Lee Cronin: observation

Transcript context

…Well, Clippy is definitely coming back. But you’re saying we don’t have a great understanding of what is intelligence, what is the intelligence underpinning the human mind. I’m very frustrated by the way that we’re AI dooming right now, and people are bestowing some kind of magic. Now, let’s go back a bit. So, you said about AGI, are we far away from AGI? Yes. I do not think we’re going to get to AGI anytime soon. I’ve seen no evidence of it, and the AI doom scenario is nonsensical in the extreme. The reason why I think it’s nonsensical … And I don’t think there isn’t things we should do and be very worried about. There are things we need to worry about right now, what AI are doing. Whether it’s fake data, fake users. I want authentic people, authentic data. I don’t want everything to be faked, and I think it’s a really big problem, and I absolutely want to go on the record to say I really worry about that. What I’m not worried about is that some fictitious entity is going to turn us all to paperclips or detonate nuclear bombs, or maybe, I don’t know, anything you can think of. Why is this? I’ll take a very simple series of logical arguments, and the AI doomers do not have the correct epistemology. They do not understand what knowledge is. And until we understand what knowledge is, they’re not going to get anywhere because they’re applying things falsely. So, let me give you a very simple argument. People talk about the probability, “P(doom)”, of AI. We can work out the probability of an asteroid hitting the planet. Why? Because it’s happened before. We know the mechanism. We know that there’s a gravity well, or that spacetime is bent and stuff falls in. We don’t know the probability of AGI because we have no mechanism. So, let me give you another one, which is like, “I’m really worried about AG.” What’s AG? AG is anti-gravity. “One day we could wake up and anti-gravity is discovered, we’re all going to die, the atmosphere is going to float away, we’re going to float away, we’re all doomed.” What is the probability of AG? We don’t know because there’s no mechanism for AG. Do we worry about it? No, and I don’t understand the current reason for certain people in certain areas to be generating this nonsense. I think they’re not doing it maliciously. I think we’re observing the emergence of new religions, how religions come, because religions are about some controls. You’ve got the optimist saying, “AI is going to cure us all,” and, “AI is going to kill us all.” What’s the reality? Well, we don’t have AI. We have really powerful machine learning tools and they will allow us to do interesting things, and we need to be careful about how we use those tools in terms of manipulating human beings and faking stuff. Right? Right. Well, let me try to steel man the AI doomers’ argument. And actually, I don’t know, are AI doomers in the Yudkowsky camp saying it’s definitely going to kill us? Because there’s a spectrum.…

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