This essay fleshes out a lot of the conclusions that have been nebulously growing in my mind over the last few months and even years!
And now that I think of it, the fear of AI resemble somewhat the fear of runaway nanobots -- the notion that we can create something that will just turn the entire world into grey goo -- which, in order to have this fear, among other things, you have to overlook the fact that we are already surrounded by nanobots! We just call them "bacteria".
"What if, as ChatGPT laps up more and more of our text, it just gets closer and closer to human mediocrity, like the mediocre text it’s trained to predict?"
And now that I think of it, the fear of AI resemble somewhat the fear of runaway nanobots -- the notion that we can create something that will just turn the entire world into grey goo -- which, in order to have this fear, among other things, you have to overlook the fact that we are already surrounded by nanobots! We just call them "bacteria".