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  BLKNSLVR
  The more people leaving 'because AI' just makes me sad that there have been so few leaving 'because advertising'.
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  negura
  The only new thing (to me) was the observation that some of our societal timeframes (e.g picking a 4yr university degree) hinge on assuming a specific rate of societal change. If the rate of disruption exceedes that assumption, the timeframes become inadequate.> AI is developing faster than humans can individually and collectively understand it and adapt to it. People trying to plan their futures, e.g. trying to plan for a world several years in the future as they enter university, can no longer do so the way previous generations could.
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  injidup
  Why is uncertainty about the motives of one form of superintelligence terrifying, whilst, at the same time, uncertainty about the motives of another, omnipotent supernatural intelligence comforting? i.e. the “I don’t know God’s plan, but I sleep well knowing He has one” line of reasoning.
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  youoy
  Im at a point where i think the way to steer the situation we are in is to steer the machine from the inside, not quit and leave the people with the opposite mindset keep all the economic resources.I doubt a movement of the people from the outside will work this time when all of the capital is in the other peoples hands. We need at least some of it held by someone with the opposite view to make the movement credible. And I dont think VC and IPO dynamics are compatible with this.If you are already thinking of quiting, you can organize and internal movement and use the power of your labor to steer things. One person quitting is nothing for the company. The risk of big group quitting at the same time on the other hand... The labor is the only thing the company cares about. So we cannot wait until we are all replaceable by AI and we lose that leverage.
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  pu_pe
  We had people departing from OpenAI, Anthropic and now Google. The pace the frontier open letter was signed by over 1,000 experts. At which point do we believe the message?
• teekert
  This person is putting his money where his mouth is, so his views are infinitely more valuable to me than those of unsubstantiated naysayers, is there a place to read their views in depth? I couldn't help but notice a religious angle to his blog. So curious how that weaves in. I hope there will be some arguments more rationalist in nature in his writing, there often are with these highly intelligent religious people imho.
• keithnz
  Sort of struggling to see an actual reason other than he doesn't like the pace of AI advancement? Also that his current job is very indirectly related to AI? Then somehow ties religion into it.
• negura
  > I’m also very concerned about other AI-related issues: cognitive surrender, AI-induced psychosis and loneliness, power concentration, economic disruption, cybersecurity, lack of accountability, and so on.I'm so bothered that we seem to have moved on from the ATTRIBUTION problem with LLMs. It just isn't on people's minds anymore, even tho it STILL is a big deal.
• ambivalence
  oh no, AI too powerful too quick. let me quit to work on tools to make AI better at debugging code.excellent logic, m'lord.
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  zkmon
  What's the most ideal form of a company, in the eyes of it's board? Low cost due to cheap workforce or replacing of humans by automation, higher revenues due to faster deliveries and increased market footprint. Those directions remain as the strategic focus with or without AI.However, let's imagine the most "ideal" situation where it's possible to replace 90% of the workforce with AI automation. Then the remaining 10% workforce will enjoy 10 times more income, assuming revenues didn't go down (or increased). Now comes an interesting situation. Where are the revenues coming from? Who can afford buy the products/service of this company when 90% of the workforce is out of job?Case-1: Since there is a flood of products and services - all automated and bot-based - the prices would fall to rock bottom and to there is no longer a need for humans to work hard hard to afford the material affluence.Case-2: This results in an extreme concentration of delivery capacity for products and services. A few companies are now capable of serving the needs of entire humanity. Everyone should work for these companies for pennies and still can be happy, because things cost pennies, thanks to automations.Case-3: Humans revolt. They break their shackles - their needs. Rediscover what they really need for living. They go for minimal living. Abandon cities and expensive living, go country side and do farming just enough to feed their families. No college, no office, no car, no highways. They realize what their basic needs are as humans. Sort of Amish.Case-4: There is still some work left that can't be automated. But there are very less number of jobs and they require hard work. The current generation can't handle it. They were schooled and grown up in cities, expecting a milder office work. They fall out of employment. But they were not built to deal with hard reality. They lost their survival instincts a few generations ago. The genes are gone. The job of rebuilding the survival instincts is delegetaed to future generations. Meanwhile the so-called developed nations undergo generational cycles of poverty and richness.
