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Nobody argued anything. GP just dismissed it as religion without engaging with a word of the material. Parent is taking a stab at why.

Not that I'm complaining. Cynicism is the failure mode I rely on HN for. It's the populism that's been getting to me.

by JumpCrisscross7 hours ago|

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> GP just dismissed it as religion without engaging with a word of the material

Fair enough. I didn’t see anything novel in the article. So treating it as a motif within the abovequoted “Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People” context is fair and a real argument.

> Cynicism

Cynicism isn’t the opposite of blind optimism. Nihilism is. I’m not seeing a rejection of the article as being baseless as cynical or nihilist. It’s just pointing out a cultural thread that doesn’t seem to be useful.

by ToValueFunfetti7 hours ago|

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I hate to get bogged down in semantics, but with the hope that one of the stronger top-level critiques makes it into the top slot here and this conversation gets buried:

Cynicism is defined as

>An attitude of scornful or jaded negativity, especially a general distrust of the integrity or professed motives of others.

I'm not saying that cynicism is automatically wrong, just that I once could trust that, when HN is wrong, it is due to cynicism applied in excess.

by threetonesun6 hours ago|

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I put it in the same bucket as living on Mars. Can it be done? Probably. Are we close? Not as close as people seem to want to believe. Is it a goal that will largely benefit society in its current form? Absolutely not.

by JumpCrisscross6 hours ago|

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Eh, with Martian habitation we know what the roadmap looks like. With AGI we don’t. It could be proximate. Or it might not be. When it arrives, it could be totally economically uncompetitive outside the rich world. Or it could replace all human labour. Or progress to become a superintelligence.

We don’t know. Which makes proposing rules around it based on fiction more than science silly.

by neutronicus5 hours ago|

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In particular, I just don’t buy into the “left behind unless” framework.

Perhaps Anthropic will create God in the Machine. Not foreclosing on that. But will it matter so much who was fucking around with Opus five e-folding times ago?

Either ClauDeus is benevolent and lifts you up (not left behind) or it isn’t, or not to you, and you are culled by a drone (left behind regardless).

Serenity Prayer time.