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https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/kelly-bets-on-civilization

Scott Aaronson makes the case for being less than maximally hostile to AI development:

Here\\u2019s an example I think about constantly: activists and intellectuals of the 70s and 80s felt absolutely sure that they were doing the right thing to battle nuclear power. At least, I\\u2019ve never read about any of them having a smidgen of doubt. Why would they? They were standing against nuclear weapons proliferation, and terrifying meltdowns like Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, and radioactive waste poisoning the water and soil and causing three-eyed fish. They were saving the world. Of course the greedy nuclear executives, the C. Montgomery Burnses, claimed that their good atom-smashing was different from the bad atom-smashing, but they would say that, wouldn\\u2019t they?

We now know that, by tying up nuclear power in endless bureaucracy and driving its cost ever higher, on the principle that if nuclear is economically competitive then it ipso facto hasn\\u2019t been made safe enough, what the antinuclear activists were really doing was to force an ever-greater reliance on fossil fuels. They thereby created the conditions for the climate catastrophe of today. They weren\\u2019t saving the human future; they were destroying it. Their certainty, in opposing the march of a particular scary-looking technology, was as misplaced as it\\u2019s possible to be. Our descendants will suffer the consequences.

Read carefully, he and I don\\u2019t disagree. He\\u2019s not scoffing at doomsday predictions, he\\u2019s more arguing against people who say that AIs should be banned because they might spread misinformation or gaslight people or whatever.

\\xa0