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Comment by meh8881 | Hacker News Reader

If you want an authoritative opinion on the societal impact of something I would want the opinion of someone who studies the societal impact of things.

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So that seems to me like someone like Stuart Russel or Nick Bostrom? But what Geoff Hinton is saying seems to be vaguely in general agreement with what those people are saying.

I’m not arguing Hinton is wrong. I’m arguing that Hinton doesn’t really matter here. The “godfather of AI” doesn’t make him particularly prescient.

His opinion obviously does matter because he is a founder of the field. No one believes that he is prescient. You are exaggerating and creating a strawman argument, infantilizing the readers here. We don't worship him or outsource our thinking.

You seem to be taking my usage of the word prescient as meaning he can either see the future perfectly or he cannot. That’s… not what it conventionally means. I simply mean his track record of predicting the future trajectory of AI is not great.

Well he bet on neural networks in the early days when it was unpopular, and that turned out to be the right trajectory.

He received a Turing Award for his work that was foundational to the current state of the art.

Your argument sounds like (and correct me if I'm wrong) something along the lines of "he chose to do X, and afterwards X was the correct choice, so he must be good at choosing correctly."

Isn't that ad hoc ergo propter hoc?

That argument would also support the statement "he went all in with 2-7 preflop, and won the hand, so he must be good at poker" -- I assume you and I would both agree that statement is not true. So why does it apply in Geoffrey's case?

It was a straightforward response to "I simply mean his track record of predicting the future trajectory of AI is not great."

I still don't follow. In your example, how would you differentiate between that choice of his being lucky vs. prescient? Or was the intent to just provide a single datapoint of him appearing to make a correct choice?

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