> these are examples that highlight our tendency to panic about things No, they are examples that highlight the tendency of certain sorts of people to panic ab

> these are examples that highlight our tendency to panic about things No, they are examples that highlight the tendency of certain sorts of people to panic about things. You're over-focusing on the objects and under-focusing on the subjects. There are two heuristics at work here: 1. People have been talking smack about AI for a long time. Remember that GPT-2 was advertised as too dangerous to release. GPT 2. Google claimed Imagen was too dangerous to release. Others claimed open source models were dangerous. Or that foundation models were too dangerous. This has been a pattern for a while. A bunch of people believed them and became AI safety extremists. Then ChatGPT made a much better version available to all, including image generation and ... it was fine. The world didn't get more dangerous. Data point: the people who said AI safety wasn't a real problem were correct. The people who said everyone should panic were wrong. It makes sense to generalize from this experience. 2. There is a certain class of person, let's call them intellectuals, whose status and income depends on their production of attention-grabbing claims. If these people stop being interesting then their careers shrivel and die. This leads such people to prioritize making claims that are optimized for virality, but not optimized for being true. Claiming the world will end if they aren't listened to is the natural evolutionary end-game here because it's impossible to be more attention-grabbing or viral than that. Data point: intellectuals specifically have made a long stream of claims about supposedly world-ending risks, which were later falsified. Data point: Since leaving psychiatry, Scott Alexander is primarily a public intellectual. it is important for him to make several interesting claims a week, which is not very easy. So it's expected for him to be attracted to claims like AI X-Risk regardless of genuine risk, and he's a very intelligent guy so can easily convince himself of things he'd like to be true (not in this case that X-Risk is high, but that X-Risk should be considered as if it might be high). Add it up and what you see is that the people in society who ignore intellectualist catastrophizing are repeatedly the winners. Sam Altman got his researcher's fantasies under control, got AI launched and are now the big winner. Other AI groups (Google) stayed in fantasy-land for far too long and were dragged kicking and screaming back to reality, and they are not the big winners.