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I don't feel like writing an essay about it now (it's late and I have other stuff that needs writing) but I'm very optimistic about AI.

I think there's some selection pressure to be gloomy on the internet; optimistic people who turn out to be wrong look stupid, while pessimistic people who turn out to be wrong merely look cautious. And then remember the old proverb 'misery loves company' - people assuage their anxiety about things by kvetching. Everyone does this some of the time (it'd be a bit unnatural if one didn't) but some people interact on line like this almost all the time - I don't know if it's depression or some sort of dopamine rush from getting angry about things or what, but I've terminated my accounts in several online communities over in recent years because I just got so sick of the sarcasm, endless negativity, and obsession with insider coding (straining to always make hip references or recycle cool quotes). It's interesting from a sociological perspective - you can see very similar group dynamics in interest groups that would be horrified to be told they had anything in common with each other - but I think it's very corrosive to participate in.

Philosopher Rene Girard has built a whole theory about this; he thinks there's a fundamental tendency towards scapegoating in human society and that people are never happy unless they have someone to project their negative feelings onto. With the advent of AI, perhaps we're unwittingly trying to automate that too. If this is so then some sort of scary AI is inevitable because we'll invent in order to have a reliably hostile enemy that's guaranteed not to vex us with diplomatic initiatives or socioeconomic guilt trips. I have a suspicion that this is the basic plot of the new Avengers movie.




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