… 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.

    • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
      8·
      11 months ago

      So he wrote that in 2007. Since then, games have only gotten more immersive according to his definition, so people dying of too much gaming should be a massive issue. As far as I know, it is not. People can fuck their lives up in other ways, but arguably straight up gambling is worse as it draws off way more real money from people that could have gone to education, housing etc.

      Yud likes to argue from first principles (obviously), but doesn’t reckon on social dynamics. If games were as bad as he describes, there would be regulation around them. Presumably if AI girlfriends become a threat to future pension payments, they will be regulated also.