Category Archives: AI

Why AI Is So Dangerous & How It Could Destroy Humanity

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Ah, click bait. Sign of the times! MEGATHREAT: Why AI Is So Dangerous & How It Could Destroy Humanity | Mo Gawdat.

Mo Gawdat is an Egyptian entrepreneur and writer. He is the former chief business officer for Google X and author of the books Solve for Happy and Scary Smart.

Mo says there are some things we shouldn’t waste time talking about because they are going to happen, inevitably. These are:

  1. There is no shutting down or reversing AI, we can’t stop it
  2. AI will be significantly smarter than humans
  3. Bad things will happen in the process of developing AI (the specifics to be determined)

…and the fourth inevitability? Utopia..?

Critical Path != Critical Section

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I always get the concepts “critical path” and “critical section” confused.

The “critical section” is the part in your algorithm which you must hold a lock for; whereas the “critical path” is an idea from hardware design which relates to the time taken for the longest combinatorial logic that needs to be processed during a clock cycle, thus limiting the frequency you can run your clock at.

Although the terminology “critical path” came from hardware, the same terminology is used in software. ChatGPT has a fairly good write-up on the two uses of the term “critical path”.

I learned a little more about this in Introduction to VHDL for FPGA and ASIC design.