Agreed. It’s a bit of both. There’s been people talking about the “alignment problem” in the right fora for like 20 years. And, if we ever have consciousness / sentience that is created by us, it will be something that it would be nice to have an answer to.
But, the most relevant AI issues today are not that. It’s about liability-shifting and other externalization by the powerful, misunderstanding and misuse by the well-meaning, and various cognitive hazards. These are not marketing, these are what the companies don’t want you to think about. There also lock-in and labor issues that the model providers don’t want to talk about, though these do have somewhat-known mitigations. You get plenty of people that are primarily concerned with these issues being dismissed a “AI doomers” which in, I think, wrong.
Yeah absolutely, these ones focused in trying to study alignment because it seemed like the most compelling problem for various reasons, but these ones had an expectation that there would be beings out fighting the immediate issues, just as there are beings with climate change as their cause area, or biosafety. People who decide their cause area is the only one that matters are being silly at best.
Incidentally, consciousness / sentience are kind of side notes, properties intelligent systems are capable, but not a requirement to be smart enough to tile the light cone with processors grinding out ever higher prime numbers.
Agreed. It’s a bit of both. There’s been people talking about the “alignment problem” in the right fora for like 20 years. And, if we ever have consciousness / sentience that is created by us, it will be something that it would be nice to have an answer to.
But, the most relevant AI issues today are not that. It’s about liability-shifting and other externalization by the powerful, misunderstanding and misuse by the well-meaning, and various cognitive hazards. These are not marketing, these are what the companies don’t want you to think about. There also lock-in and labor issues that the model providers don’t want to talk about, though these do have somewhat-known mitigations. You get plenty of people that are primarily concerned with these issues being dismissed a “AI doomers” which in, I think, wrong.
Yeah absolutely, these ones focused in trying to study alignment because it seemed like the most compelling problem for various reasons, but these ones had an expectation that there would be beings out fighting the immediate issues, just as there are beings with climate change as their cause area, or biosafety. People who decide their cause area is the only one that matters are being silly at best.
Incidentally, consciousness / sentience are kind of side notes, properties intelligent systems are capable, but not a requirement to be smart enough to tile the light cone with processors grinding out ever higher prime numbers.