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Comments (174)

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  throwaway13337
  The framing of how we think about AI has really been cultivated by a quite homogeneous group of people. These people, like all people that belong to a sub-culture, are almost certainly prone to groupthink.It's extremely important to see that group as such. That it is not thousands of individual perspectives but a chorus of connected/aligned people who have all read the same things and talked to the same people and are rewarded implicitly for thinking a similar way.Many of them read HN and are offended I put them this way. But it's inescapable that we as humans have this flaw when we're surrounded by a culture.There's another universe where we do not constantly compare AI to nukes. I bet that world has a lower P(doom).
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  vinkelhake
  I'm not saying there aren't weird things going on, but this article sure does a lot of guilt-by-association. We're putting neoreactionaries, polyamorous rationalists, doomsday AI researchers and the Zizians in one big web.
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  arcticfox
  This whole "we can't trust the people warning us because they're either weirdos or involved" deal is such a strange angle when you can just start from zero, look at what's known to be happening right now, and draw a very straight line to catastrophe.It's like being concerned Oppenheimer and company are exaggerating when looking at the first nuclear tests at the same time.
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  cameldrv
  When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro. Few people have the ability/temperament to reason about things that have never happened before. Those that do have a weird psychological profile. Usually you can ignore them. Every once in a while, you can't.
• walrus01
  Oh, man, not this again. I recommend listening to the "Behind the Bastards" podcast episodes on the Zizians if you want to really be confronted by the personal histories of some people who went really far down the rationalist rabbit hole. Yes, the harry potter fan fiction features prominently in it.https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=behind+th...
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  Animats
  If you want to meet the sex part of that crowd, Slutcon is in a week.[1] Tickets are $3,300 to $10,000. This is Aella's creation. It's in Berkeley, California, and there's a fair amount of overlap between the organizers and the Berkeley "rat" community mentioned in the parent article.[1] https://www.slutcon.com/
• raincole
  It seems that the author has very weird and strong obsession over Yudkowsky and his HP fanfic and took the public hatred toward AI companies as an opportunity to ridicule him.
• alexpotato
  I remember first watching the Matrix.They they made the Animatrix as a companion piece.The Second Renaissance [0] episode of the Animatrix talks about how the machines came to power in the Matrix universe. At the time, it made sense within the bounds of the movies.Reading about a lot of this AI discussion makes me feel like it was a documentary sent back in time.https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLUouZgbTp2o_7LK7zqubt...
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  narmiouh
  The big fear in the administration is any attempt to put breaks on the AI progression will lead to a recession and so the history will be written as to win an election (that is almost certain a losing proposition for the party in power), they put the future of humanity at risk.
• ball_of_lint
  Useless article. Doesn't matter whether Coxon has pure motives, it got attention. You can't put that back in a bottle.It does matter whether AI is safe or not. I won't make a specific argument here, but I think the rationalist community would be overjoyed to see unaffiliated people sincerely trying to reason through these things.
• GlibMonkeyDeath
  Really struck by some of the parallels with other "perfection cults", e.g. the Oneida Community circa 1850's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oneida_CommunityThe Oneida's also produced a violent assassin: Charles Guiteau https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_J._Guiteau (I guess it is debatable they "made" him, same as with the Zizians)Let's hope Thiel and company redirect that democracy-destroying energy into making quality flatware sometime soon...
• LastTrain
  This writing smells like the aggrandizement of subcultures seen in early Wired articles.
• jmoggr
  The ad hominems are tiresome. You think the people who are explicitly trying to replace all humans are any less weird and problematic?The rationalists long predicted that misaligned AI would break out of training environments, this has happened. They believe (among other things) that this will continue to happen, and that creating powerful AI that is aligned and controllable is not currently possible.You should draw a line in the sand and decide what evidence you'd need to see to convince you that their perspective is worth considering.You don't have to agree with all of their beliefs and predictions (I don't), but you should evaluate their arguments on merit, not on a characterization of some weird subset of people who happened to read a convincing blog post.
• S-E-P
  It is pretty funny to me that the transhumanist movement is hoping that these LLMs can eventually move past a parody of human intelligence.A lot of weird folks in that arena, a lot of strange books too that they wrote for the consumption of the public. It's always the same backstory too.
• Arubis
  Probably best read with [Venkatesh Rao on EA Safety](https://substack.com/home/post/p-216194276) as a companion piece.
• jgord
  We need deep and rational discussion of the implications, impact and dangers of AI and how to mitigate them.This is not that - although it is a summary of some of the social cliques / trends, and maybe a warning against groupthink.
• epsteingpt
  The best piece of reporting on the subject I have ever seen.
• tbrownaw
  With a title like that, I was expecting a piece about society ending as a result of how too many people marrying chatbots affects the population pyramid.
• fhdhcndndn
  A more cynical but accurate take is that eltists with disproportionate access to capital, some might even say a "silver spoon", are reading the writing on the wall that a benevolent superintelligence will erase their own elitism versus the commoners, and make said elitists just another meatbag like everyone else. That's why AI needs to be tightly controlled and wielded as a force that reinforces class divisions rather than erasing them.
• irickt
  dupe https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49738411
• MarkusQ
  > If worries about AI safety and the end of the world entered your life recently, it’s probably because of a resignation letter.No, it's because of an extensive and well coordinated FUD campaign. The resignation letter was just one salvo, and, like the rest, orchestrated.I'm not a huge fan of calling LLMs "AI" and acting like they're our savior, but I'm even less of a fan of the brain-dead fearmongering.
