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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   31769 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 28, 2025

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You write like you're an AI bull, but your actual case seems bearish (at least compared to the AI 2027 or the Situational Awareness crowd).

I was responding to a particularly bearish comment and didn't need to prove anything so speculative. If someone thinks current level ai is cool but useless I don't need to prove that it's going to hit agi in 2027 to show that they don't have an accurate view of things.

I think this is true too, in a decade. The white-collar job market will look quite different and the way we interact with software will be meaningfully different, but like the internet and the smartphone I think the world will still look recognizably similar. I don't think we'll be sipping cocktails on our own personal planet or all dead from unaligned super intelligence any time soon.

well yes, that world is predicated on what I think is a very unlikely complete halt in progress.

You write like you're an AI bull, but your actual case seems bearish (at least compared to the AI 2027 or the Situational Awareness crowd).

I was responding to a particularly bearish comment and didn't need to prove anything so speculative. If someone thinks current level ai is cool but useless I don't need to prove that it's going to hit agi in 2027 to show that they don't have an accurate view of things.

I think this gets at a central way in which I've been unclear/made multiple points.

First, some things that I think, but are not my key point:

  1. Reasonably plausible (>25%): AI will be used commonly in sober business workflows within a few years.
  2. Not very likely, but still a reasonable thing to discuss (5%): this this will take jobs away en masse within a decade, or similarly restructure the economy.

Why not likely: spreadsheets sure didn't. It might take away a smallish number, but technology adoption has always been so slow.

Why reasonable to discuss: this is fundamentally about existing AI tech and sclerotic incentive structures in the corporate world, both of which we know enough about today to meaningfully discuss.

And finally, my key point in this discussion:

3. Baseless science-fiction optimism: extrapolating well past "current tech, well-integrated into workflows" is baseless, "line super-exponential goes up," science-fiction optimism. Possible? I guess, but not even well-founded enough to have meaningful discussion about. Any argument has to boil down to vibes, to how much you believe the increasing benchmarks are meaningful and will continue. E.g., if we throw 50% of GDP at testing the scaling hypothesis, whether it works or not, all we will be able to say (at least for a while, potentially forever) is: huh, interesting, I wonder why.

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