… while at the same time not really worth worrying about so we should be concentrating on unnamed alleged mid term risks.
EY tweets are probably the lowest effort sneerclub content possible but the birdsite threw this to my face this morning so it’s only fair you suffer too. Transcript follows:
Andrew Ng wrote:
In AI, the ratio of attention on hypothetical, future, forms of harm to actual, current, realized forms of harm seems out of whack.
Many of the hypothetical forms of harm, like AI “taking over”, are based on highly questionable hypotheses about what technology that does not currently exist might do.
Every field should examine both future and current problems. But is there any other engineering discipline where this much attention is on hypothetical problems rather than actual problems?
EY replied:
I think when the near-term harm is massive numbers of young men and women dropping out of the human dating market, and the mid-term harm is the utter extermination of humanity, it makes sense to focus on policies motivated by preventing mid-term harm, if there’s even a trade-off.
To answer the original question, it’s as simple as the people working on AI are unable to grasp the near term risks (e.g. deepfakes, labor devaluation, climate change from energy use), so they focus on the fun, sci-fi “long term” issues.
So then ofc we have yud here on his usual bullshit talking about some made-up problems that only his giant brain can confabulate.
No, they’re able to grasp the near term risks, they just don’t want that to get in the way of making money because they know they’re unlikely to be affected.