in the least surprising twist of 2023, the ~~extremely mid philosopher~~ visionary AI researcher Douglas Hofstadter has started to voice concerns about chatbots taking over the world
orange site has some takes:
Again, I repeat everyone that is loling at x-risk an idiot and that includes many high profile people with huge egos and counter culture biases. (Hello @pmarca). There is a big movement to call ai doomers many names and generally make fun and dismiss the risk. It is exactly like people laughing at nuclear risks saying its not possible or not a thing even when Einstein and Oppenheimer were warning us. If you belong in this group is up to you.
to quote Major General Thomas Farrell during the Trinity test, “lol. lmao”
gwern in the LW comments:
That is, whatever the snarky "don't worry, it can't happen" tone of his public writings about DL has been since ~2010, Hofstadter has been saying these things in private for at least a decade*, starting somewhere around Deep Blue which clearly falsified a major prediction of his, and his worries about the scaling paradigm intensifying ever since; what has happened is that only one of two paradigms can be true, and Hofstadter has finally flipped to the other paradigm. Mitchell, however, has heard all of this firsthand long before this podcast and appears to be completely immune to Hofstadter's concerns (publicly), so I wouldn't expect it to change her mind.
- I wonder what other experts & elites have different views on AI than their public statements would lead you to believe?
this is notable as the exact same fucking argument the last flat earther I talked to used, with the words “the firmament” replaced with AI