But what is it a summary of? Of doomsday AI fiction tropes? It's called "possible futures", so it's claiming to be more than that, but somehow, almost all the terminal nodes are "dystopia" or "death".

There are massive logical leaps here. For example, why does superhuman intelligence translate into AI taking over the world? By what means, exactly? You can respond to this with more sci-fi tropes - nanobots, mind manipulation - but come on.

I have plenty of misgivings about AI, but I think you can make a plot like that for anything if you get into the right mindset. Kamala Harris wins → war in Eurasia → nuclear apocalypse, Coke changes the recipe → soft drink extremists begin a worldwide terror campaign → totalitarian police state, etc.

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Alwayshasbeeb an hour ago | parent [-]

Was looking for this comment. I stopped reading two paragraphs in at:

>This could probably happen today: a pandemic could cause human extinction, and AI is capable enough to assist in biology research.

No, friend. Someone having access to abliterated fable 5 or whatever does not give them superpowers to create a human extinction level pandemic.

	▲	EA-3167 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I have no idea how to deal with people like that, when someone has thoroughly internalized unfounded assumptions about what ML is, how it works, and where it's headed based on the current tech... what do you say? How do you broach the topic that they might be so deep in a hype cycle that they've genuinely lost touch? I've tried, gently, firmly, obliquely... nothing seems to work. I had the same experiences during the Crypto bubble, people simply wouldn't listen to dissent from the notion that we were on the cusp of changing money, programming, and society. How do you explain to someone that just because they can imagine an exponential graph doesn't mean the data fits?