AI 2027

Older and related article from one of the authors titled "What 2026 looks like", that is holding up very well against time. Written in mid 2021 (pre ChatGPT)

https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/6Xgy6CAf2jqHhynHL/what-...

//edit: remove the referral tags from URL

That's incredible how much it broadly aligns with what has happened. Especially because it was before ChatGPT.

Will people finally wake up that the AGI X-Risk people have been right and we’re rapidly approaching a really fucking big deal?

This forum has been so behind for too long.

Sama has been saying this a decade now: “Development of Superhuman machine intelligence is probably the greatest threat to the continued existence of humanity” 2015 https://blog.samaltman.com/machine-intelligence-part-1

Hinton, Ilya, Dario Amodei, RLHF inventor, Deepmind founders. They all get it, which is why they’re the smart cookies in those positions.

First stage is denial, I get it, not easy to swallow the gravity of what’s coming.

> Will people finally wake up that the AGI X-Risk people have been right and we’re rapidly approaching a really fucking big deal?

OK, say I totally believe this. What, pray tell, are we supposed to do about it?

Don't you at least see the irony of quoting Sama's dire warnings about the development of AI, without at least mentioning that he is at the absolute forefront of the push to build this technology that can destroy all of humanity. It's like he's saying "This potion can destroy all of humanity if we make it" as he works faster and faster to figure out how to make it.

I mean, I get it, "if we don't build it, someone else will", but all of the discussion around "alignment" seems just blatantly laughable to me. If on one hand your goal is to build "super intelligence", i.e. way smarter than any human or group of humans, how do you expect to control that super intelligence when you're just acting at the middling level of human intelligence?

While I'm skeptical on the timeline, if we do ever end up building super intelligence, the idea that we can control it is a pipe dream. We may not be toast (I mean, we're smarter than dogs, and we keep them around), but we won't be in control.

So if you truly believe super intelligent AI is coming, you may as well enjoy the view now, because there ain't nothing you or anyone else will be able to do to "save humanity" if or when it arrives.

Political organization to force a stop to ongoing research? Protest outside OAI HQ? There are lots of thing we could, and many of us would, do if more people were actually convinced their life were in danger.

> Political organization to force a stop to ongoing research? Protest outside OAI HQ?

Come on, be real. Do you honestly think that would make a lick of difference? Maybe, at best, delay things by a couple months. But this is a worldwide phenomenon, and humans have shown time and time again that they are not able to self organize globally. How successful do you think that political organization is going to be in slowing China's progress?