An excerpt has surfaced from the AI2027 podcast with siskind and the ex AI researcher, where the dear doctor makes the case for how an AGI could build an army of terminators in a year if it wanted.
It goes something like: OpenAI is worth as much as all US car companies (except tesla) combined, so it could buy up every car factory and convert it to a murderbot factory, because that's kind of like what the US gov did in WW2 to build bombers, reaching peak capacity in three years, and AGI would obviously be more efficient than a US wartime gov so let's say one year, generally a completely unassailable syllogism from very serious people.
Even /r/ssc commenters are calling him out about the whole AI doomer thing getting more noticeably culty than usual edit: The thread even features a rare heavily downvoted siskind post, -10 at the time of this edit.
The latter part of the clip is the interviewer pointing out that there might be technological bottlenecks that could require upending our entire economic model before stuff like curing cancer could be achieved, positing that if we somehow had AGI-like tech in the 1960s it would probably have to use its limited means to invent the entire tech tree that leads to late 2020s GPUs out of thin air, international supply chains and all, before starting on the road to becoming really useful.
Siskind then goes "nuh-uh!" and ultimately proceeds to give Elon's metaphorical asshole a tongue bath of unprecedented depth and rigor, all but claiming that what's keeping modern technology down is the inability to extract more man hours from Grimes' ex, and that's how we should view the eventual AGI-LLMs, like wittle Elons that don't need sleep. And didn't you know, having non-experts micromanage everything in a project is cool and awesome actually.
Heartwarming: the worst person you know just outed themselves as a fucking moron
Even the people who are disagreeing are still kinda sneerable though. Like this guy:
That's still assuming that the AI is a valuable tool for the purpose of genetic engineering or nuclear weapons manufacturing or whatever! Like, the hard part of building a nuke is very much in acquiring the materials, engineering everything to go off at the right time, and actually building it without killing yourself. Very little of that is meaningfully assisted by LLMs even if they did work as advertised. And there are so many people in that very thread alone going into detail on how biological engineering is incredibly hard in ways that similarly aren't bottlenecked by the kinds of things current AI structures can do. The level of comedically missing the point of the folks who keep trying to explain reality is off the charts.