Discussion about this post

User's avatar
MB's avatar

Zvi, you are missing a lot of context regarding the Belgian 'toxicity score's thing. Dries Van Langenhove is not some random dude, he's a far-right politician and the founder of the far-right student movement 'Shield & Friends', and has been under investigation for hate speech since 2018-2019 after an investigative journalist managed to infiltrate his movement and leaked some of the content of their private group chats, which contained a lot of rather extreme racist and antisemitic memes, and that triggered the 'targeted' investigation he is complaining about now. It is not at all established practice to use AI to determine whether something is hate speech or not, I assume they just resorted to using AI here because of the sheer size of the 'shitposting' group. There is no such thing as a Belgian 'toxicity score', that is pure hyperbole. If you're wondering why his tweet has 1M views and no community notes, that's simply because he's a rather well-known far-right figure in Belgium, so he has a lot of far-right followers.

Expand full comment
tup99's avatar

"‘This sounds like science fiction’ is a sign something is plausible"

I couldn't disagree less.

Actually, there are two separate questions, when a thing "sounds like science fiction": (1) is likely to be true? (2) is it likely to be believed by the public?

The above statement is wrong with respect to #1, but I'd rather talk about #2, which is the more important one. When trying to convince the general public of something, if it "sounds like science fiction", the public won't believe it – regardless of whether it's true.

When someone says "this sounds like science fiction," what they are *really* saying is "this sounds outlandishly implausible." They will dismiss the thing, and they will dismiss you too. You will lose credibility in their eyes. And again, the thing being actually true or false is irrelevant.

If you're trying to convince the public that AI should be regulated, then it's extremely anti-helpful to talk about being turned into goo, or Dyson spheres, or transhumanism. Those things sound crazy (and/or thousands of years away) to the general public.

You could try going down the route of *educating* the general public that these things are actually realistic and proximate, but that would be trying to boil the ocean. Instead you will need to talk about AGI in ways that the public can accept, if you want to actually have an effect on the world. Otherwise, it's all just talk.

Expand full comment
17 more comments...

No posts