Did Superintelligence have a dramatic effect on people like Elon Musk? I can imagine Elon getting involved without it. That involvement might have been even more harmful (e.g. starting an AGI lab with zero safety concerns).
In college, he thought about what he wanted to do with his life, using as his starting point the question, “What will most affect the future of humanity?” The answer he came up with was a list of five things: “the internet; sustainable energy; space exploration, in particular the permanent extension of life beyond Earth; artificial intelligence; and reprogramming the human genetic code.”
Overall, causality is multifactorial and tricky to analyze, so concepts like “causally downstream” can be misleading.
(Nonetheless, I do think it’s plausible that publishing Superintelligence was a bad idea, at least in 2014.)
Did Superintelligence have a dramatic effect on people like Elon Musk? I can imagine Elon getting involved without it. That involvement might have been even more harmful (e.g. starting an AGI lab with zero safety concerns).
Here’s one notable quote about Elon (source), who started college over 20 years before Superintelligence:
Overall, causality is multifactorial and tricky to analyze, so concepts like “causally downstream” can be misleading.
(Nonetheless, I do think it’s plausible that publishing Superintelligence was a bad idea, at least in 2014.)