alt Hacker News"So I'd like to engage AI risk from both these perspectives. I think the arguments for superintelligence are somewhat silly, and full of unwarranted assumptions.
But even if you find them persuasive, there is something unpleasant about AI alarmism as a cultural phenomenon that should make us hesitate to take it seriously.
First, let me engage the substance. Here are the arguments I have against Bostrom-style superintelligence as a risk to humanity"
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The framing here seems to me to equate "AI risk" and "AI alarmism" with buying in to belief in "Bostom-style superintellgence".
I'm not sure if the author meant to put anyone who is alarmed by developments in what we're calling "AI" into the same bucket as "AI obsessives want to make it into a programming problem, by designing a God-like machine", but I think this conflation is unfair and, frankly, dangerous.
I don't know what superintelligence is. I don't even know what intelligence is. And I don't really know what either "artificial" or "general" mean either when talking about "AGI".
You can believe, as I do, that these things can be, and will inevitably will be if we don't radically correct course, used to do very bad things independent and short of being "God-like". When you have systems which can hypothesize, synthesize, and test thousands if not millions of potential infectious agents in bulk [0], and can then order the ingredients for you from dodgy websites via some "claw", and then when you put these systems under the unsupervised control of millions of people with varying levels of stability and altruism, something extremely bad is exceedingly likely to happen.
I understand that 2016 is ages ago and things change, but I came away from the article with the impression that if I'm worried about AI risk then I'm a clown like the three pictured in the "Outside Argument" section (you're a Google-Glass-wearing cringe nerd if you're alarmed). Maybe that's my fault and I'm not smart enough to understand the actual point of the article. If I have misinterpreted, I welcome the correction.