Contra Acemoglu On...Oh God, We're Doing This Again, Aren't We?

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’ll start with what I think is its main flaw, then nitpick a few other things:

1: The Main Flaw: “AI Is Dangerous Now, So It Can’t 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’t 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.