Speculating the difference between those who “feel the AGI” vs don’t:
People are social: If most people they see aren’t acting impressed, then they shouldn’t either. A vibe I get from social media is that AI is bad (for environment, jobs, AND capabilities). This is also similar to reactions to COVID early 2020. This is also similar to myself where I didn’t invest time into AI safety until I made 1 friend to work on it over discord (it became socially viable to do at that point).
AGI soon would be inconvenient to our own narrative: I remember spending a few hours to understand the chinchilla scaling laws; my stomach sunk. In the back of my mind, I had always expected to, you know, get married, have kids, live a long and healthy life, and this punctured a hole in that.[1] I was quite depressed for a couple of days, but fortunately had read how to greave well.
For students, a large narrative is finishing their degree & getting a job. Even if timelines aren’t that short, does it really make sense for them to keep studying that when a (metaphorical) meteor could hit earth in a few years? I think it’s a natural learned behavior to ignore thoughts/feelings of dissent in your current narrative you’re relying on, because no narrative --> no motivation (and it might look bad to acknowledge faults in your plan).[2]
A few related ones:
AI hasn’t literally cured cancer (I do believe there will be a cascading effect once it has done something of this caliber)
Scaling laws aren’t felt in a gut sense: I learned it in a way that viscerally affected my predictions of the future. Most people DON’T have a strong model of scaling laws. Although, I think some equations or graphs would lack punch without going into depth the capabilities of eg GPT-2,3,4, etc.
AGI soon would be inconvenient to our own narrative: I remember spending a few hours to understand the chinchilla scaling laws; my stomach sunk.
This was me about four months ago, except my trigger of multi-day dread and depression was seeing the METR graph of task-completion time horizons.
I guess some of us have just had that moment of “oh shit” and concluded x-risk is a real thing that we really need to worry about, and some of us haven’t.
Are we all (in this thread and this community) just wired in an unusual way that makes us assume worst case scenario is the most worthy of our attention?
Speculating the difference between those who “feel the AGI” vs don’t:
People are social: If most people they see aren’t acting impressed, then they shouldn’t either. A vibe I get from social media is that AI is bad (for environment, jobs, AND capabilities). This is also similar to reactions to COVID early 2020. This is also similar to myself where I didn’t invest time into AI safety until I made 1 friend to work on it over discord (it became socially viable to do at that point).
AGI soon would be inconvenient to our own narrative: I remember spending a few hours to understand the chinchilla scaling laws; my stomach sunk. In the back of my mind, I had always expected to, you know, get married, have kids, live a long and healthy life, and this punctured a hole in that.[1] I was quite depressed for a couple of days, but fortunately had read how to greave well.
For students, a large narrative is finishing their degree & getting a job. Even if timelines aren’t that short, does it really make sense for them to keep studying that when a (metaphorical) meteor could hit earth in a few years? I think it’s a natural learned behavior to ignore thoughts/feelings of dissent in your current narrative you’re relying on, because no narrative --> no motivation (and it might look bad to acknowledge faults in your plan).[2]
A few related ones:
AI hasn’t literally cured cancer (I do believe there will be a cascading effect once it has done something of this caliber)
Scaling laws aren’t felt in a gut sense: I learned it in a way that viscerally affected my predictions of the future. Most people DON’T have a strong model of scaling laws. Although, I think some equations or graphs would lack punch without going into depth the capabilities of eg GPT-2,3,4, etc.
I mean, I am married now and plan to have kids, but this update was ~4 years ago.
I view this as a local optimum, cause paying more attention to dissenting stuff requires skill to be done right.
This was me about four months ago, except my trigger of multi-day dread and depression was seeing the METR graph of task-completion time horizons.
I guess some of us have just had that moment of “oh shit” and concluded x-risk is a real thing that we really need to worry about, and some of us haven’t.
Are we all (in this thread and this community) just wired in an unusual way that makes us assume worst case scenario is the most worthy of our attention?
What is your expected timeline? Particularly for an AI that would be capable of curing cancer (if you think that’s possible).