Opinionhaver

I wouldn’t say that staying calm makes you smarter - rather, getting caught up in emotions makes you dumber. When you’re calm, you have access to your highest reasoning abilities, whereas when you’re emotionally charged, those capabilities are diminished. That’s one of the main reasons I spend so much time criticizing reactivity and hostility online, even when it’s directed at causes I also oppose. It doesn’t matter whether the anger is justified or not - you quite literally can’t think straight when you’re angry. And we need you all to think straight.

There’s no such thing as “actual AI.” AI is just a broad term that encompasses all artificial intelligence systems. A chess engine, ChatGPT, and HAL 9000 are all examples of AI - despite being fundamentally different. A chess engine is a narrow AI, ChatGPT is a large language model, and HAL 9000 would qualify as AGI.

It could be argued that AGI is inevitable - assuming general intelligence isn’t substrate-dependent (meaning it doesn’t require a biological brain) and that we don’t destroy ourselves before we get there. But the truth is, nobody knows how difficult it is to create AGI, or whether we’re anywhere close. There’s a lot of hype around generative AI right now because it remotely resembles what AGI might look like - but that doesn’t guarantee it’s taking us any closer. It could be a stepping stone - or a total dead end.

So what I hear you asking is: “Can’t we just use task-specific narrow AI instead of creating AGI?” And yes, we could - but we’re never going to stop improving these systems. And every step of progress brings us closer to AGI, whether that’s the goal or not. The only things that might stop us are hitting a fundamental wall (like substrate dependence) or wiping ourselves out.

There’s also the economic incentive. AGI would be the ultimate wealth generator. All the incentives point toward building it. It’s a winner-takes-all scenario: if you're the first to create a true AGI, your competition will likely never catch up - because from that point on, the AGI can improve itself. And then the improved version can further improve itself, and so on. That’s how you get to the singularity: an intelligence explosion that leads to Artificial Superintelligence (ASI) - a level of intelligence far beyond human comprehension.

Whether it be AI apocalypse or utopia, it's not LLM's that people think will take us there. It's AGI/ASI and nobody knows how long it'll take us to develop a system like that. Could take 2 years or it could take 50.

I think it's a false assumption that these people wouldn't be paying anyway. That's just a narrative spread as a fact. It's undeniable that film/game studios are losing money due to piracy. Some number of the people who pirate would be paying for it if piracy wasn't an option.

That's not what I asked.

Well, let’s use my photography as an example then. Do you think it’s perfectly okay if someone buys prints from me, sets up an art show displaying my pictures, and charges people money to see it - without my permission or offering me any compensation?

You're moving the goalposts. The claim was that people are going to jail for "thinking they own a product they paid for." Your example has nothing to do with that.

For selling hacking tools - not for modifying their personal device.

So your issue isn’t that you don’t actually own the DVDs you paid for, but rather that you’re not allowed to run an unlicensed cinema.

Pirated movies are not something you've paid for. And watching DVDs with friends is not "illegal exhibition."

What? Whose gone to jail for thinking that they own a product they've bought?

Sure, but the fact that fear of punishment doesn't deter everyone, doesn't mean it doesn't deter anyone. Good example from my own life would be speeding; the fear of losing my license is the main reason I don't do it.