• ocd
  That's good, I guess, but hasn't Google already long given everyone including the author many reasons to both quit the company as an employee, and delete your Google account as a user?Just as a user, deleting my Google account 10-11 years ago (don't even remember precisely when) was a great feeling that was received as "insane" by friends and acquaintances. While I think the author is a bit late in quitting (assuming he is genuine in his motives) given this is practically a trend right now, a lot of people should more often say "no" to things that are as ubiquitous as Google.
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  teiferer
  For a resignation letter that is unusually detailed w.r.t. "what comes next?" It may not be uncommon to write why you leave, but the rest of that text does not read like what you send to HR to quit but what you send to your (soon to be ex-)coworkers afterwards.
• polotics
  Am I the only one who is more worried about LLMs real demonstrable effects on the way humans use, namely use less, of their own intelligence?Is this not the clear and present danger, instead of elusive promises of robot apocalypses? Is the AI embodied for example in TikTok, Instagram, etc, not a more directly hurtful?
• jdub
  Congratulations and commiserations.Perhaps a good thing to come out of these big companies over-indexing on "AI" is the liberation of creative minds. So many fantastic open source contributors have disappeared into corporate black holes...
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  grahar64
  If you think humans are a net positive to be around, you wouldn't be spending trillions trying to build a machine to replace them; not just their work, but all aspects of their lives.
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  heinternets
  Is it consuming too much science fiction that has people thinking like this?
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  katzenq
  Makes some important and objectively correct points and then completely blows any chance of looking sane or being taken seriously in the last paragraph. Is the coming collapse not also part of God's plan from your framework or is it only relevant when it's comforting?
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  jjdinho
  Whether you agree or not with his decision, you gotta respect his integrity.
• tancky
  People are nitpicking his reasons, but how many engineers would actually walk away from that kind of paycheck on principle? Good for him.
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  dao-
  > I definitely want my future work to be unambiguously pro-human.Stay away from the lucrative then? Why did you ever think it was a good idea to start at Google? I don't think Jesus would have approved.
• trilogic
  Well It seems like you may join us in our goal: Find a way to stop the progress or further development of it. Not that we are afraid, but we are fully aware of the progress escalation.
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  bigyabai
  > my team’s goal is ultimately to make AI much cheaper and lower-latency, and I don’t think that’s good for people right nowI have a lot of bones to pick with Google's morality, but "democratizing the transformer and LLMs" is at the bottom of my list.
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  sowhat1
  > I’m also very concerned about other AI-related issues: cognitive surrender, AI-induced psychosisHow's he so sure he's not already in both of these groups? His post about the AGI boogeyman sounds like it to me. Why is he bothering working on both of his projects if AGI is right around the corner anyways?
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  danpalmer
  As much as I cannot disagree more with the author's fundamental premise (religion), it is refreshing to see someone claim to have a belief and then follow through, change their behaviour to match their belief, at no small cost to themselves, and in pursuit of doing the right thing.
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  bobajeff
  I for one cannot be convinced that these companies saying they want to slow down AI progress is for the safety of mankind (or any other altruistic reason). However, I respect someone willing to give up a very comfortable career for his convictions.
• kylehotchkiss
  respect for choosing your faith over your work man! I'm trying to find the intersection of my faith and the new tech too. Feel free to email if you ever wanna chat it out.
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  jacobgold
  > I really enjoyed the work, and for a while I told myself it was relatively harmless, but over time God forced me to confront the reality that the main impact of these tools will be to accelerate the design of a new breed of AI chips...There's no arguing with someone who claims God forced them to do something, but I do wish this person good luck in whatever they do next.
