He’s right, unless you factor in hardware effects such as bit flips which will always occur at non-zero probability. Anyways the same is true for people. Neglecting quantum effects, we are of course also made of fully deterministic processes. So to me it’s not so interesting a distinction

Good to know. But there are many dissenting voices, even in the academic space. Should we not take them seriously?

Also I think it’s crazy for some to claim there’s no risk of AI catastrophe. A risk does not imply a certainty, it’s only a probability. Are you willing to claim there’s a 0% chance of a possible future AI system wreaking havoc? Either by some misalignment or through a bad actor. I think that’s a VERY strong claim to make. Especially when leading experts (Stuart Russel, Hinton, …) think the risk is considerably higher. Maybe some amount of hesitation here is wise, no?

And what about the academics making similar claims? Also Sam Altman and others didn’t just suddenly start believing in AI risk. He’s been talking publicly about it for a decade