If Yudkowsky is needlessly pessimistic, I guess we get an extra decade of time. How are we going to use it? Ten years later, will we feel just as hopeless as today, and hope that we get another extra decade?
This phrasing bothers me a bit. It presupposes that it is only a matter of time; that there’s no error about the nature of the threat AGI poses, and no order-of-magnitude error in the timeline. The pessimism is basically baked in.
Fair point. We might get an extra century. Until then, it may turn out that we can somehow deal with the problem, for example by having a competent and benevolent world government that can actually prevent the development of superhuman AIs (perhaps by using millions of exactly-human-level AIs who keep each other in check and together endlessly scan all computers on the planet).
I mean, a superhuman AI is definitely going to be a problem of some kind; at least economically and politically. But in best case, we may be able to deal with it. Either because we somehow got more competent quickly, or because we had enough time to become more competent gradually.
Maybe even this is needlessly pessimistic, but in such case I don’t see how it is.
If Yudkowsky is needlessly pessimistic, I guess we get an extra decade of time. How are we going to use it? Ten years later, will we feel just as hopeless as today, and hope that we get another extra decade?
This phrasing bothers me a bit. It presupposes that it is only a matter of time; that there’s no error about the nature of the threat AGI poses, and no order-of-magnitude error in the timeline. The pessimism is basically baked in.
Fair point. We might get an extra century. Until then, it may turn out that we can somehow deal with the problem, for example by having a competent and benevolent world government that can actually prevent the development of superhuman AIs (perhaps by using millions of exactly-human-level AIs who keep each other in check and together endlessly scan all computers on the planet).
I mean, a superhuman AI is definitely going to be a problem of some kind; at least economically and politically. But in best case, we may be able to deal with it. Either because we somehow got more competent quickly, or because we had enough time to become more competent gradually.
Maybe even this is needlessly pessimistic, but in such case I don’t see how it is.