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If Anyone Builds IT, Everyone Dies

5 points by daly ↗ HN
They make excellent points, such as the damage possible if AI can spend money.

Oh, by the way, Google is building a system to allow AI to spend money.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8s6nGMcyr7k

Read it. Weep. I'm not sure if the authors have met humanity.

https://www.amazon.com/Anyone-Builds-Everyone-Dies-Superhuman/dp/0316595640

4 comments

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bell-cot
"If Anyone Build IT..." is a cool-sounding trope. Which pushes lots of human emotional buttons. Making that trope a great thing to push, if you goal is to get ahead in our attention economy.

From my PoV, our "shortish-term profits are the ONLY metric that matters" global techno-capitalist system is vastly more dangerous than AI.

hollerith
>if you goal is to get ahead in our attention economy.

If a person wants a reputation as smart and able to make accurate predictions, why would he focus most of his public statments on a prediction that if he is right, no one will find out definitively that he was right because everyone will be dead?

codevark
I thought it said "If anyone builds IT, everyone dies". Maybe I take my job too seriously.
falcor84
I wouldn't be surprised if Yudkowsky would agree that the initial creation of "Information Technology" was an almost direct stepping stone (in evolutionary terms) on the path to AI, which in turn (he argues and I agree) will lead us towards superintelligence. I suppose that Kurzweil might take this even further, arguing that the path was set as soon as an early hominin picked up a stick and intentionally drew an arrow towards berry bushes in the ground.