Eventually we will pull the black ball out of the urn. It is the responsibility of those currently alive to assess the possible harm their creations might cause.
This cynical invincibility complex is becoming a tacit allowance of extreme danger. It's not some annoyance for people to act responsible, and not all technological achievements are the same as ones previously produced.
John C Lilly had a concept called the "bad program" that was like an internal, natural, subconscious antithetical force that lives in us all. It seduces or lures the individual into harming themselves one way or another - in his case it "tricked" him into taking a vitamin injection improperly, leading to a stroke, even though he knew how to administer the shot expertly.
At some level, there's a disaster-seeking function inside us all acting as an evolutionary propellant.
You might make an argument that "AI" is an evolutionary embodiment of our conscious minds that's designed to escape these more subconscious trappings.
> And there is no reason to think that AGI would have desire.
The entire point of utilizing this tool is to feed it a desire and have it produce an appropriate output based upon that desire. Not only that, it's entire training corpus is filled with examples of our human desires. So either humans give it desire or it trains itself to function based on the inertia of "goal-seeking" which are effectively the same thing.
The problem with your analogy is that these babies are HUMANS and not some distinctly different cyber-species. The basis of "human alignment" is that we all require basically the same conditions and environment in order to live, we all feel pain and pleasure, we all need food - that's what produces any amount of human cooperation. What's being feverishly developed is the seed of a different species that doesn't share those restrictions.
We've already found ourselves on a trajectory where un-employing millions or billions of people without any system to protect them afterwards is just accepted, and that's simply the first step of many in the destruction-of-empathy path that creating AI/AGI brings people down.
It's time to put an end to this fashionable and literal anti-human attitude. There's no comparative advantage to AI replacing humans en-masse because of how "stupid" we are. This POV is advocating for incalculable suffering and death. You personally will not be in a better or more rational position after this transition, you'll simply be dead.
These 5 people are our employees. We pay them with our tax dollars to assist in delivering services to ourselves and our fellow citizens. Unless secrecy is a distinct function of the service they deliver, I expect their names to be public. Transparency and accountability is owed to the taxpayer, if that's not acceptable to people then they are free to lend their talents to the private sector instead.
Doing business in, or running, a marketplace without established legal regulations opens you up to undefined consequences. Without laws to bind you, there are no laws to protect you.
The comment you replied to referenced "multiple teenagers" - the very people that liquor stores cannot sell alcohol to since they're not recognized as mature enough to be freely allowed to drink.
SR allowed children to buy addictive poison without any regulation whatsoever, and Ross profited off of those transactions.
The article is about insurance company malfeasance, but this boils it down to mis-aligned consumer expectations about living forever in total bliss. That feels like a strange disconnect.
No, the main takeaway is that this might be ATTEMPTED. Success is not inevitable and to take such guarantees from those most motivated to sell AI is foolish.
> For example today, SaaS tools exist for so many things you’d have had to hire for in the past. Thanks to SaaS you can get started really easily - take payments, get a storefront, send email newsletters..
By definition, SaaS is something you hire a company to do - you're paying for a service
> it will be a net good on a scale we can’t imagine
Why?
> megaliths of today also have more market power than optimal, hence so much anti-consumer shenanigans
Are you suggesting that large corporations will shrink market-share because they can all increase automation? How would that work?
> do they?
Yes, it's plainly obvious that some people feel some guilt for eating meat.
Regular hunters != industrial-level slaughtering. There are plenty of "regular hunters" who only eat meat they kill themselves. This is like saying if I cut down a single tree on my property I should also support the clear-cutting of the rainforest.