Hacker News Reader

Comment by dekhn | Hacker News Reader

There's a scene in the movie "War of the Worlds" by Spielberg where the protagonist's son walks into a war zone because he is entranced by the battle (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X7rfWPbEufo). He is obliterated (along with the rest of the US forces) shortly after.

I've always been struck by that scene, because in a lot of ways, if we really are headed towards a superintelligence, I at least want to be there and see it happen in the last few minutes before foom! As an example, the author thinks AI will revolutionize entire fields overnight. I welcome that. Nearly all fields of biology have become moribund, focusing more and more on esoteric side details, rather than addressing the key problems.

View on HN

It might not be "foom!", it might just be like...all the computers and networking infra in the world go dark over the course of a few minutes. Could really look like anything, part of the issue is that we haven't the slightest idea what "misalignment" looks like for a superintelligent system.

Not refuting your overall point, but the son wasn’t killed. They reunite at the end of the movie.

Oh, I'm pretending that's not canon because it doesn't make any sense and it undermines the original scene.

I think the idea is really cathartic for many, there kind of is no more supreme resolution than this. You(and humanity) are freed from our flesh prisons of cognition and also get to experience/feel what the next evolution of informational intelligence will look like in the last experiences of it. You might also be the last one to feel/experience anything like that for a long time.

In the game Outer Wilds, the ending is very similar, and a lot of people rank it at one of the best games ever made. I kind of believe that this outcome is probable partially because of this, most scientists working on this really want to see and experience it.

> most scientists working on this really want to see and experience it.

We used to call these people doomsday cultists and made sure to ostracize them from society.

You can't address the key problems without understanding of the esoteric side details to be fair. You are studying what is basically the worlds most complicated and undocumented computer.

Actually, I work in biology, which is a far more complicated and undocumented computer than any existing AI model. And we've already seen the failure models (COVID is an example).

> He is obliterated

Technically, he is not. He returns in the final scene.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com