Yeah, I guess that was a bit of a strawman. Obviously mass extinctions are bad.

Sorry, I meant “destroy the planet” as in lifeless/only single celled organisms.

And you can kind of see humanity as “just another big asteroid impact”. Nature will recover competeley over the next million years or so. That’s what I meant with mass extinctions being kind of inconsequential for the planet as a whole on geological time scales.

Obviously mass extinctions are also bad besides their effect on human society, I just meant that that is mostly a spiritual one thats hard to measure, about lost potential and eradicating a species. As a thought experiment, is eradicating a disease, a form of life, inherently negative? Mosquitoes? Do you agree that it’s a big achievement that we eradicated small pox? What if we eradicate all existing diseases?

Well, survive yes. But self-sufficiency is a big problem. The world is nowadays so interconnected that even a problem in only one region can severely affect all of humanity (e.g. semiconductors from Taiwan). So yes, a collapse of our modern society is certainly possible.

Destroying the planet is not really a thing. Mass extinctions in the past were a big deal but at the same time: Earth recovered. We only have a big problem because the plants/animals we need might go extinct.

Obviously valuing nature and wildlife diversity in and of itself is good but it doesn’t have any intrinsic value in regards to supporting society.

You can understand it but you can’t interpret the value. How many movies is a CD? Or a DVD? Or a 1TB SSD? Or even Avatar in 3D (presumably not 1)? How many movies have even been released in total/last year?

The number awes non-tech savvy folk but it doesn’t really inform them of anything. You could just as well write “more movies than you will ever need”.

And besides that, I personally think that news should try to educate folk. I’m completely fine with a comparison in the article. But why in the headline?

Fair point. I personally think that AI lives up to enough parts of the hype so that there won’t be another AI winter but who knows. Some will obviously get disillusioned but not enough.

There are quite a lot of AI-sceptics in this thread. If you compare the situation to 10 years ago, isn’t it insane how far we’ve come since then?

Image generation, video generation, self-driving cars (Level 4 so the driver doesn’t need to pay attention at all times), capable text comprehension and generation. Whether it is used for translation, help with writing reports or coding. And to top it all off, we have open source models that are at least in a similar ballpark as the closed ones and those models can be run on consumer hardware.

Obviously AI is not a solved problem yet and there are lots of shortcomings (especially with LLMs and logic where they completely fail for even simple problems) but the progress is astonishing.

Why do you think that? Dive bombing hits generally within a few meters, even during WW2 where it was used against tanks. Why would a guided rocket be that much better? Where would it get the target data from if it doesn’t have a human to guide it?

Obviously, there exist guided munitions with higher accuracy (<1m) but that’s not the majority.