There is an even more important lesson in this in that the people who worked on the bomb thought the world would be over in short order and were totally wrong.
Feynman talked about how there was an idea of "normal" people walking around not knowing they were basically doomed and going to die in a certain nuclear holocaust in a few years.
Von Neumann thought the U.S. should launch a nuclear first strike at Moscow.
Obviously, if war is inevitable then you don't have to be the father of game theory to figure out you should strike first.
It was just a year ago that literally everyone was predicting we would be in a recession right now. We can't predict that but we can predict how AGI plays out even when we haven't bothered to define a measure of what AGI even is. Even people who grew up "knowing" we would all have sentient robots by 1997. I can't think of a single prediction I have heard in my lifetime that has turned out to be true other than the government debt going up.
Not only that, but go back a decade ago and look at what the singularity people (which the AI alignment crowd comes out of) were saying that. When employment was struggling to recover after the great recession, the singularity folks said that it wasn't going to recovers, because tech was replacing humans, and that this was just the beginning of mass unemployment (one of the reasons why UBI got so popular).
CGP Grey's popular "Human's Need Not Apply" video is a good example of this kind of thought:
Claims that self-driving cars are already here and already better than human drivers, and that the only question is how quickly they replace humans. He argued that Baxter, the general purpose robot, could already copy the tasks of a human worker and do the work for much cheaper. Baxter was discontinued in 2018 because of low interest.
These people have a horrible track record when it comes to technology predictions, and it's unnerving that, instead of reflecting on how wrong they've been, they're doubling down and trying to slow technological advancement.
"McCauley currently sits on the advisory board of British-founded international Center for the Governance of AI alongside fellow OpenAI director Helen Toner. And she’s tied to the Effective Altruism movement through the Centre for Effective Altruism"
I wonder if she (Tasha? Tascha?) was Sam FTX's girlfriend before Caroline. She hired him at the Effective Altruism foundation or whatever it is called after he left Jane Street.
Michael Jackson also would not be Michael Jackson if not for the advent of MTV and Thriller. Embracing a new artistic medium to its fullest extent to make a 13 minute video in an age of 3 minute songs on the radio.
Creative people will find creative ways to use new creative tools.
There is even still amazing marble sculpture being made today but we are not going back to ancient Rome in terms of the importance of sculpture as a popular artistic medium of the day.
There will be cool, new electronic music genres from these AI tools and that sound might eventually make its way to whatever cultural icons of the day are making music. Mostly though no one will listen to these genres just like they don't listen to them today. Music just isn't that culturally important anymore overall.
The real big deal is AI video because video is the dominant artistic medium of right now by several orders of magnitude. This is all just a dress rehearsal for AI video at mass scale.
Like most things I read outside programming on this board, it is people talking out their ass about things they don't know much about but they think they do because they are well paid to write javascript.
I would have agreed until these recent podcasts that Chomsky did.
Everyone is basically talking out their ass when it comes to language and linguistics. That becomes incredibly obvious listening to Chomsky on chatGPT.
I was even so stupid to think Chomsky wasn't a fan of chatGPT because it somehow invalidated some of his language theories. Low and behold, no, Chomsky actually knows what he is talking about when it comes to linguistics.
This is totally wrong.
It has already saturated because we are already using all the data we can.
The language model "creativity" is a total fraud. It is not creative at all but it takes time to see the edges. It is like AI art. AI art is mind blowing until you have seen the same 2000th variation on basically the same theme because it is so limited in what it can do.
To compare the simple game of chess to the entire space of what can be programmed on a computer is utterly absurd. You just don't know what you are talking about.
She is like a unicorn because I have personally never met a losing poker player.
Everyone is crushing it no matter what the rake in these games. "The games are all so soft". Sometimes they eventually though get bored of making all this money and move on to something else.
Same with sports betting now. "I win some, I lose some but overall I am up". Everyone says the same thing, even when betting on sports they don't even personally follow or watch.
Feynman talked about how there was an idea of "normal" people walking around not knowing they were basically doomed and going to die in a certain nuclear holocaust in a few years.
Von Neumann thought the U.S. should launch a nuclear first strike at Moscow. Obviously, if war is inevitable then you don't have to be the father of game theory to figure out you should strike first.
It was just a year ago that literally everyone was predicting we would be in a recession right now. We can't predict that but we can predict how AGI plays out even when we haven't bothered to define a measure of what AGI even is. Even people who grew up "knowing" we would all have sentient robots by 1997. I can't think of a single prediction I have heard in my lifetime that has turned out to be true other than the government debt going up.