Another thought-terminating one-liner. This is why I had to add that this was a hypothetical scenario in OP, because it seems whenever anyone tries to discuss transformative AI on this site, there is always the kneejerk bias to just say it's all a VC scam, overhyped, etc.
Which is fun to talk about because it makes you the smart cynic and everyone else the dumb sheep, but it isn't productive when discussing ideas within a hypothetical range (i.e. with no burden of proof, simply a what-if), but even explicitly saying it's a "what-if" scenario can't keep that bias from coming out.
I think it's unwise to spend almost no time considering the real impacts of AI given how much the internet, mobile phones, and social media have changed the world over the past 20 or so years. I mean, don't spend all your time thinking about it, but at least consider it with a seriousness that doesn't resort to those cliches.
The FUD is little more, and in many cases is, one liners that play on insecurity.
There is no case to justify an assumption as true.
How would you judge the impact of 'technology' over the past 20 years? The 20 years before that were pretty revolutionary too, and so were the 20 years prior to that.. and... the 20 years prior... and... Bias comes from the life one's lived.
How to measure the impact, then? Life expectancy? Education? Gender equality? Access to clean air and water? A safe house that the majority of people can afford doing a job they don't hate? All these things that go into Human Development? Of which HDI [1] is but one, of which some have had progress in some countries. But fear mongering, playing on insecurities, that gets investor money for the hope some fraction of wealth can be accumulated by peddlers of such insecurity. You are a useful distraction.
>How would you judge the impact of 'technology' over the past 20 years? The 20 years before that were pretty revolutionary too...
Yes and I never said they weren't. We are living at the tail end of many revolutions whose timeframes shorten with each one. Five years ago people would call it sci-fi if you could say you could ask a computer to create a photo-realistic video of a person singing an original song from a text prompt, now it's just one of many new releases each month. Is every AI release strictly practical? No, but it's impossible to deny the real impacts many releases have had, including Alphafold.
>But fear mongering, playing on insecurities, that gets investor money for the hope some fraction of wealth can be accumulated by peddlers of such insecurity. You are a useful distraction.
Are you claiming that AI startups and companies diving headfirst into AI products and R&D are just fearmongering for investor money? Strange to say because most of these companies (google, meta, Openai, etc) don't speak much about the risks of AI, but rather the upside of empowering people. Most FUD comes from their detractors who claim that AGI will lead to human disempowerment, but if that were an attractive narrative for the aforementioned companies to peddle for economic gain, how come they all are distancing themselves from that claim?
