(Cross-posted from my website)
So, AI is accelerating. Does humanity have a future, and if so, what?
I consider myself a logical person, but this is not a logical piece of writing. It’s an attempt to share the contours of what I feel when I feel my thoughts about the future of AI. I’m aiming to evoke, not to defend. Reader be warned.
The first question is “will it?” Will AI manifest intelligence that feels like a force of nature to us, in the way that human intelligence is a force of nature to monkeys? Or even a force of nature to insects?
My answer is: An exponential is matter reaching towards heaven, an S-curve... (read 3376 more words →)
It sounds like both sides of the debate are implicitly agreeing that capabilities research is bad. I don't think that claim necessarily follows from the debate premise that "we both believe they are risking either extinction or takeover by an ~eternal alien dictatorship". I suspect disagreement about capabilities research being bad is the actual crux of the issue for some or many people who believe in AI risk yet still work for capabilities companies, rather than the arguments made in this debate.
The reason it doesn't necessarily follow is that there's a spectrum of possibilities about how entangled safety and capabilities research are. On one end of the spectrum, they are completely orthogonal:... (read 358 more words →)
Re: "Any coders that would like to jump into this?"
I hope it's okay to pitch my own startup for this: https://bubble.is
We make a tool to let non-programmers build things like this kind of project. Think SquareSpace for web applications with real, custom logic. We're accessible to anyone with enough computer skills to, for example, build formulas in excel.
I started Bubble precisely because I had a bunch of ideas for similar things -- collaboration sites, smart todos lists, etc. -- and even as an experienced programmer, I found that the effort of building each one was deterring me from experimenting. I wanted something that would let me do... (read more)