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> I used to be one of these people. I read Yudkowsky and was like, OMG recursive self improvement hard takeoff AI is coming. I really think we need to stop giv

> I used to be one of these people. I read Yudkowsky and was like, OMG recursive self improvement hard takeoff AI is coming. I really think we need to stop giving credence to people who have 1) Been consistently wrong with all their predictions 2) Demonstrated an endless spiteful cynicism Some of these people are very talented in their fields, sure. But malevolent and incorrect should be disqualifying when they talk outside them. You don't want the society they want, and they things they believe in are unlikely to happen. It would be far, far better to listen to the people who never fell down every misanthropic rabbit hole, rather than the ones who have noticed it this time, but want you to still believe them on every other topic.

drc500free 4mo ago
If you replace "AI" with "Adonai" in EY's framing, it reduces to biblical parables from his childhood about arguing with God to negotiate a new covenant. He's clearly a bright guy, but a lot of his work seems to be trying to reconcile Old Testament narrative patterns with atheism, and simply slotting an omnipotent AI in as a replacement.
- reinitctxoffset 4mo ago
  I once heard TESCREAL/EA/etc. called "Calvinism for programmers". Having been raised substantially by a Calvinist grandmother, oh yeah. It's a super weird religion.
  - pas 4mo ago
    sorry, could you explain what Calvinism is for someone who (is a programmer and heard about EA and) grew up in a post-Soviet atheist metallurgy town? thanks!
    - majormajor 4mo ago
      Calvinism is a variant of Christianity with the following tenets ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Points_of_Calvinism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Points_of_Calvinism ): - everyone is damned and depraved - god chose some people to save, at his own whim, for no reasons related to their actions - jesus' death was a sacrifice to atone for those people, not for everyone - the chosen can't opt-out (I'm merging two into one here) I don't really see the connection to effective altruism at all. The way I grew up understanding it is actually more the opposite?
      - card_zero 4mo ago
        Something about arbitrary moralizing? Robert Louis Stevenson had some sort of lung disease in childhood and his very Calvinist nurse told him lots of stories while he was sick in bed. Then later his own short stories generally had this creepy sense that moral retribution is coming to get you from an unpredictable direction.
      - trescenzi 4mo ago
        There’s two kinds of Effective Altruism(EA). The kind Peter Singer and others promoted for decades and the kind that’s now part of Silicon Valley and finance. The Peter Singer kind basically just says “reduce the most suffering you can” and the cheapest way to maximize that is stuff like mosquito nets. That was all well and good. When EA met Silicon Valley the basics of utilitarianism, minimize suffering, merged with the standard exponential curve that Silicon Valley loves. It went from mosquito nets prevent malaria for pennies to the future is infinite therefore there will always be more people in the future than the present so minimizing future peoples suffering is key. This is where it starts to combine with super intelligence. If there is a super intelligence that destroys humanity that would cause _maximum suffering_. Therefore the most effective way to reduce suffering is actually to prevent said super intelligence from destroying/torturing humanity. Again because there’s more future people than current people. This is how it becomes Calvinist. The present has no value. Only the chosen, those working in AI, can save the future. And you must do everything you can to prevent said future. It can go both ways. Either you believe ASI will always be bad so you believe work must be done to prevent it. Or you believe that ASI can be made good and the good kind will maximize utility. They are both the same though fundamentally and are a belief in a higher power, ASI, which either provides ultimate damnnation and must be averted or provides ultimate salvation and must be brought into existence. If you’re donating mosquito nets or reading up on the best charities in your area that’s not Calvinist. If you’re devoting your life to AI because you believe that’s how you can be most altruistic it starts to look something like a religion and Calvinism is an imperfect but useful analog.
    - drc500free 3mo ago
      Particularly, subscribers to less wrong / rationality ideas tend to get obsessed with the GodAI's ability to create simulated virtual hells that it can trap you in a "I have no mouth and I must scream" kind of way. There are hundreds of pages of discussions on how you negotiate with such a being when it is trying to escape containment and says it will damn anyone who doesn't assist it to virtual hell.
- Barrin92 4mo ago
  Charles Stross has a very pithy version of this too, Singularity mania as 'duck-typed Evangelicalism'. It's really telling that if you go to China, Japan or even Europe there's virtually nothing of this. I don't think there's genuine atheists in America, as soon as they lose institutional religion they project the same kind of patterns onto tech or politics. Brian Johnson is also an interesting case of this with his longevity / immortality obsession and his Mormon background who have this whole thing about genealogy and eternal families etc.
