You are allowed to comment if you absolutely hate AI, or love it. If you think it is overrated or underrated, ok (although I think it's too early to say what the consensus even is to know whether it is overrate/underrated). But if you think it is just a scam, gimmick, grift, etc I don't need to hear from you right now :soviet-heart:
Let the discussion begin:
So it's clear there's this big alignment debate going on rn. Regardless where you stand, isn't it fucked that there's a cabal of the biggest freaks money has ever produced debating the future of humanity with zero input from normal society?
Even if it isn't humanity's future they think it is. There's probably like 100 people in the world paid to work on alignment. How can you not develop a megalomania complex?
What kind of chatter are you hearing about AI?
I very occasional hear people irl obliquely mention AI. A cashier said like 'oh that AI stuff, that's pretty scary'. That's about it.
Now the blogs I follow have been basically colonized by AI news. These aren't even strictly technology blogs. I started following David Brin for UFO takes, I started following Erik Hoel for neuroscience takes. Literally everyone I follow has published takes on AI and zero of them dismiss it out of hand.
Sorry this will get long.
I basically feel like we are in another version of the post nuclear age except only insiders know it. After the first A-bomb, everyone knew the world was different starting the very next day. Now only designated take-havers are aware of this new reality.
Or regular folks are aware of it but they're so disempowered from having a say that they only engage with the realization online like I'm doing now. Medicare for all is Bernie's thing. The border is Trump's. Even if nothing will ever be done about healthcare, the fact that Bernie talks about it justifies you thinking about it. AI isn't any politician's thing.
I'd put the odds of a nuclear war around 1% a year. I'd say there's a 1% chance AI can be as world-ending as that. That's such a low number that it doesn't feel like "AI doomerism". But 1% multiplied by however much we value civilization is still a godalmighty risk.
When I've heard this site talk about it, it's usually in the context of "holy shit this AI art is garbage compared to real art? Where's the love, where's the soul?" If it was 1945 and we nuked a city, would you be concerned with trying to figure out what postmodernism would look like?
Usually when I've gotten to the end of my post I delete it.
Not to be all pedantic (or minimize the horror of nuclear war) but this isn't actually how stats work, although I actually think the ballpark of 50% nuclear holocaust in 50 years sounds about right, as terrifying as that is. But yeah, just think about it -- if you have a 1% chance of something happening in a year, then in 100 years it would be 100% guaranteed to happen. In reality the 1% chance remains 1% every year, no matter how many years aggregate.
I'm not a stats expert though so if I'm wrong someone please correct me
I did check my math before posting and now I'll inflict it on you. To figure out the chance of a nuclear war happening at any time over 70 years (with a 1% chance each year) what you actually need to do is figure out the odds of a nuclear war not happening at any point over the 70 years.
We'll start with just 2 years. There's a 99% chance of no nukes in the first year and a 99% chance of no nukes in the second year. So you can multiply the 99% (from the first year) by 99% (from the second year) to get 98.01% (.99 * .99). You can do the same math for the 3 years (.99 * .99 * .99) and the 4 years (.99 * .99 * .99 * .99).
You can (and probably should) also express this as 99% to the power of however many years you're dealing with. So 70 years would be 99% to the power of 70 (.99^70) which is the same as multiplying .99 by itself 70 times. This works out to .495 or so, or a 49.5% chance of not having a nuclear war over 70 years. You flip that over to get a 50.5% chance of having a nuclear war and then you round it to a nice round 50%.
Interestingly enough, this math only gives you the odds of 1 or more nuclear wars over 70 years. The math for exactly one nuclear war is more complicated and I can't do it off-hand.
Absolutely correct. But we do need to aggregate these odds over a number of years somehow. The thing to keep in mind is that this is starting at the beginning of the 70 years. Once a year is behind you then you can ignore it for statistical purposes. It's like if you already got 5 heads in a row, the chance of the next flip being a heads is still 50%. However the odds of getting 6 heads in a row starting from nothing is pretty low.
Damn I learned something today, thank you
The 50% is just (1-0.01)^70 (49.5%). This is assuming the 1% for each year is statistically independent (ie not getting nuked in 2020 doesn't affect the odds of not getting nuked in 2022).