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Shtetl-Optimized » Blog Archive » Why am I not terrified of AI?

scottaaronson.blog · 32,148 words · saved by 1 readers

Every week now, it seems, events on the ground make a fresh mockery of those who confidently assert what AI will never be able to do, or won’t do for centuries if ever, or is incoherent even to ask for, or wouldn’t matter even if an AI did appear to do it, or would require a breakthrough in “symbol-grounding,” “semantics,” “compositionality” or some other abstraction that puts the end of human intellectual dominance on earth conveniently far beyond where we’d actually have to worry about it. Many of my brilliant academic colleagues still haven’t adjusted to the new reality: maybe they’re just so conditioned by the broken promises of previous decades that they’d laugh at the Silicon Valley nerds with their febrile Skynet fantasies even as a T-1000 reconstituted itself from metal droplets in front of them. No doubt these colleagues feel the same deep frustration that I feel, as I explain for the billionth time why this week’s headline about noisy quantum computers solving traffic flow an

Shtetl-Optimized >> Blog Archive >> Why am I not terrified of AI? Shtetl-Optimized The Blog of Scott Aaronson If you take nothing else from this blog: quantum computers won't solve hard problems instantly by just trying all solutions in parallel. Also, please read Zvi Mowshowitz's masterpiece on how to fix K-12 education! --> << Should GPT exist? The False Promise of Chomskyism >> Why am I not terrified of AI? Every week now, it seems, events on the ground make a fresh mockery of those who confidently assert what AI will never be able to do, or won&#8217;t do for centuries if ever, or is incoh

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