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...Fine, I'll bite. How much of this impression of Sam is uncharitable doomer dressing around something more mundane like "does not believe AI = extinction and thus has no reason to care", or even just same old "disregard ethics, acquire profit"?
I have no love for Altman (something I have to state awfully often as of late) but the chosen framing strikes me as highly overdramatic, besides giving him more competence/credit than he deserves. As a sanity check, how -pilled would you say that friend of yours is in general on the AI question? How many years before inevitable extinction are we talking here?
You are making an "argument from incredulity", i.e. the beliefs of Sam Altman are so crazy that they can’t be real. I don't think this is the case. Many powerful people in Silicon Valley have beliefs that are far outside the Overton Window.
Say what you will about Elon Musk, he is at least pro-human. This is not at all the case for many of his peers. For example, Larry Page and Elon Musk broke up as friends over Musk's "speciesist" belief that humanity should remain dominant over god-like AI's.
The idea that Sam Altman would literally want to destroy humanity to birth in a superior AI life form might sound ridiculous to you. But you don't know these people.
There's a good chance (not 100%, but not 0% either) that we're going to build superintelligence while the "adults in the room" argue about GDP numbers or whatever. If this happens it could make some people (perhaps a single person) more powerful than anyone in history. Do you want Sam Altman to be that person? Because I sure as hell don't.
Since this is a gossip thread...
I have a couple friends who genuinely want the extinction of the human race. Not in a mass murder sense as they conceptualize it, but in a create a successor species, give a good life to the remaining humans, maybe offer them the chance for brain uploads, sense. Details and red lines vary between them, but they'd broadly agree that this is a fair characterization of their goals and desires.
Where do they work? OAI, Anthropic, GDM.
I have a fair amount of sympathy for their viewpoints, but it's still genuinely shocking. It's as if you suddenly found out that every government official was secretly a Hare Krishna or part of the People's Temple, and then when you point it out, everyone thinks the accusation is too absurd to be real.
In their defense: why do we care so much about the survival of homo sapiens qua sapiens? We're different from how we were 50,000 years ago, and we'll be more different still in 5,000, and maybe even 500. So what? So long as we have continuity of culture and memory, does it matter if we engineer ourselves into immortal cyborgs or whatever is coming? What's so special about the biped mammal vessel for a mind?
Not gonna make an argument here because I don't think there would be a point, but I'll mention that you're doing a great job demonstrating my concerns about atheists.
Well, leaving it at that would be a cheap shot, so,
I don't think I'm my mind any more than I'm my body. Which is to say, yes to both, but there's more going on than that. Also, human beings are uniquely divine, and God is a man in heaven. Human existence and experience are uniquely important, and uniquely destined.
Believe it or not I'm open to the idea that at some point 'we' make the transition to non-organic substrates. I just don't know enough about what actually matters to rule that out. But when people are eager to make the jump to artificial bodies and minds (not that you actually advocated for this), they strike me as dangerously naive in terms of their assumptions.
How sure are you that what we are can be digitized? What, specifically, is valuable to you, and worthy of cultivation? In symbolic terms, which gods do you actually serve?
So you're arguing for qualia and souls, yes? I believe I am my mind, that the mind is computation, and that its computational substrate is irrelevant. I'm honestly baffled by people who hold otherwise --- I want to be charitable, but I'm having a hard time seeing past opposition being ultimately a product of personal incredulity regarding our conscious experience being a worldly, temporal information processing phenomenon.
Our minds are worldly, temporal information processing phenomena, yes. At least mostly, as we experience them. No disagreement there. The question is whether, if and when our minds die, there is anything of us left. I think so.
We have no idea what consciousness is, how it happens, or even why it should ever arise in the first place. Until that's sorted there's a ton of room for other perspectives. Soul of the gaps, sure. That accusation wouldn't trouble me.
Perhaps I could say that I think our minds are so loud in our conscious experience that we fall into the mistaken assumption that everything occurring in our consciousness is our minds. The only way to find out is to die. In the meantime I'm not in a rush to create perfect, immortal copies of my mind which have no internal conscious experience, let the last bio-humans die off, and call it a day.
But I want to repeat the question:
Your position is fundamentally religious, isn't it? We feel that existing, thinking, being are so profound that they must continue after death. But what if they aren't? I've never seen evidence that they are. If you'd like to adopt a religiously flavored epistemology, that's fine, but having done so, you've departed from the realm of logical argumentation.
Regarding the realm of logical argumentation, what's your view on Determinism and the free-will problem?
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