One can simultaneously believe AGI is possible, be only modestly sceptical that our current methods are likely to yield it in the near term and still find the religious ferocity enveloping its discussion silly.
> saying that the human brain cognitive capabilities cannot be reproduced on other types of substrates is stupid at this point
Straw man. Nobody argued this. The discussion is around how urgent it is to policy treat a future hypothetical.
Not that I'm complaining. Cynicism is the failure mode I rely on HN for. It's the populism that's been getting to me.
Fair enough. I didn’t see anything novel in the article. So treating it as a motif within the abovequoted “Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People” context is fair and a real argument.
> Cynicism
Cynicism isn’t the opposite of blind optimism. Nihilism is. I’m not seeing a rejection of the article as being baseless as cynical or nihilist. It’s just pointing out a cultural thread that doesn’t seem to be useful.
Cynicism is defined as
>An attitude of scornful or jaded negativity, especially a general distrust of the integrity or professed motives of others.
I'm not saying that cynicism is automatically wrong, just that I once could trust that, when HN is wrong, it is due to cynicism applied in excess.
---Diogenes (L) on Diogenes, arch-Cynic, VI.2.71
Afaik not formalised in Lean4, but sounds like optimism
Most of D's other stuff imho is optimism taken to its clear-eyed extreme. ya know. the way a very best version of us could always unironically RELY on HN [,after much practice]
>so those whose training has been of the opposite kind derive more pleasure from despising pleasure than from the pleasures themselves.
Might be why professional Nihilists admire Cynics (ie, for their ... unaffected comedy)
https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Diogenes_...
We don’t know. Which makes proposing rules around it based on fiction more than science silly.
Perhaps Anthropic will create God in the Machine. Not foreclosing on that. But will it matter so much who was fucking around with Opus five e-folding times ago?
Either ClauDeus is benevolent and lifts you up (not left behind) or it isn’t, or not to you, and you are culled by a drone (left behind regardless).
Serenity Prayer time.