On 5/1/2023 at 10:40 AM, PancakesLover said:WAIT, REALLY?
is something wrong with the guy? is he, radioactive or
I mean I don't think he's gonna pose a danger to Ross or anything, but Yudkowsky and his lesswrong friends are just cranks. He's not really a programmer, not really an expert beyond having written a lot of things, and the "research" his foundation does with all the giant piles of money donated to them amounts to wild speculation about sci-fi shit becoming real.
The current wave of neural network popularity and discourse is probably a convenient advertising strat, but it's mostly unrelated the robot apocalypse they keep predicting. If we wanna talk about the threats of AI, we're going to be talking about automation, impersonation, data and statistical bias, things that accentuate the problems we already face in the real world due to centuries of compounded socioeconomic tension and systemic injustice. The current problems are not a break with tradition, they are the tradition, only more.
By contrast, the thing that Yudkowski (and Elon Musk, in case you wanted more evidence it's a fake problem) is most afraid of amounts to a time-traveling bonzibuddy that tortures you for not thinking about it hard enough. I highly recommend rationalwiki's dutifully-maintained and sourced page for more info on all this garbage. A lot of it is really funny.