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https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/contra-acemoglu-onoh-god-were-doing

The Washington Post has published yet another "luminary in unrelated field discovers AI risk, pronounces it stupid" article. This time it\'s Daron Acemoglu. I respect Daron Acemoglu and appreciate the many things his work has revealed about economics. In particular, I respect him so much that I wish he would stop embarrassing himself by writing this kind of article (I feel the same way about Steven Pinker and Ted Chiang).

In service of this goal, I want to discuss the piece briefly. I\\u2019ll start with what I think is its main flaw, then nitpick a few other things:

1: The Main Flaw: \\u201cAI Is Dangerous Now, So It Can\\u2019t Be Dangerous Later"

This is the basic structure around which this article is written. It goes:

1. Some people say that AI might be dangerous in the future.
2. But AI is dangerous now!
3. So it can\\u2019t possibly be dangerous in the future.
4. QED!

I have no idea why Daron Acemoglu and every single other person who writes articles on AI for the popular media thinks this is such a knockdown argument. But here we are. He writes:

AI detractors have focused on the potential danger to human civilization from a super-intelligence if it were to run amok. Such warnings have been sounded by tech entrepreneurs Bill Gates and Elon Musk, physicist Stephen Hawking and leading AI researcher Stuart Russell.