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Comment by pibaker | Hacker News Reader

When I learned that this website is by the same people who gave us AI 2027, I immediately thought about the Wikipedia page on doomsday predictions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dates_predicted_for_ap...

Notice the many times when a prediction failed and the so called prophet would come back in a few years and give you a new date. And they would tell you, well, this time it's real.

I do find it ironic that many of the AI predictions are coming from the self titled "rationalists." It seems like building your identity around being rational and immune to psychological pitfalls is a good way to ensure that you don't even notice that you have walked straight into the one psychological trap every cult has employed since time immemorial.

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> When I learned that this website is by the same people who gave us AI 2027, I immediately thought about the Wikipedia page on doomsday predictions.

Then, you opened the page and read it and realized that this prediction was contingent? You know what a conditional is (I would assume) if this, than that?

Then you realized that the only reason you were posting this comment was as a sort of silly gotcha "Oh look at the guys who keep increasing the number" instead of talking about the differences between the scenarios?

Then what happened?

They gave a ~2 year timeframe for their predictions in this one (tied to the next presidential election), so in 2 years when none of this has happened will they then switch over to a new AI 2044 Plan? Where's the accountability? Where's the followup or retrospective? What if there was some mechanism that branded these people so that when they made claims in the future people could clearly see the authors labeled as "made completely wrong fantastical claims in the past"?

"Doomsday predictions have occurred since time immemorial. Ergo, the Cuban Missile Crisis is nothing to worry about."

You actually have to look at the substance of the prediction. Sorry.

Like all forms of eschatology it's not actually concerned with the future to come--it's real aim is to have influence now.

It's just a form of rhetoric.

To dismiss them, saying, "ah ha! they're making the same error as all failed prophets!" misses the point.

What they are really talking about is AI governance.

... and then there are the actual planet-threatening astronomical events that humanity should think about ways to mitigate but I'm worried that human lifespans and capitalism prevent us from working towards mitigations. Everyone will just say "meh, 1 million years is a long time, I won't be around" and a million years will go by.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future

Capitalism, in particular NASA's commercial space development program, have already provided and demonstrated initial asteroid redirect capability via the DART mission launched by SpaceX, which impacted an asteroid and measured the changes to its trajectory.

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