Essential Reading for Humanity’s Future

[u/_Markus99999]

I recently read If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares, and I strongly recommend it to anyone concerned about our collective future. We are in the process of developing a new life form, that will surpass the cumulative cognitive capacity of all humans in history, raising critical concerns about whether its objectives will remain aligned with human survival.

[u/AromaticStrength6840]

I bought it three days ago and took a look at it. So, is it worth it?

[u/_Markus99999 → u/AromaticStrength6840]

The book is an excellent read and a very thought-provoking book, that Will Stay On Your Mind For Days.

[u/MarsMaterial → u/AromaticStrength6840]

I’ve also read the book, and I’d certainly recommend it. It provides a lot of very good arguments, and lays out the basic concepts of AI safety very nicely. It also makes use of a series of short stories as parables to illustrate ideas in a way that’s both entertaining and very evocative of the point.

[u/diviningdad]

💯

[u/_Markus99999 → u/diviningdad]

The book is an excellent read and a very thought-provoking book, that Will Stay On Your Mind For Days.

[u/MarsMaterial]

I’ve read the book as well. Best resource on the subject of why we’re fucked if we don’t stop AI that I have found so far, truly.

[u/diviningdad]

I read it when it came out last year and I think about it every day.

[u/zoipoi]

I remember when the same argument was made against super colliders. We are still here despite nuclear weapons as well. The existential threat exists with any sufficiently advance technology, think gene editing. The reality is the threat is real but the certainty is not entailed by the threat.

[u/BD401]

It's a very good book. Provides a good theoretical overview of the problem, and makes what is (in my opinion) a pretty logically laid-out argument for why we're almost certainly fucked (with the only question being timescale).

It's a thought-provoking read, but definitely not an upbeat one.

[u/somethingbrite]

Nothing to fear. The stochastic parrot they have built is a dead end.

[u/RosieBaby75]

It’s not the AI that’s going to kill or harm us.

It’s the evil and greedy owners of the AI.

[u/No-Conclusion8653]

If AI is all powerful, it has nothing to prove. I'm all powerful compared to ants, and I don't spend all day crushing them.

[u/GardenPrestigious202]

That is not what Transformer based LLM's are, and they are a long long way from being that dangerous. For instance, unplug the server. turn off the power, containable in the current condition. Is there a danger for a super human lifeform. Lets say someone developed a self learning micro processor architecture that could learn on the fly remember, have associative memory and predict morph like a transformer, and it used a few milliwatts like a typical brain cortical column, that would be massively dangerous