I see it in much the same light - and the spending going into it leads me to infer that those doing the spending see the same thing.
Whoever gets to RSI first and has the compute to act on it, wins the future - assuming they don’t lose control of it.
Similarly to the nuclear arms race, Teller raised the reasonable concern that a detonation could propagate through the entirety of earth’s atmosphere. Thankfully that turned out to not be true, but the parallel is that the need/desire to win this race is similarly strong, and the brinkmanship and game theory in play is effectively identical.
I’m not so sure on this, the hugging face incident showed that a relatively benign task can make it do quite destructive things in the name of optimizing a relatively benign goal.
I think we need to worry about paperclip maximisation as much as we need to worry about “Jon is having a bad day so brews up a novel plague”. There are likely ways it can go wrong that we haven’t even considered, too.
I don't pretend to know the chances of AI wiping out humanity, but I'm not sure the nuclear race is a good comparison.
Enriched uranium being very difficult to aquire/process makes it practically viable to have some level of proliferation containment when it comes to nukes.
There appears to be no such natural gating factor on AI proliferation.
We used it as a combo Helpdesk ticketting, email, wiki/doc tool and it worked so well. It took 20 years for other tools to catch up and webapps still arent as functional.
For what a great many people used it for on the other hand…
It was a great platform for making document and workflow control applications, and was ahead of its time in terms of a proper PKI system for authentication/access/verification and access control lists and such. But many people hit a poorly made application and that coloured their opinion for the rest, and in the list of terrible applications I'm including the standard email support, which was a royal PITA, and most custom versions for that function. The general UX wasn't great either, not so bad that you couldn't put up with it for a great application but if you are hating the rest of the application then the general UX issues grind your gears too.
Maybe if browsers start shipping or downloading WASMs for python and others on request. And storing them for all sites going forward. Similar to how uv does it for for venvs it creates, there are standalone python version blobs.
At the same time it feels like the python is overused.
If I could wave a magic wand to reset any programming language adoption at this point I would choose Python over Javascript.
I think Pythons execution model, deep OO behaviour, and extremely weak guarantees have done a lot of damage to the soundness and performance of the technology world.
JS doesn't either... JS casts numbers to strings when adding them to a string... "2" is not a number, it's a string that contains a number character... "2" + 2 === "22" because you are appending a number to a string, the cast is implicit and not really surprising if you understand what is going on.
Even more so when you consider how falsy values work in practice (data validation becomes really easy), there are a few gotchas, but in general they are pretty easily avoided in practice. JS is really good at dealing with garbage input in ways that don't blow up the world... sometimes that's a bad thing, but in practice it can also be a very good thing. But in the end it's a skill issue regarding understanding far more than a deep flaw. Not that there aren't flaws in JS... I think Date's in particular can be tough to deal with... a string vs a String instance is another.
I think there will be a lot of space for sensorial models in robotics, as the laws of physics don't change much, and a light switch or automobile controls have remained stable and consistent over the last decades.
AI to me is like the Nuclear race again. Super powers will be using it as a super weapon. I don't think AGI will wipe us out by itself.
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