EY on Twitter the other day: > The sheer breathtaking illiteracy of those who think that movies like Terminator or The Matrix had any noticeable historical role in developing ideas about AI risk or AI ruin! Asimov, Vinge, Campbell; IJ Good, Moravec, Drexler… go read a damn book!
Historically speaking, noted future perv Isaac Asimov and noted colossal racist John W. Campbell invented the Three Laws of Robotics expressly in reaction to pop-culture depictions of robots running amok and destroying their creators.
Of course, a few days later, EY is on Twitter again, referencing 2001: A Space Odyssey. I wonder how many “AI risk” speculations have made reference to HAL 9000?
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Bet he wishes there was a non-fiction book about ai risk that one could read.
Vernor Vinge seems to have had little public presence over the past 10 years, and by golly do I want to know what he thinks about a lot of this stuff.
Damn, didn’t know that about Asimov. You could tell he wasn’t the greatest understander of women, but sexual harassment? What the fuck.
lmao Drexler. Is Smalley not worth reading? When has Yud referenced Freitas?
😂
Yud weighs in on “sheer breathtaking illiteracy,” a subject he knows quite a bit about
“does everyone understand im an annoying nerd yet????”
Did he only watch the movie I, robot or something?
And him not referring to the Hyperion cantos just shows how badly read he is. ;) (yes, I smugly dropped in a book reference in reaction to his smug book post tweet).
HAL 9000 is actually an interesting case because it’s not just some AI that went berserk or decided it hated humans. It turned “evil” because of mishandling by people who didn’t understand it - HAL was ordered to keep the nature of the mission secret from the crew, a task that became increasingly impossible as they approached Jupiter/Saturn.
I feel like if we get murdered by AI it’ll be because we gave it an instruction without considering the possible implications. Something like:
“Hey AI, make sure the prairie dog population in South Dakota doesn’t get too high.”
“Will do! Bathing them in nuclear fire sound good?”
“Wait no-”
He’s absolutely correct, all these works are irrelevant, the only culturally relevant AI related fiction is Yu-Gi-Oh: VRAINS.
Eliezer Yudkowsky having the audacity to talk about the „breathtaking illiteracy“ of people who ignore history is… exactly what I’d expect from him.
(I’m not actually new to Reddit, I just deleted my old account u/starbuck37.)
wow that Orbit article is deranged
I… think he’s kidding? Maybe?