Had a quick look. Curiously I landed at point where ChatGPT provided examples of higher level of discussion for both fighting climate denialism and for fighting “the extreme left climate alarmism religion”
Followed by a convincing demonstration that it can even fake sincerity
I don’t want to get into the climate debate, or the AI debate, both of which are still generally at similar levels.
My prejudice was and partly still is that ChatGPT will have a positive impact in helping people understand the complete uselessness of a large numbers of “professional” occupations such as mainstream “journalism”, “management” and “politics”:
“It is worth repeating at this point the theories that Ford had come up with, on his first encounter with human beings, to account for their peculiar habit of continually stating and restating the very very obvious, as in “It’s a nice day,” or “You’re very tall,” or “So this is it, we’re going to die.”
His first theory was that if human beings didn’t keep exercising their lips, their mouths probably shriveled up.
After a few months of observation he had come up with a second theory, which was this–"If human beings don’t keep exercising their lips, their brains start working.”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
I am quite confident that escalating rhetoric about “extinction” has been counter productive to serious measures that would actually contribute solutions.
Likewise confident that claims that the “The Science” is authoritatively determined indicate an anti-scientific attitude.
I do not regard above as prejudices.
But they do strongly incline me to a prejudiced reaction against a short statement issued by very large numbers of “scientists” and other “notables” that begins with::
Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority …
It reminds me of Einstein’s alleged response to a statement denouncing the theory of relativity issued by 100 scientists:
One Hundred Authors Against Einstein was published in 1931. When asked to comment on this denunciation of relativity by so many scientists, Einstein replied that to defeat relativity one did not need the word of 100 scientists, just one fact.
But I think there is a certain subtlety in the full sentence, with its careful choice of two global problems that are well known to have not been adequately resolved, and equally careful avoidance of a third that has been paralysed by excessive hype about “extinction”.
… alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.
I do believe that the first signatory knows what he is talking about, and how to communicate it effectively and with subtlety, from doing his MOOC on neural networks. So I intend to pay careful attention to the whatever factual arguments they have produced despite the above prejudice against the opening phrase.