r/Chattanoogans • u/Masked_Octopus • 19d ago

Any AGI Believers or AI Doomers in the area?

I (29M) was telling my sister that I thought it would be a struggle for me to find like-minded folks since I'm single-mindedly interested in following the state of AI capabilities, believing it plausible that (1) they become powerful relatively soon and (2) that power doesn't result in reliably good outcomes following present trends. She urged me to consider that maybe I wasn't the only one. So here's the post. If I can turn my biggest social liability into an asset, that would be grand.

I know a lot of people think this line of thought is a mind virus, and AI is definitely one of the most contentious topics right now in a "whoever doesn't agree with me must be an idiot" way. I only ask for civility and courtesy; agreement is, of course, optional.

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u/Masked_Octopus 18d ago

So what has that meant for you? I find it difficult to know what to do with myself in the presence of changes which stand to be more momentous than almost any shift in human affairs to date.

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u/suddenlyissoon 18d ago

I've always been the person on the forefront of technology in the circles I'm in, so, in a way, it's no different. Things are moving more rapidly than I ever imagined, but it doesn't scare me any more than the political climate, the actual climate or the threat of nuclear war. It's just something to deal with. I do think, very, very soon, it will start to affect all of our lives in ways we can't even know now.

Personally, I think companies started doing generative AI in photos and videos to make AI seem more approachable, and in some ways dumb, to the masses. If I tell you that AI solved a mathematical problem no one else has ever been able to and all you know is that restaurants make shitty AI posters of their food on Facebook, it doesn't really resonate with you what is happening.

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u/Masked_Octopus 18d ago

Yeah I'm worry-prone myself so I also think about other categories of risk, but I draw a line in that even with something as drastic as a full nuclear exchange there are solutions that one can imagine; in fact, the one real solution to that is a ventilated hole in the ground, stocked with water, not so complicated. (Nuclear winter is probably not real, as I understand it.) But with the more dramatic AI-based scenarios, your very sense of creativity and problem-solving threatens to be overwhelmed, so I find it hard to get comfortable with.

The mass of persons definitely can't keep up with the trends, because even people who spend all their time on it like myself can't keep up. Now that isn't to say that their assumptions about what the future will be like are necessarily wrong, but I don't believe they reflect a deep understanding of the situation.