Being a doomer sucks, man. But I see a lot of issues with your way of thinking, which I was basically getting at in the post you replied to. Let me explain:

Today it's a useful tool. But in not too long--a few years, perhaps--this tool will be able to outsmart you. If you think this is definitely not going to happen, then okay--we see the progress in LLMs differently. I see machines which, in a matter of three years, went from being able to do basic proofs, to math Olympiad problems, to century-old Millennium problems. I see no reason why progress will slow down.

Any "tool" which is that much smarter than you is no tool, any more than you are the "tool" of your pet dog.

I understand wanting to feel better and be optimistic about the future. I'm unfortunately not, and that makes a lot of people feel bad. Again, I'm sorry! I don't want to be a downer. But it's important to me that people take these risks seriously and don't minimize them with expressions like "we still have paper" and "it's a useful tool."

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demaga an hour ago | parent | next [-]

> Any "tool" which is that much smarter than you is no tool

I don't think this is accurate. Chainsaw is way more powerful than I am, yet it is definitely a tool. Computer is a tool too.

> I understand wanting to feel better and be optimistic about the future.

Historically, people who were pessimistic about the future, were very wrong. And this goes back centuries, if not millennia.

	▲	lostmsu 35 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> Chainsaw is way more powerful than I am, yet it is definitely a tool. That's because the relationship between a tool and its wielder is primarily in intelligence.

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ptero 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> But I see a lot of issues with your way of thinking, which I was basically getting at in the post you replied to.

Of course. And I am not claiming that my view is the view or even a particularly good view. It is just my personal worldview. But I think that with ups and downs, over generations and centuries, the world is on an uptrend. My parents were being driven, with their families, from their homes as kids; one of them lost an eye (as a kid) from a war; both lived through years of hunger. My grandparents saw real crap, two lived through a famine and saw many die from hunger.

But they all lived through those disruptions, worked and tried to build something better (I had to probe that information out of them; they did not even mention those things to us). I think the AI disruptions will not be nearly as painful and we will live through them just fine. Again, just a personal perspective.

> I see machines which, in a matter of three years, went from being able to do basic proofs, to math Olympiad problems, to century-old Millennium problems. I see no reason why progress will slow down.

I think what we see is LLMs picking the low hanging fruit. There is a lot of it, but I do not think we can extrapolate it. Some things will be particularly easy for LLMs to exceed humans on (like a steam engine being better in driving heavy machinery), some possible, many very hard. And humans will find new things to explore and build. We will see in 25 years (I am old and might not be alive then, but maybe I will see enough in 15).

As a side note: I do not know why you are being downvoted. I do not agree with your view, but I think it is intelligent and well written. I hope folks stop downvoting anything they disagree with and go back to downvoting on tone, not alignment.

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pixl97 an hour ago | parent [-]

>But I think that with ups and downs, over generations and centuries, the world is on an uptrend.

I mean if you were a dinosaur you had a 100 million year uptrend and then it was suddenly over.

Things did not becomes better on accident, in general humans have wanted a better world for themselves. There is no scientific rule that says this must remain true. We have to strive for it. And if we hand over all this to a few rich people with intelligent machines there could be a huge upset here.

	▲	ptero 20 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> I mean if you were a dinosaur you had a 100 million year uptrend and then it was suddenly over. Yes. But my point is that we have a major crisis (and a part of the population thinking that the current way of life is over forever), every few generations. With your analogy, the dinosaurs had "the end is nigh" and "this time is different" doomerist beliefs a million times before finally being right. Agree fully that it is good to strive for the improvement. But there are so many different views of what the improvement would look like, so we have good folks who, when spun up by their respective leaders, focus on their differences and start fighting. Which, IMO, is almost, almost, almost always a bad way to build something better. My 2c.