Posted on 04/09/2024 7:36:23 PM PDT by DallasBiff
From the academic who warns of a robot uprising to the workers worried for their future – is it time we started paying attention to the tech sceptics?
Eliezer Yudkowsky, a 44-year-old academic wearing a grey polo shirt, rocks slowly on his office chair and explains with real patience – taking things slowly for a novice like me – that every single person we know and love will soon be dead. They will be murdered by rebellious self-aware machines. “The difficulty is, people do not realise,” Yudkowsky says mildly, maybe sounding just a bit frustrated, as if irritated by a neighbour’s leaf blower or let down by the last pages of a novel. “We have a shred of a chance that humanity survives.”
It’s January. I have set out to meet and talk to a small but growing band of luddites, doomsayers, disruptors and other AI-era sceptics who see only the bad in the way our spyware-steeped, infinitely doomscrolling world is tending. I want to find out why these techno-pessimists think the way they do. I want to know how they would render change. Out of all of those I speak to, Yudkowsky is the most pessimistic, the least convinced that civilisation has a hope. He is the lead researcher at a nonprofit called the Machine Intelligence Research Institute in Berkeley, California, and you could boil down the results of years of Yudkowsky’s theorising there to a couple of vowel sounds: “Oh fuuuuu–!”
(Excerpt) Read more at theguardian.com ...
But there is no evidence for the improvement in your claim, therefore you have no ability to articulate it.
To be clear, what I’m saying is that technology in the silicon-based information age never meets expectations.
The expectation has been that computer technology would bring new features and functions that happen instantly and perfectly. But the reality is that:
1) Each process often takes longer than expected.
2) Each process at times fails completely.
3) Quality of life in all areas of measure is observed to be worse than it was decades ago.
Interesting link.
Thanks.
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