Things have gotten scarier since 2023.



So the other day I wrote a post about how humanity is inevitably going to be disempowered by the existence of AI:

You are no longer the smartest type of thing on Earth

A bunch of people wrote to me and asked me: “What made you change your mind?”. Three years ago, shortly after the release of the original ChatGPT, I wrote a post about how LLMs are not going to destroy the human race:

LLMs are not going to destroy the human race

And just a couple of months ago, I wrote a post arguing that ASI (artificial superintelligence) is likely to peacefully coexist with humanity rather than kill us off.

People wanted to know why my tone had shifted from optimistic to pessimistic.

Well, the simple answer to that is “I was in a worse mood.” My rabbit was sick,1 so I was kind of grumpy, and so in my post a few days ago I painted the eventual disempowerment of humanity as more of a negative thing than I usually do. In fact, I’ve always believed that at some point, humanity would be replaced with something posthuman — godlike AIs, a hive mind, modified humans, or whatever. I grew up reading science fiction about that kind of thing — Vernor Vinge, Charles Stross, Arthur C. Clarke, Iain M. Banks, and so on — and it just always seemed impossible that humanity had already attained the theoretical pinnacle of intelligence.2 I had always simply envisioned that whatever came after us would be in the general human family, and would be more likely to be on our side than against us.

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