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Rob Cobb's avatar

How is your relationship with those characters? If there’s no backchannel between you and Tyler, seems worthwhile to find or make one. It seems hard to have all discussions in public.

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Freddie deBoer's avatar

But even this meta-argument seems to leave little space for the most sensible argument: human beings have a truly terrible track record when it comes to futurism, our ability to forecast even largely mechanical future events is extremely limited, and history is the story of things that didn't happen as much as it is the story of things that did. And right now the AI debate is dependent on forecasting of unfathomably complex future events with comical confidence by almost everyone involved. I find it absolutely mystifying; "tomorrow will be very much like yesterday" remains the best bet in all of human prognostication.

I can't be the first to point out that AI doomerism and AI utopianism are really two facets of the same thing. And both seem to fundamentally serve the same master - the profound human dissatisfaction with the way things are. But the world is probably going to remain the same mundane and disappointing place it's always been. That is the endowment of modernity.

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