The AI hype is starting to make a lot more sense. AI is just how Musk and other leading techbros experience the world right now.Consider this: Elon Musk doesn't do any work. He has people for that. All he has to do is give those people vaguely-worded instructions or "prompts" and they come back with the thing he wanted. He doesn't know how they do it, nor does he care. If something doesn't work the way he wants it to or doesn't meet his specifications, he supplies his people with a more specific prompt. That's how he "works"
edit: from @mcc in comments:
And they're terrified of AGI "getting out of control", I.E., the faceless entities that the prompts are attached to suddenly acting independently and making demands instead of just passively returning requested thing on demand.All that nonsense stuff about accidentally creating computer hell god is just sublimated fear about their employees unionizing
relatedly, when Sam Altman insists "I am a stochastic parrot, and so are you" (i.e. "there is nothing going on in your precious meat-based human brains that ChatGPT isn't doing right now") i think that that's largely because the people he interacts with on a regular basis - people he sees as equals, who take AI "seriously" the same way he does - actually do talk indistinguishably from ChatGPT output
there is, as they say, no "there" there, and he and his kind (and their eager sycophants) mistake that vacuity for genuine insightfulness
if that wasn't the case, a fractally hogwash statement like "if we had a human population in the trillions then we'd have thousands of Mozarts" would be relegated to the crazy pile where it belongs instead of making headlines