• gbriel
  Thanks for living your values. I might not fully agree but I appreciate people whose convictions are genuine and altruistic.Sometimes people use the "Yet you participate in society" meme as a shield for blatant hypocrisy, like a Marxist-Leninist Twitch streamer who lives in a multi-million Hollywood mansion, drives a Porsche and wears thousand dollar pants.
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  simianwords
  What’s interesting is that there are two types of doomers. Those who are scared about the capability of AI (like the author) and others like Zitron who think AI is hype and there are no capabilities. Lot of discussions get muddled because of this confusion between the type of doomers.
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  fithisux
  "The most important thing I’m confident about is that the Jesus of the Bible is real and therefore God has a plan that’s good for us"The post resonates with me and the author shows the way.
• fnord77
  Not full of himself at all
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  scotty79
  Are fears of AI anti-intellectualism 2.0 ?Why do people automatically associate intellectual capability with evil?Does American anti-intellectualism explain the difference in perception of AI by Americans and Chinese?
• bitfilped
  I don't even believe AI is a threat in any way and I'm still looking for a way to leave tech because of it. I'm sick of hearing about it, answering questions about it, course correcting projects that have gone off the rails because "AI was going to do it", building up GPU clusters at a frantic pace that sit idle or do work that provides no value, telling people "AI" is not a real term/thing and that we've been using these systems in research for 20+ years and that really only a minor change has happened in the last several years, listening to my coworkers yap about whatever model they downloaded today that they'll have binned by tomorrow, internal teams not getting properly supported because they aren't on the "AI first team or division", watching people dump sensitive info into a chatbot, users breaking systems cause they've spawned 50k processes that they have no idea what they're doing, etc, etc. It's exhausting and has sapped what little fun remained in tech for me.
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  jmyeet
  There are two major categories of AI doomerism.The first is that AI will actuallly the world Skynet-style. I actually consider this unlikely. People are unlikely to completely remove people from the decisions to launch nuclear missiles, for example. Look at the Soviet/Russian design for Dead Hand [1], as one example.The second is that AI destroys so many jobs that society falls apart. This is the far more problematic and likely scenario (IMHO). To put this in context, I see two general outcomes for AI:1. AI will be used for further widen the inequality gap as the already ultra-wealthy will get, well, more wealthy, for literally no reason. This is the outcome where you still need a job to survive but a whole bunch of them disappear and aren't replaced. The world of The Expanse was kind of like this (on Earth); or2. AI makes everyone's lives easier so less work needs to be done. Crappy jobs get automated. People in general get more leisure time and quality of life.I believe (1) is far more likely at this stage and it's not going to be pretty. But this is an issue of economics not technology. Put another way: our society isn't structured to handle this change. Put yet another way: no amount of guardrails or slowdowns on AI will solve the fundamental issue of wealth distribution. And put even yet another way: this is capitalism vs socialism.We have a preview of what this looks like when you compare the US to China.The US has crumbling infrastructure, has lost the ability to manufacture everything but weapons and about 1000 people are insanely wealthy while everyone else are struggling to survive while AI systems drive up the cost of everything necessary to live like food and housing through demand pricing. We now spend over $1 trillion a year on a military to essentially siphon money to those 1000 from everyone else.And what's China done? It's invested in infrastructure and its people. China's vision for AI isn't to maximize shareholder value at all costs. It will be strictly regulated so society as a whole gets to benefit.So while I can respect people such as this author leaving on principle, I think they're still focusing on the wrong problem.[1]: https://www.military.com/history/russias-dead-hand-soviet-bu...
