The People Who Got AI Right – And the Rest of Us Who Didn't Believe Them
About this episode
Filip Molcan discusses the predictions about artificial intelligence and reflects on past dismissals of its potential dangers.
This week I read two texts that sent me out for a walk afterwards. I do that fairly often anyway, but this time I went even though the sun was blazing outside and all my Greek neighbors were asleep, saving their energy for the evening. The first piece is from the AI Futures Project team, which works on predicting when humans will stop programming. The second is by journalist Dylan Matthews , who – eleven years on – is apologizing to people he once dismissed as cranks. I’ll summarize them here, somewhat mercilessly. Anyone already afraid of the future is probably better off deleting this email now. The conference where weirdos stood at the lectern In August 2015, the Effective Altruists organized a conference called EA Global. Among the speakers were Nick Bostrom (author of Superintelligence ), Stuart Russell (a legend of computer science), Nate Soares (today the author of If Anyone Builds It Everyone Dies ), and a still-fairly-reasonable Elon Musk. The topic: how artificial intelligence will sweep us all away. Among the attendees was Dylan Matthews, a journalist for Vox. He spoke there with a young engineer from Google named Chris Olah. With a philosophy PhD student named Amanda…
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