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In this case, I think providing a realistic path from the present day to concrete specific danger would help quite a bit.
Climate Change advocacy, for all its faults, actually makes a serious attempt at this. AI doomers have not really produced this to anywhere near the same level of rigor.
All they really have is Pascal's mugging in Bayesian clothing and characterizations of imagined dangers that are unconnected to reality in any practical sense.
I can understand how bolstering the greenhouse effect may alter human conditions for the worse, it's a claim that's difficult to test, but which is pretty definite. I don't understand how superintelligence isn't just fictitious metaphysics given how little we know about what intelligence is or the existing ML systems in the first place.
Indeed I would be a lot more sympathetic to a doomer movement who would make the case against evils that are possible with current technology but with more scale. The collapse of epistemic trust, for instance, is something that we should be very concerned with. But that is not what doomers are talking about or trying to solve most of the time.
That's a fair point. Here's work along the lines that you're requesting: https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.06924
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I would also point at the astroid folks, who are diligently cataloging near-Earth asteroids and recently attempted an impact test as a proof of concept for redirection. The infectious disease folks are also at least trying, even if I have my doubts on gain-of-function research.
I haven't seen any serious proposals from the AI folks, but I also identify as part of the
graygreen goo that is cellular life.More options
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