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> while making one long argument from ignorance

Ignorance of what? You're saying his argument is lazy and ignorant, but you're not backing that up.

I think he is willfully refusing to "imagine potential problems" - because a core point of the article is that people are "imagining magic", which isn't really an argument, but more of a way of whipping people into an emotional frenzy (all jobs will be taken by robots, dystopian futures, etc)




I'm referring to a specific fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_ignorance, that appeals to our ignorance. Effectively, 'We don't know what the future holds, so we don't need to worry', 'We don't know if superhuman intelligence is even possible, so we don't need to worry', 'We don't know if your prediction will happen, so lets go with mine'.


His argument is that people predicting future superhuman intelligence are failing to imagine what sort of limitations future AI might have. Every technology we've invented has very real limitations. A smart phone would have astounded Newton, but it still doesn't transmute lead into gold. And smart phones exist within a web of similar technologies, which future AI will also exist in.

Brooks is challenging the notion of superhuman AI eating the world without anything limiting it.


That’s an oversimplification of his argument. I interpreted it as him saying that positing a future, superhuman, malevolent, intelligent agent, that we should tremble in fear of, provides no useful line of reasoning that we could pursue to take prudent action to mitigate potential problems.

His obvervation is that the future road to superhuman intelligence will be paved with events, not known to us now, that will provide us with experience to handle the emergence of the malevolent AI.m

This shows that the author is not suggesting that since we can’t foresee the future, we simply should hide our head in the sand, plug our ears, la la la.

On the contrary, he is implying that our normal human tactics of being concerned with the future are more robust than we might fear, and will continue to serve us into the unknown future.




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