The guy was saying that AI was going to be a serious problem decades before anyone else was even considering it as a remote possibility. How is that in any way "consistently wrong with all their predictions"?

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fasterik an hour ago | parent | next [-]

>The guy was saying that AI was going to be a serious problem decades before anyone else was even considering it as a remote possibility

That's not accurate at all. AI research has been around since the 1950s and pioneers of the field identified risks early on, including Alan Turing, Norbert Wiener, and I. J. Good.

The problem with Yudkowsky is that he lays out elaborate doomsday scenarios with extreme confidence, except none of it is grounded in realistic physical constraints, timelines, or empirical data. It's all divined a priori from Yudkowsky's ad hoc "rationalist" principles.

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johnfn an hour ago | parent | next [-]

You are saying 1) other people have said the same thing and 2) you don't like the particular way he said it. Those can both be true, but that isn't even close to "consistently wrong with all their predictions".

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fasterik an hour ago | parent [-]

No, they didn't say the same thing. Identifying potential risks is not the same thing as confidently predicting the extinction of humanity.

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johnfn an hour ago | parent [-]

We agree the guy roughly said AI will be dangerous. We agree AI is dangerous. Not sure what more there is to say here.

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fasterik an hour ago | parent [-]

Well, I don't agree AI is dangerous, at least no more dangerous than electricity or the Internet. But even so, saying that AI is dangerous is not at all an original or interesting thought, especially for a guy who started talking about it in the early 2000s. Go back and watch 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) or The Terminator (1984).

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johnfn 40 minutes ago | parent [-]

The discussion isn't about whether it's an "original or interesting thought", it's about whether Yudkowsky is "consistently wrong with all their predictions". You keep shifting the topic.

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fasterik 34 minutes ago | parent [-]

I was mainly responding to the claim that he was "saying that AI was going to be a serious problem decades before anyone else was even considering it as a remote possibility." But we can also look at the specific predictions he's made.

https://www.longtermwiki.com/wiki/E643

Some that turned out to be wrong include: singularity by 2021, singularity by 2025, 70% chance of human extinction between 2003-2015, and that his team would build "final stage AI" reaching transhumanity between 2005-2020 ("probably around 2008 or 2010"). His only correct prediction to date has been that AI would win gold in the IMO by 2025.

If you have examples of other predictions of his that have come true, I'd be interested to hear them.

	▲	johnfn 5 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I was responding to someone who said Yudkowsky was "consistently wrong with all their predictions". Yes, fair enough, Yudkowsky wasn't the literal first person ever to say that AI might be bad. The point was that the common academic response at the time if you were to say AI could be bad was to laugh you out of the room. IMO, you get a lot of points for making a prediction when almost everyone else in the world disagrees with you. The reason those movies you cited were blockbusters was because very view people believed that they were realistic. No one made a movie about a pandemic in 2020. I don't think there's much to be gained out of hashing out whether every prediction Yudkowsky has said was right or wrong: I likely directionally agree with you there, as I also find some of his more extreme predictions to be inaccurate. I mostly take issue with "consistently wrong". The results in longtermwiki are not "consistently wrong". He's definitely wrong sometimes. But consistently?

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2snakes an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Yah, another way of putting this is theory-ladenness of hyperreality of personal world model (rationality vs empiricism).

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piker an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Has AI yet been a serious problem?

	▲	ben_w an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Yes, repeatedly, since well before this particular AI summer. One previous attempt at AI was "expert systems", and while the term fell out of use it's functionally about the same as basically all modern business systems, and doing that wrong led to a lot of people being prosecuted for crimes they didn't commit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal If you insist on learning systems, all AB testing counts, and from that we get meta making their products into hyper-stimuli for vulnerable teens: https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/meta-meta-... Even without that lawsuit, there have been various concerns that "the algorithm" (of Twitter/X, FB, Instagram, YouTube, Google, everyone) has propagandising biases that damage society. I don't know how to sift fact from politicking with that.