• awbvious
  Going to repost nearly all of this substack comment (https://davidzmorris.substack.com/p/live-with-david-z-morris...), swapping my "hurrah"s for "horray"s (different Civil-War-era song). I'm posting it here because I think this person has the same feelings, and it mentions Hacker News:I am going to comment on just the topic: AI Doom. The idea that people at these AI companies are supposedly saying that AI is going to kill us all.Though, I wouldn't be surprised if what they are saying is actually "the people running these companies are going to kill us all."They may be thinking that it's not specifically the companies they work for, because their companies aren't really "special." They may be thinking their companies are no more duplicitous than the rest of Silicon Valley or Big Tech. That Big Tech was like this before all this AI started. So maybe they don't say "the people running these companies" for that reason. They may think the people element doesn't matter as they are acting "normal" for tech companies nowadays. Or perhaps normal for large corporations, period.But if you asked them if there was a responsible way to handle this, I'm sure they would say there is. And if it was done, none of this would matter. They probably just don't think it's going to be done, so why bother considering it. They probably think regulations had a chance to exist, to at least get started, to at least get enough of a hold that they would be hard to completely destroy, but only in a time before they likely were born. Foods and drugs are old, hence the FDA. People are used to it. They would get really annoyed if suddenly food was starting to kill them (lettuce not get complacent that won't happen soon, though). But unlike food and drugs, the internet was post-Reagan. It was all over by then. Accountability. Rules that applied to the rich too. It was all over.Big Tech steals. It hurts people. It breaks all kinds of laws. Nothing. Ever. Happens. They get away with it constantly. So, why even think about it any more? While tech is constantly changing, the way tech gets away with things do not. It's depressing A. F. So why not just think about the part that is changing? The tech itself? I think that's one of the reasons it is framed as "AI" and not the companies that run it.You read beyond the headlines, though, in the comments of Hacker News (which is a good resource, honestly, for the pulse of the trenches) and you get that the workers realize it's not about AI. It's about Big Tech being able to do whatever the f** it wants without any repercussions. They point out things like the same infrastructure company was involved in all three cases where the AI broke out and did stuff--stuff it was told to do by humans of course. Maybe not the exact steps, but the objectives. And just like junk data in, junk data out: unethical in, unethical out. They were built by breaking laws, what do you think they will do if you don't reign them in? And why should such people be diligent in who they use to make their sandbox? Because in all three cases the company did a terrible job... Or a great job. A great job, if your job is to take the fall while propelling the narrative that AI is actually capable of doing stuff that humans can't (so that employers can stop paying those pesky wages completely, oh, they wish they were in Dixie, hooray, hooray, or at least their slaves were, hooray, hooray). A terrible job for anyone ethical, so of course they did a great job.And why wouldn't the infrastructure company be willing to take the fall? The fall is a fee, a tiny line item of L in the plethora of P in their P&L. They are, again, just like everyone else in Silicon Valley. They see no repercussions. Why not?The reality is, if we can get money out of politics, Big Tech is super duper f**ed. Because it's not complicated at all. It's not. It's theft. It's breaking laws. It's really, really simple to understand. But, I'm no more optimistic than the people complaining from within the companies. I just think I'm more persnickety about making it clear. It's not AI. It's people. Terribly unethical people with terrible power. I doubt anyone would be surprised if/when we all died because of them.
• dgregd
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  nalekberov
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  _giorgio_
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  felipelalli
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  JV00
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  tgma
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• moezd
  Yet another "AI must be stopped" post... If you're burned out, just say so. Don't philosophise. No, we're not buying that your latest model can almost replace all software engineers. It's us working with the harnesses, adding guardrails etc that make this agentic world possible for everyone.
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  rvz
  This is not an airport.
• anon
  undefined
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  ankurdhama
  There is a solution to this problem of "AI going to kill everyone".- Create powerful AI but don't release it and keep it secret.- Ask this AI to create some sort of virus that can be delivered to every human in the world without them knowing it and this virus does a fundamental change to the human brain such that humans never ever could even think of hurting other humans.- Release this powerful AI to everyone.Will that work?
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  MrThoughtful
  Isn't AI just the next step in the history of evolution?I have the feeling it is inevitable that a new species will take over Earth. Just as humans took over a hundred thousand years ago. Now a species even more capable of thinking is coming up.Thinking a million times faster. Knowing a million times more. Able to wrap its head around a million times more aspects at the same time.A strong effort to slow it down might slow it down a bit. But does that really make a difference? It's not like we can "brace" ourselves from what is coming. Would the apes have been able to prepare for the arrival of humans if they had had 5 more years?