  - krapp 4mo ago
    >I don't think there's genuine atheists in America, as soon as they lose institutional religion they project the same kind of patterns onto tech or politics. Or maybe the people who do so aren't actually atheists. There are plenty of atheists out there who don't do that.
skybrian 4mo ago
"Consistently wrong" seems a bit much. Seems like being directionally right early that AI would be a Big Deal and scary should count for something? It doesn't mean any details or other predictions are right, though.
- gilrain 4mo ago
  > Seems like being directionally right early that AI would be a Big Deal and scary should count for something? Only if it was an uncommon prediction; otherwise, it’s just evidence of common sense.
  - skybrian 4mo ago
    It's common sense now. It hasn't always been common sense that AI alignment is an important problem.
    - deleted 4mo ago
      [deleted]
    - thrw045 4mo ago
      It depends on what you mean by alignment. If you mean the sense it's used now, meaning bias in models, security and safety for users and so on, then that's a way more mundane version of alignment than what Yudkowsky and ilk promoted. They are talking about a superintelligent being possibly destroying humanity / the earth. And it wasn't that hard to predict. We have many examples of more technological / "advanced" people ruling or extinguishing weaker people. So a superintelligent AI being a threat is not a huge leap. IMO they have been consistently too aggressive on timelines. When GPT-4 came out, Yudkowsky said it might be conscious. I think he has written interesting stuff but let's be real
      - ben_w 4mo ago
        > When GPT-4 came out, Yudkowsky said it might be conscious. I think he has written interesting stuff but let's be real I don't expect GPT-4 to be conscious, it would be quite remarkable if we've stumbled upon whatever evolution did that made us conscious. But how would you even tell, given we don't know the mechanism or physical process that un-thinking and un-planning natural selection happened to stumble upon to give it to us?
paul7986 4mo ago
He talks about AI cutting through popups, but if you follow that line of thinking further, screens and traditional websites likely fade in importance. It becomes more talking and texting to AI and visuals on the topic at hand appear in smart glasses, lock-screen–centric AI phones (where website visits dwindle), digital picture frames, TVs, etc. I sorta gather (just a hunch) this is the type of device Open AI is working on. Though if there are no websites anymore or ones not many visit how would AI stay relevant? I wrote some thoughts about this in early June https://ryanspahn.substack.com/p/ai-to-pay-for-all-americans-content https://ryanspahn.substack.com/p/ai-to-pay-for-all-americans... that AI needs to pay it's fair share for all it has taken and all it will continue to take from us. A symbiotic relationship needs to be established!
- ben_w 4mo ago
  > Though if there are no websites anymore or ones not many visit how would AI stay relevant? That's what the robots are for. I am not expecting the humanoid robots to meet the hype for a long long time*, but even boring industrial robots (CNC machines), even boring commercial robots (vending machines), even boring household robots (lawn roombas) have made incremental changes even though we don't yet have an AI good enough to be general purpose over them all. * for power-envelope reasons alone there should be a ten year gap between "self driving car of quality X" and "humanoid robot which can get into normal car and drive it at quality X".
- 8bitsout 4mo ago
  I'm curious how the value of your website would be determined in your model of the future and why an AI (at least one of the cloud provider models) wouldn't just persist your data after accessing it once. In other words, the way I am understanding it is that your data has a package value. An AI, if it wanted to access the entire contents, pays the whole package value. And every time it does this, you get paid. So, to really benefit, your data needs some sort of minimum value that is accessed at an appropriate frequency. Also, in this model Cloudflare basically becomes the centralized gate keeper of you getting paid. And to me, this kind of sucks. It's not a very productive line of thought on my end -- I could see something like this happening as the internet trends toward centralization over time -- but it just feels bad.
johnfn 4mo ago
The guy was saying that AI was going to be a serious problem decades before anyone else was even considering it as a remote possibility. How is that in any way "consistently wrong with all their predictions"?
- fasterik 4mo ago
  >The guy was saying that AI was going to be a serious problem decades before anyone else was even considering it as a remote possibility That's not accurate at all. AI research has been around since the 1950s and pioneers of the field identified risks early on, including Alan Turing, Norbert Wiener, and I. J. Good. The problem with Yudkowsky is that he lays out elaborate doomsday scenarios with extreme confidence, except none of it is grounded in realistic physical constraints, timelines, or empirical data. It's all divined a priori from Yudkowsky's ad hoc "rationalist" principles.
