<story><title>The Darwinian argument for worrying about AI</title><url>https://time.com/6283958/darwinian-argument-for-worrying-about-ai/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>chinchilla2020</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s nowhere close to understanding basic logical concepts of the real world. Mimicking human sentences is something my African Grey parrot can do.&lt;p&gt;Building a deck is something AI cannot do.&lt;p&gt;For all our technology, we still don&amp;#x27;t have an automated kitchen because the work involved in the logistics and maintenance of the kitchen&amp;#x2F;materials is astronomically greater than simply doing the cooking by hand.&lt;p&gt;AI has no bridge to the real world. It can&amp;#x27;t build a house, farm crops, and maintain vehicles. For those on hackernews, a laptop may seem like the portal to reality, but that isn&amp;#x27;t the case for the other 90% of the human workforce.&lt;p&gt;We are 50% of the way between the big bang and heat death of the universe. There are no interstellar civilizations contacting us yet. They better hurry up if we plan to fulfill the scifi notions I see on this site.</text></item><item><author>jstanley</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s not easy, but it only has to succeed once.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s not easy to turn primordial soup into humans, but it happened.</text></item><item><author>mercurialsolo</author><text>A lot of the AI doomerism comes from folks who do not understand the real complexities in making systems which really can function in a fully autonomous way in an environment which is hostile and dynamic. Much like an AI maybe tasked to sniff for security loopholes, there will be other AI&amp;#x27;s which will be tasked to defend. Eventually costs, resources also boil down into what is possible.&lt;p&gt;Evolutionary goals are not easy even with autonomous systems as goal definition is largely defined by societal needs, the environments we stay in and the resources we work with.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>BobbyJo</author><text>A virus can wipe out significant portions of the human population with so little complexity we don&amp;#x27;t even consider it life, and with no understanding of what it&amp;#x27;s doing.&lt;p&gt;There are systems on the planet in which a single circuit activation has the potential to turn everything into radioactive soup via a cascade of responses.&lt;p&gt;The near term risk isn&amp;#x27;t super intelligence, it&amp;#x27;s the paper-clip optimizer pushing the wrong button.</text></comment>
<story><title>The Darwinian argument for worrying about AI</title><url>https://time.com/6283958/darwinian-argument-for-worrying-about-ai/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>chinchilla2020</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s nowhere close to understanding basic logical concepts of the real world. Mimicking human sentences is something my African Grey parrot can do.&lt;p&gt;Building a deck is something AI cannot do.&lt;p&gt;For all our technology, we still don&amp;#x27;t have an automated kitchen because the work involved in the logistics and maintenance of the kitchen&amp;#x2F;materials is astronomically greater than simply doing the cooking by hand.&lt;p&gt;AI has no bridge to the real world. It can&amp;#x27;t build a house, farm crops, and maintain vehicles. For those on hackernews, a laptop may seem like the portal to reality, but that isn&amp;#x27;t the case for the other 90% of the human workforce.&lt;p&gt;We are 50% of the way between the big bang and heat death of the universe. There are no interstellar civilizations contacting us yet. They better hurry up if we plan to fulfill the scifi notions I see on this site.</text></item><item><author>jstanley</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s not easy, but it only has to succeed once.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s not easy to turn primordial soup into humans, but it happened.</text></item><item><author>mercurialsolo</author><text>A lot of the AI doomerism comes from folks who do not understand the real complexities in making systems which really can function in a fully autonomous way in an environment which is hostile and dynamic. Much like an AI maybe tasked to sniff for security loopholes, there will be other AI&amp;#x27;s which will be tasked to defend. Eventually costs, resources also boil down into what is possible.&lt;p&gt;Evolutionary goals are not easy even with autonomous systems as goal definition is largely defined by societal needs, the environments we stay in and the resources we work with.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>consilient</author><text>&amp;gt; We are 50% of the way between the big bang and heat death of the universe.&lt;p&gt;Not even close. Star formation is going to continue for at least another trillion years, and red dwarves are going to continue shining for tens of trillions of years after that.</text></comment>