Fool's Expertise

I listened to the recent Ezra Klein interview with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang , which seems to be something of a Rorschach test for AI doomerism: if you are inclined to see doom, Jensen sounds dismissive, but if you (like me) do not fear for the future of humanity at the (metaphorical!) hands of a computer program, Jensen’s responses seem very reasonable. (With some exception: does this guy really not know his own zip code?!) But I also think there was a lost opportunity. While Jensen rightfully indicates that existing regulation (e.g., product liability laws) can act to hold the frontier labs accountable for harms caused by their own products (a point made more thoroughly by former FTC chair Lina Khan ), he didn’t challenge Klein enough. In particular, Klein repeatedly appealed to the authority conferred by AI expertise; how could Jensen disagree with pioneers like Geoffrey Hinton? While Jensen (rightfully) pointed out Hinton has been wrong in his predictions (e.g., his infamously wrong 2016 prediction that radiology would cease to exist by 2021 ), he missed an opportunity to explain why Hinton is wrong: it’s not (merely) that Hinton is not seeing the future (or aspects of it) clearly, it’s that Hinton is making claims that far exceed the range of his domain expertise.