this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2023
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Climate is fucked, animals continue to go extinct even more, our money will be worth nothing the coming years.. What motivation do I even have to care to keep going? The world is ran and basically owned by corrupt rich people, there's poverty, war, etc. It makes me sick to my stomach the way to world is. So I ask, why bother anymore?

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[โ€“] TheFutureIsDelaware@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 year ago (6 children)

You're at a moment in history where the only two real options are utopia or extinction. There are some worse things than extinction that people also worry about, but lets call it all "extinction" for now. Super-intelligence is coming. It literally can't be stopped at this point. The only question is whether it's 2, 5, or 10 years.

If we don't solve alignment, you die. It is the default. AI alignment is the hardest problem humans have ever tried to solve. Global warming will cause suffering on that timescale, but not extinction. A well-aligned super-intelligence has actual potential to reverse global warming. A misaligned one will mean it doesn't matter.

So, if you care, you should be working in AI alignment. If you don't have the skillset, find something else: https://80000hours.org/

Every single dismissal of AI "doom" is based on wishful thinking and hand-waving.

[โ€“] pfannkuchen_gesicht@lemmy.one 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

No. Maybe as a short stop on the way to extinction, but absolute and complete extinction aint a dystopia. And the worse than extinction possibilities are more like eternal suffering in a simulator for resisting the AI. Not quite captured by a "dystopia".

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