Cold Takes

>legitimate, practical field

It's a mistake to conflate practicality with legitimacy, e.g. philosophy and pure mathematics are legitimate but impractical fields.

>None of the arguments you've made so far actually touch in any relevant facts, they're just vague arguments from authority.

I've been countering your arguments which sound vaguely authoritative (but don't actually cite any authorities) with some actual authorities.

I also provided a few links with object-level discussion, e.g. this literature review https://arxiv.org/pdf/1805.01109.pdf

There are many AI risk intros -- here is a list: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/T98kdFL5bxBWSiE3N/best-introductory-overviews-of-agi-safety

I think this is the intro that's most likely to persuade you: https://www.cold-takes.com/most-important-century/

>But this stuff is no different than worrying about an alien invasion.

Why aren't you worried about an alien invasion? Is it because it's something out of science fiction, and science fiction is always wrong? Or do you have specific reasons not worry, because you've made an attempt to estimate the risks?

Suppose a science fiction author, who's purely focused on entertainment, invents a particular vision of what the future could be like. We can't therefore conclude that the future will be unlike that particular vision. That would be absurd. See https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qNZM3EGoE5ZeMdCRt/reversed-stupidity-is-not-intelligence

Our current world is wild relative to…

I think you are significantly misrepresenting what the author said. He didn't say he has no idea what control variables are. What he said is:

> The "controlling for" thing relies on a lot of subtle assumptions and can break in all kinds of weird ways. Here's[1] a technical explanation of some of the pitfalls; here's[2] a set of deconstructions of regressions that break in weird ways.

[1] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0152719

[2] https://www.cold-takes.com/phil-birnbaums-regression-analysis/

To me this seems to demonstrate a stronger understanding of regression analysis than 90+% of scientists who use the technique.

Hmmm I have my doubts about that, sounds like Cathie Wood talk. How will AI increase GDP? Seems like it could reduce GDP just as easily by putting all the writers, artists, coders, out of a job. This estimate is much more modest for AI increases by 2030.

https://www.pwc.com/gx/en/issues/data-and-analytics/publications/artificial-intelligence-study.html

>The greatest economic gains from AI will be in China (26% boost to GDP in 2030) and North America (14.5% boost)

I think of this article when I hear about decades of incredible growth on top of the already many decades of incredible growth.

https://www.cold-takes.com/this-cant-go-on/

Holden Karnofsky, the CEO of Open Philanthropy, has a blog called 'Cold Takes' where he explores a lot of these ideas. Specifically there's one post called 'Digital People Would Be An Even Bigger Deal' that talks about how this could be either very good or very bad: https://www.cold-takes.com/how-digital-people-could-change-the-world/

The short story obviously takes the very bad angle. But there's a lot of reason to believe it could be very good instead as long as we protected basic human rights for digital people from the very onset -- but doing that is critical.