Eric Weinstein is controversial but he is also very bright and a good communicator.
His statement that we're already "there" with AI in dangerous territory is to my opinion accurate. It doesn't really matter if we cross the Rubicon next month or more probably next year, the reality is that we're "there". Then what?
That's the question and unfortunately there is no answer to it, either now or later.
Should we worry about it? Eric Weinstein thinks so and I tend to agree. The "danger" of AI is NOT what we're being told. It won't exterminate anybody not will it go rogue, terminator style, that's Hollywood's stuff. The danger is intrinsic. We will soon be dealing with something more intelligent than us, and very soon after, far more intelligent than us. We will be outsmarted and necessarily manipulated because that's what intelligence does. Agency first and consciousness later will be achieved. Independent goals will be set, local then more global. And sooner than we realize, we won't be in change. Again, not out of malice but simply because smart machines, smart systems, smart cities and whatever else becomes "smart" will be out of our intellectual reach.
In other words, this is a Rosemary's baby moment. We're giving birth to something we do not understand. Not necessarily demonic in a literal sense, but clearly beyond our reach. Should we think twice about it? Of course. Will we? Of course not. One of the fundamental rules of nature is that soon after the state of "emergence" comes an arm race which diversify the horizon to fill the universe of possibilities opened when an orthogonal escape becomes possible. This is a simple mathematical description of what's going on before our eyes right now. In other words, out of complex LLM (Large Language Models), intelligence has emerged and just by scaling up and tweaking the parameters we are exploring a new landscape of possibilities with untold possibilities and maybe, most probably, terrible dangers.
Here's Eric Weinstein's opinion about it:
Harvard Physicist WARNS: You Have No Idea What's Already Happening
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