> When I checked back a few years later, the community seemed to be all about surviving the Rapture, I mean “Singularity”, summoning God, I mean the “Friendly A

> When I checked back a few years later, the community seemed to be all about surviving the Rapture, I mean “Singularity”, summoning God, I mean the “Friendly AI”, and maximizing the happiness of the expected 10 to the trillion lives in Heaven, I mean the “Simulation”. I found all of that a lot less convincing. AFAIK - one reason for this shift is because A) people who (want to) work in ML/AI want jobs B) billionaires like to fund shit that strokes their ego (AI > mosquito nets) and C) people who work in the EA field need money too and turns out mosquitos nets aren't super sexy to fund. So, inherently, people in EA will stroke the ego of billionaires with rapture-like projects because they get funding from those projects and they'll probably say stuff that is a bit extreme (along with some psychos just being thrown into any crowd). I know people who work in EA. It's complicated and difficult to balance. You have to realize - people (billionaires) contribute often just to stroke their own ego... not because they only want to help the world. At best - you can get them to do a split investment on their pet AI project and then a bit on real EA stuff. Otherwise, they'll just not contribute anything - and then you have the same capitalistic issue that you'll always have... too much wealth being concentrated into the hands of a few. The people I know in EA are often like, "Well if I take any money out of these guys - it's better than them having it. They have so much and no one person should have that much. It's inefficiently used by their hoarding."