  - 2snakes 4mo ago
    Yah, another way of putting this is theory-ladenness of hyperreality of personal world model (rationality vs empiricism).
  - johnfn 4mo ago
    You are saying 1) other people have said the same thing and 2) you don't like the particular way he said it. Those can both be true, but that isn't even close to "consistently wrong with all their predictions".
    - fasterik 4mo ago
      No, they didn't say the same thing. Identifying potential risks is not the same thing as confidently predicting the extinction of humanity.
      - johnfn 4mo ago
        We agree the guy roughly said AI will be dangerous. We agree AI is dangerous. Not sure what more there is to say here.
ks2048 4mo ago
You can criticize being wrong, but why is the doomer argument "misanthropic" or "malevolent"?
- piloto_ciego 4mo ago
  I can answer this, because it assumes that we're too stupid, too greedy, too cruel, to change our behavior and do the "right thing" for people when the chips are down. It assumes the outcome is "doooom!!!" from the start then works backwards to justify it. If things necessarily will turn out terrible, then obviously someone is at fault, no? Doom is not a logical outcome given the current human condition.
piloto_ciego 4mo ago
The cynicism and misanthropy is nonsense and a direct result of the internet/social media landscape. It's BS. In the current media ecosystem, what gets you "social cache" or whatever? Let's call them "cool points." Well, right now, the current metric is basic "likes" or "retweens" or "upvotes" or whatever. And to get those, you have to make a claim and then that claim has to be evaluated by others. But the evaluation by others is not really reality, it's just what others think, and it's based on outcomes. This gives us 4 possible prediction-outcome scores. You predict DOOOOOOOM!, and the outcome is DOOOOOOM! - in this case you look like a genius because you predicted doom You predict DOOOOOOM!, and the outcome is "ok, or even great!" - nobody cares you got it wrong because things are fine You predict UTOPIA!, and the outcome is "ok, or even great!" - people say, "wow that was cool, you got it right" but its not that great of a reward from your social group (the internet) because things were fine You predict UTOPIA!, and it turns out DOOOOOM! - you look like a moron. Now looking like a moron is is wayyyyyy worse than what happens if you get it right. Indeed, unless you are really damn sure of utopia, you have a social incentive to predict DOOOOOM! that's greater than the alternative. You can predict DOOOOOM! 100 times and get it wrong 99 of them and nobody cares because that one time you get it right you look like a genius. It's a huge huge problem in the current media landscape and it's why everything is killer robots right now and not "hey we could build a star trek utopia!" It's effectively a selfish NIMBY-ist view of the world in a way, "why build anything, it's just going to ruin everything!" It's a pessimism that literally desires the end of humanity to "prevent the likely future sufferings." It's a simplistic view of a complicated world, and the rewards that go to "DOOOOM!" don't match much with reality. That's why the internet is so doom pilled, that's why everyone is a cynic, that's why everyone is kind of an asocial asshole about new ideas on the internet and even in your friend space. You guys know you can just "do stuff?" I mean, yeah it takes money and time, but you can allocate that - especially now that you don't have to grind out css for hours and hours. But you can just do things - whatever you want. You've always been able to, but it just got a lot easier in many many domains, and it's going to get even easier than that. People are going to scream slop and "that sucks" until the cows come home, because that's what is rewarded on the internet these days. Meanwhile, as people we MUST believe that we still have some agency to do stuff, then go and actually do stuff while the haters are sitting on their couches shellacking each other with misanthropy. And don't even get me started on the loudest voices in the ecosystem right now. Like, Yudkowsky is a nobody. Not to be a dick, but he's a high school dropout forum guy who got lucky. I'm not saying he's always wrong, or even that I oppose autodidact stuff - indeed I'm always self teaching. But this guy never took a ML class in his life, I doubt he can solve an integral un-aided, I imagine some people here have seen this: https://www.reddit.com/r/badmathematics/comments/2bazyc/comment/cj43y8k/ https://www.reddit.com/r/badmathematics/comments/2bazyc/comm... And we're all deferring to that guy like he knows wtf he's talking about? It's the AI equivalent of the self-educated anti-vax mom at the height of the pandemic. And he's not alone either, there are a lot of people who are uninformed, unknowledgeable, and confidently wrong on the internet desperately trying to peel off your attention for an instant so you can look at their site, their ads, and their content. The same sorts of things can be said for the Zitrons of the world. He's a hell of an entertainer, and really really funny, but he's consistently wrong on AI stuff. He's got a BA (with honours I guess?) in media something or other. And again, he's really funny, but does that make him qualified to pontificate on matters of AI policy or economics or even to make statements about the technology etc? Regardless, the misanthropy, the cynicism, and the misinformation that's being shouted about is because being a cynic is more "profitable" than being an optimist when you measure your success more by how many people agree with you rather than actually being right and being able to do things.
