Big news: Douglas Hofstadter, a legendary scholar and famous AI skeptic, changed his mind: "I think [AI progress] is terrifying. I hate it. I think about it practically all the time, every single day.” “It feels as if the entire human race is about to be eclipsed and left in the dust. The accelerating progress has been so unexpected, caught me so completely off guard - not only myself but many, many people - there is a kind of terror of an oncoming tsunami that is going to catch all of humanity off guard." "[AI] renders humanity a very small phenomenon compared to something else far more intelligent than us, and [AI] will become incomprehensible to us, as in comprehensible to us as we are to cockroaches. “Very soon these entities [AIs] may well be far more intelligent than us, and at that point we will recede into the background. We will have handed the baton over to our successors. If this were to happen over a long time, like hundreds of years, that would be OK, but it’s happening over a period of a few years. “To me it’s quite terrifying because it suggests that everything I used to believe was the case is being overturned. I thought it would be hundreds of years before anything even remotely like a human mind would be [soon]. I never imagined that computers would rival or even surpass human intelligence. It was a goal that was so far away I wasn’t worried about it. And then it started happening at an accelerating pace, where unreachable goals and things that computers shouldn’t be able to do started toppling - the defeat of Gary Kasparov by Deep Blue, and going on to defeat the best Go players in the world. And then systems got better and better at translation between languages, and then at producing intelligible responses to difficult questions in natural language, and even writing poetry.”