[ExI] Elon Musk, Emad Mostaque, and other AI leaders sign open letter to 'Pause Giant AI Experiments'

[Adrian Tymes]

On Fri, Mar 31, 2023 at 2:13 AM Giovanni Santostasi <gsantostasi at gmail.com>
wrote:

> The AI doomers would say, but this is different from everything else
> because.... it is like God.
>

Indeed, and in so doing they make several errors often associated with
religion, for example fallacies akin to Pascal's Wager (see: Roko's
Basilisk).


> Take Russia, or North Korea. Russia could destroy humanity or do
> irreparable damage. Why doesn't it happen? Mutual Destruction is part of
> the reason.
>

To be fair, given what's been revealed in their invasion of Ukraine (and
had been suspected for a while), it is possible that Russia does not in
fact - and never actually did - have all that many functioning long-range
nuclear weapons.  But your point applies to why we've never had to find out
for sure yet.


> One thing is to warn of the possible dangers, another this relentless and
> exaggerated doom sayers cries.
>

Which, being repeated and exaggerated when the "honest" reports fail to
incite the supposedly justified degree of alarm (rather than seriously
considering that said justification might in fact be incorrect), get melded
into the long history of unfounded apocalypse claims, and dismissed on that
basis.  The Year 2000 bug did not wipe out civilization.  Many predicted
dates for the Second Coming have come and gone with no apparent effect; new
predictions rarely even acknowledge that there have been said prior
predictions, let alone give reason why those proved false where this
prediction is different.   Likewise for the 2012 Mayan Apocalypse, which
was literally just their calendar rolling over (akin to going from
12/31/1999 to 1/1/2000) and may have had the wrong date anyway.
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