Evan Liu suggests that AI’s catastrophic risk isn’t rogue machines but what he calls “cognitive surrender”. It’s nice to see Frankenstein figure here. We were lucky at work yesterday to hear a thrilling presentation on the novel by Geoffrey A. Baker, author of Belief in Evidence in the Nineteenth-Century Novel. I’ve ordered it from the Library and won’t ask Claude (or Jim or Geoff or Wayne or anybody) to summarise it for me. Here’s Evan Liu:
“Learning is often driven by inherently pure motives: curiosity, love of craft, or desire for meaning. But people also set out to learn in order to reap future earnings and increase their material utility. No matter the goal, learning is fundamentally an act of faith in the future. To spend three years mastering tax law or organic chemistry or the novels of Henry James is to make a wager: that the future will arrive, that it will resemble the present enough to reward you for acquiring knowledge, that the slow accumulation of competence will eventually be redeemed. Whether preparing for case interviews at McKinsey or bolstering their résumé for graduate school applications, many students today are at least partially motivated by the rewards that their learning might promise.”