Another view on The A.I. Dilemma

Interesting to read Nick Drage’s riposte to The A.I. Dilemma which I watched a few weeks ago. I agree with his points on the presentation in terms of lack of citations and extreme interpretations, which when scrutinised does the subject a disservice.

The presentation is worth watching just to see what they get away with. And because the benefits and threats of AI are worth considering and adapting to, and especially because the presenters are so right in encouraging us to think about the systemic changes taking place and who is making those changes, but I’m really not sure this presentation helps anyone in that endeavor.

This isn’t to say that the topics raised are not important ones. I’m currently a third of the way through listening to a very long podcast interview between Lex Fridman and Eliezer Yudkowsky on “Dangers of AI and the End of Human Civilization”. Both of them know infinitely more about the topic than I do. It’s very philosophical, questioning whether we’d know if something had become ‘sentient’ in a world where the progress of AIs is gradual in a ‘boiling frogs’ sense. The way they talk about GPT-4 and the emergent properties of transformers in particular makes it sound like even the researchers aren’t fully sure of how these systems work. Which is interesting to me, a complete layperson in this space.