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I'm not making assumption 6, that's the whole crux of the issue. Concerns about the specific nature of the intelligence are the whole point in question.
1-5 are trivial.
With 7 you're bringing in 'short term'. Scott is specifically saying 'not right now' and neither am I. Scott wrote about Plan A where he explicitly asks for 15 or so years to make sure it's done right, not racing ahead. His big thing is 'let's not do it just yet, it is coming soon but we are not properly preparing or implementing it so let's slow down and do it right'. The alternative to 'we need more time to prepare' is 'never do it', which is what he is criticizing as unacceptable.
Realistically, people are not going to wait two hundred years, or five hundred years, or any 'safely beyond any need to care about it' distance of time to reap immense gains in wealth and power. This isn't wise but it's happening anyway. Non-LLM AI doesn't really work for general tasks, only LLMs have shown generality or long-horizon capabilities.
Well, you may not care for technical capacity. In some abstract sense, the Zulu empire and the British empire were equal peers. But in all real and significant senses, obviously the British were better and greater and the Maxim Gun settled the question.
The Tower of Babel is not a real thing and I don't see any need to care about it. Tolkien also writes about unreal things, things that could not be real, do not hold to principles we actually observe in the world. His genre is fantasy.
Science fiction actually relates to reality in a certain sense, that's the key distinction here. Things start off in sci-fi (like the atomic bomb) and have been made real, often by creators inspired by the fiction. You can't criticize sci-fi by appealing to fantasy, Jewish or otherwise.
I don't actually think 1-5 are all obvious, but my point is that you responded to my criticism of my Scott with points that are in the 1-5 area.
Do I think that people are actually going to stop making LLMs? No, I don't. If I had to bet, I'm in the camp that sees LLMs as a 'normal technology'. I think they will exist, more use will be made of them, and that the uses found will be moderate and not that interesting. I think both the doomers and the singularitans will be disappointed.
The point that I made that you took issue with was that it is ludicrous to say that if we don't make LLM-based 'AI', we're '[consigned] to a permanent civilisational childhood or an early grave'. That is absurd. If we don't pursue that technology, we're not even locking ourselves out of artificial intelligence, much less locking ourselves out of civilisational maturity.
The Babel example was meant to be evocative, not an argument as such. You're an atheist, fine, whatever. Scott made a comparison from Judaism so I felt it was within-bounds to reply with another comparison from Judaism.
Fifteen years is short term.
This is one of the weird things about the debate to me - the absurdly short timelines everybody seems to be approaching it with. From my perspective, Scott and the 'AI pause' people are basically one subgroup of accelerationist AI-enthusiast arguing with another subgroup of accelerationists. Five, ten, fifteen years, that's all still the short term. That is the immediate future. Medium-term for me means 'within the next hundred years or so', i.e. within the lifetimes of people alive today, and long-term means after that.
I think there is a very good argument to the effect that 'civilisational maturity', if it is a meaningful measure, refers to more than sheer destructive power.
Can you give some examples where the "more" would diverge meaningfully from the "sheer destructive power"? What's an example of a "mature civilization" with minimal destructive potential? The Amish?
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