• hirvi74
  I'm a born and raised the Southerner, so I don't really understand all this "Effective Altruism" and "Rationalist Movement" group stuff.Seriously, I am not trying to be obnoxious or make some poor attempt at a joke. I used HN for years before I learned YCombinator was like Shark Tank for startups or something.So, to my knowledgable folks in this thread, are these groups truly some efficacious, philanthropists, or are these movements just another one of those onanistic Bay Area beliefs I see people complain about a lot on the Internet? (No hate here, I've never even been to the Bay, nor have I met any tech folks from there either).I tried to read the article, but with all the proper nouns and acronyms, I might as well have been reading a foreign language.
• kypro
  As someone who is weird, the reason I think these communities exist is because a lot of us are on the spectrum and it's honestly so exhausting trying to discuss ideas with people to just be called weird or toxic or whatever else. In a way the reason people see us as a group is because we can't do the groupthink thing, and so it's nice to talk to others who are not going mock you for liking Harry Potter and being interested in AI risk.As a "group" we disagree on almost everything... It's why we talk to each other.
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  RobRivera
  Thats certainly a title
• virtualritz
  See also from earlier today [1].More or less the same content but parent is much more palpable, IMHO.[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49737985
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  CGMthrowaway
  Hopefully enough smart people out there can distinguish between many "AI safety" people and actual AI engineers/scientists at these labs working at the coalface.AI ethics reminds me of "design thinking" grifters or scrummasters or other such BS jobs of times past.If you listen in an informed way to these people talk, they are not really as technical as they sound. They are personality hires, woo-woo spellcasters. They are just creating content for a narrative. The grasp of philosophy is not even at par with what you might think it ought to be.
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  elendilm
  I remember reading back in 2014 (IIRC) Yudkowsky's explanation of the Bayes theorem. It was genuinely good. Some sort of first principles introduction.HPMOR was entertaining as well. Death as the last enemy to be destroyed placed his priorities where his mouth is.For a brief time back then I used to visit Lesswrong and many comments including Yudkowsky's were plain stupid (which was not hard to reason at all) but coming from folks who valued themselves as first principles thinkers was an oxymoron.But his timeless equations (IIRC), Bayes theorem explanation and HPMOR were all remarkable and I will always appreciate those works.
• zeckalpha
  This sphere goes further back: There's direct connections to Extropianism and onto many more: Transhumanism, Julian Assange, Alcor, Timothy Leary, John Perry Barlow (EFF, Grateful Dead), another VP: Dick Cheney, Nicholas Negroponte, Marvin Minsky, Jeffrey Epstein...Really depends on how broad of a brush you use. This article makes lots of connections but could connect with all of the above with only a few more.
• anon
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• anon
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• TacticalCoder
  > William MacAskill co-founded 80,000 Hour ...> Then the movement minted a fraud. Sam Bankman-Fried was not an accident of proximity; he was EA’s own productTFA could have have mentioned that it's a fraud, MacAskill, who minted another fraud. MacAskill was SBF's guru and he was also involved in FTX and Alameda scams (but distanced himself before the scandal blew up) and MacAskill bought a 15 million GBP mansion in the UK for the Effective Altruism movement using funds stolen by SBF.Last I checked the mansion hasn't been clawed back yet (but it could: funds from the Madoff ponzi have been clawed back more than 15 years after the fraud has been exposed).Now of course people in charge of clawing back the stolen funds are the only hope of people who've been scammed for MacAskill didn't effectively altruistically sell the mansion to effectively altruistically hand the money to people who have been scammed.That MacAskill and SBF maybe had groupsex with Caroline Ellison is one thing: they're proud to be polyamorous, whatever. We live in a free world.But buying a $15 million mansion with stolen funds is thievery. Effective Scammers.
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  petesergeant
  I'm going to be fucking irritated if we all die because BlueSky posters wanted to take pot-shots at the EA crowd. The Boy Who Cried Wolf is _also_ a story about how a community lost a child because of cynicism, and the people proudly declaring that they "know" every safety concern is just a marketing ploy also concerns me.
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  lovich
  > A sex worker from Idaho who became one of the subculture’s most-read writers and now runs an AI-doom propaganda residency with Grimes, Elon Musk’s ex-girlfriend.I hate that I know who that is from this scant description.> A splinter sect that fled to tugboats and whose members have been linked to six deaths. And a blogger who wanted to abolish democracy, found the ear of several billionaire patrons, and watched his ideas come to fruition in the vice president’s office.Actually fuck I know who all of these people are.
• croemer
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• stupidfurrythin
  >If worries about AI safety and the end of the world entered your life recently, it’s probably because of a resignation letter.It's actually because of all the hoops I have to jump through to get Gemini to generate my kinky bara/furry pin-ups and videos.I totally get that this is exceptionally weird to the vast majority of people. Even the other furries ostracize me for daring to engage with what they seem to think is a sort of digital Moloch.I read a rant recently, where the main thrust was that "AI safety" was about controlling the user. Censorship. I find it easy to agree with that take. I suppose that there's some merit to not allowing these systems to teach users how to build a nuke, but this early in the game, with this many restrictions, what is "safety" in practice? "Protecting people from bad actors"? Or "defining a narrow idea of what's acceptable, according to the particular ethical and philosophical idiosyncrasies of the system admins and owners," which I guess I don't share?My weird little art-adjacent initiatives are such small potatoes, a personal Mirror of Erised that has basically zero effect on the lives of anyone else. But even they're too much to abide. They want to make genAI an indispensable tool for the next generation or so of human expression, but the guardrails are up and tightening with every model release. No dicks in the contemporary art galleries of 2050, huh? (Maybe the other furries are right after all.) And what happens when AI is an arbiter in situations involving real blood or treasure? Situations that antagonize the platform's owners, or the existence or purpose of the platform itself?And the public gets basically no input, let alone the individual. Sounds great. /s
• thrwaway5771
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• ridicthread
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• underlipton
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