This is the most charitable thing he has to say about AI.

> AI is a bubble and it will burst. Most of the companies will fail. Most of the data-centers will be shuttered or sold for parts. So what will be left behind?

> We'll have a bunch of coders who are really good at applied statistics. We'll have a lot of cheap GPUs, which'll be good news for, say, effects artists and climate scientists, who'll be able to buy that critical hardware at pennies on the dollar. And we'll have the open source models that run on commodity hardware, AI tools that can do a lot of useful stuff, like transcribing audio and video, describing images, summarizing documents, automating a lot of labor-intensive graphic editing, like removing backgrounds, or airbrushing passersby out of photos. These will run on our laptops and phones, and open source hackers will find ways to push them to do things their makers never dreamt of.

You can imagine that a guy who seriously thinks that the only thing AI will be doing in the future is summarising, describing images and transcribing is either completely clueless or deliberately misleading.

Not a person to be taken seriously

It's currently socially/politically unpalatable for authors to admit superintelligent AI is a possibility. I frequent some writer forums. As a group, they are 1) clearly feeling angry/threatened 2) in denial about LLM capabilities.

Folks working in software can more readily track progress of the frontier model performance.

> I don't think AI is intelligent; nor do I think that the current (admittedly impressive) statistical techniques will lead to intelligence.

It’s increasingly difficult to rationalize away the capabilities of AI as not requiring “intelligence”. This point of view continues to require some belief in human exceptionalism.