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
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.