The AI-collapse pre-mortem

berthub.eu

22 points·Bogdanp··3 comments

It's interesting to call this a pre-mortem as it seems mainly organized around thinking positively past the imperfections of the technology. It's like a pre-mortem for the housing crisis that focuses on the benefits of subprime mortgage lending.

What I'd expect to see is an analysis of how to address or prevent the same situation as previous bubbles: that society has allocated resources to a specific investment that are far in excess of what that investment can fundamentally be expected to return. How can we avoid thinking sloppily about this technology, or getting taken in by hucksters' just-so stories of its future impact? How can we successfully identify use-cases where revenues exceed investment? When the next exciting tech comes around, how can we harness it well as a society without succumbing to irrational exuberance?

I don't know if you could have an independent government institution to help regulate booms and busts like the Fed does with the money supply? I'm not sure what you'd do with AI but there are fairly obvious things that could have been done with housing like restrict lending on the upside and spend on infrastructure in the bust.

Elected politicians have perverse incentives to let bubbles run so they can claim it's their policies providing never ending growth.

The guy seems quite moderate really, that AI progress will continue even if/when a financial bubble collapses.

I disagree with taking the Chinese Room Argument seriously as any guide as to whether computers can/will think/understand. It's always seemed a bit silly beyond being a philosophical discussion idea.

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