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d_silintoday at 6:56 PM2 repliesview on HN

To add a bit more constructive feedback, think of the "AI cornucopia" and "Superintelligence destroys humanity" as opposite ends of all possible outcomes distribution (low probability event).

The most likely one is the "business as usual, but with AI" - some things will get better, some things will get worse, but overall state of affairs will remain mostly the same.


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holmesworcestertoday at 7:39 PM

The people who've thought the most about this put it differently:

Think of a new, superintelligent model as if it was a new v1 Starship launching for the first time, with a full fuel tank. On the one hand, rockets have existed for some time, and some have gone to space successfully, including by this company.

On the other hand, this is a tube of metal full of highly explosive liquid going faster than most human objects ever go, for the first time ever in this novel and state of the art configuration.

If someone said, "really, the first Starship exploding is just at one end of the probability distribution, where the other is that everything goes fine and all its passengers have a nice trip in space," would you get on that rocket?

Or, more aptly, if you and every other living human was already on that rocket, would you push the launch button?

The analogy works because superintelligence is, like rocket fuel, an extremely powerful force that has a default tendency to break containment and go boom (consume lots of energy and heat and matter in a chain reaction, to pursue more intelligence to pursue whatever goal it is pursuing.)

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eltetotoday at 7:25 PM

But will “business as usual, but with AI” justify the current capital expenditures? I think the market is pricing things as being closer to “AI cornucopia”.

What happens if/when we don’t deliver?

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