You can cherry pick examples of doomers being right and wrong. There have been doomers about nuclear war, wrong so far. About various religious apocalypses, wrong wrong wrong. Overpopulation and famine, wrong-oh!
Homosexuality hasn’t legitimated bestiality or pedophilia, in fact we have perhaps a more vigorous anti-pedophile movement now than ever before—I saw a guy on a motorcycle on the freeway a month or two ago whose sweatshirt read “kill your local pedophile” on the back. In the past, mass rape in the wake of war and marital rape was normal and expected worldwide, or we weren’t even equipped with the moral frame and language to condemn it.
We have little evidence TV et al destroyed people’s ability to read so much as gave them many alternatives to it. Anki makes it easier than ever before to memorize poems, should you choose to.
Were people in the past specifically worried about the dissolution of the marriage format, or were they worried about certain healthy and fulfilling relational dynamics for which “marriage” was a convenient label? Unclear, and that’s a lot of difficult history to hash out if you were to try. And if the latter; then are we so sure things haven’t improved? The past appears to be full of thoroughly toxic marriages, as well as prematurely dead spouses.
I could go on, but I don’t think there’s a point. This post is implicitly about AI doomers, and it’s trying to score points lazily by this weird sort of “our team has always been right, doesn’t that seem intuitively correct to you?” anecdotalism. This is the sort of thing an AI enthusiast could easily point to as an example of bad doomer criticism of AI accelerationism that may inappropriately increase their confidence, even as it appears to be intended to do for the doomers. Sigh.
You can cherry pick examples of doomers being right and wrong. There have been doomers about nuclear war, wrong so far. About various religious apocalypses, wrong wrong wrong. Overpopulation and famine, wrong-oh!
Homosexuality hasn’t legitimated bestiality or pedophilia, in fact we have perhaps a more vigorous anti-pedophile movement now than ever before—I saw a guy on a motorcycle on the freeway a month or two ago whose sweatshirt read “kill your local pedophile” on the back. In the past, mass rape in the wake of war and marital rape was normal and expected worldwide, or we weren’t even equipped with the moral frame and language to condemn it.
We have little evidence TV et al destroyed people’s ability to read so much as gave them many alternatives to it. Anki makes it easier than ever before to memorize poems, should you choose to.
Were people in the past specifically worried about the dissolution of the marriage format, or were they worried about certain healthy and fulfilling relational dynamics for which “marriage” was a convenient label? Unclear, and that’s a lot of difficult history to hash out if you were to try. And if the latter; then are we so sure things haven’t improved? The past appears to be full of thoroughly toxic marriages, as well as prematurely dead spouses.
I could go on, but I don’t think there’s a point. This post is implicitly about AI doomers, and it’s trying to score points lazily by this weird sort of “our team has always been right, doesn’t that seem intuitively correct to you?” anecdotalism. This is the sort of thing an AI enthusiast could easily point to as an example of bad doomer criticism of AI accelerationism that may inappropriately increase their confidence, even as it appears to be intended to do for the doomers. Sigh.