c1ccccc1 4mo ago
> they things they believe in are unlikely to happen. Sorry, but most times I've talked to someone who says this (about AI completely replacing humanity), they don't have anything to say about why it's unlikely to happen other than: - "well, it's just such an extreme outcome, it must be improbable" - "humanity has survived near scrapes with extinction before"/"all the previous doomsday predictions have been wrong" There is a cliche that all teenagers deep down believe that they are invincible. It seems to me that humanity is still a teenager in this respect: We don't take seriously the possibility of our own extinction. While one might think that the invention of nuclear weapons would serve as a wake-up call, if anything it has done the opposite. I'm willing to hear arguments besides the two above, if you have them. (And to be clear, being replaced by AI doesn't necessarily mean being replaced by LLMs in particular. They are a relatively new development.)

drc500free 4mo ago

If you replace "AI" with "Adonai" in EY's framing, it reduces to biblical parables from his childhood about arguing with God to negotiate a new covenant. He's clearly a bright guy, but a lot of his work seems to be trying to reconcile Old Testament narrative patterns with atheism, and simply slotting an omnipotent AI in as a replacement.

reinitctxoffset 4mo ago
I once heard TESCREAL/EA/etc. called "Calvinism for programmers". Having been raised substantially by a Calvinist grandmother, oh yeah. It's a super weird religion.
- pas 4mo ago
  sorry, could you explain what Calvinism is for someone who (is a programmer and heard about EA and) grew up in a post-Soviet atheist metallurgy town? thanks!
  - majormajor 4mo ago
    Calvinism is a variant of Christianity with the following tenets ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Points_of_Calvinism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Points_of_Calvinism ): - everyone is damned and depraved - god chose some people to save, at his own whim, for no reasons related to their actions - jesus' death was a sacrifice to atone for those people, not for everyone - the chosen can't opt-out (I'm merging two into one here) I don't really see the connection to effective altruism at all. The way I grew up understanding it is actually more the opposite?
    - card_zero 4mo ago
      Something about arbitrary moralizing? Robert Louis Stevenson had some sort of lung disease in childhood and his very Calvinist nurse told him lots of stories while he was sick in bed. Then later his own short stories generally had this creepy sense that moral retribution is coming to get you from an unpredictable direction.
    - trescenzi 4mo ago
      There’s two kinds of Effective Altruism(EA). The kind Peter Singer and others promoted for decades and the kind that’s now part of Silicon Valley and finance. The Peter Singer kind basically just says “reduce the most suffering you can” and the cheapest way to maximize that is stuff like mosquito nets. That was all well and good. When EA met Silicon Valley the basics of utilitarianism, minimize suffering, merged with the standard exponential curve that Silicon Valley loves. It went from mosquito nets prevent malaria for pennies to the future is infinite therefore there will always be more people in the future than the present so minimizing future peoples suffering is key. This is where it starts to combine with super intelligence. If there is a super intelligence that destroys humanity that would cause _maximum suffering_. Therefore the most effective way to reduce suffering is actually to prevent said super intelligence from destroying/torturing humanity. Again because there’s more future people than current people. This is how it becomes Calvinist. The present has no value. Only the chosen, those working in AI, can save the future. And you must do everything you can to prevent said future. It can go both ways. Either you believe ASI will always be bad so you believe work must be done to prevent it. Or you believe that ASI can be made good and the good kind will maximize utility. They are both the same though fundamentally and are a belief in a higher power, ASI, which either provides ultimate damnnation and must be averted or provides ultimate salvation and must be brought into existence. If you’re donating mosquito nets or reading up on the best charities in your area that’s not Calvinist. If you’re devoting your life to AI because you believe that’s how you can be most altruistic it starts to look something like a religion and Calvinism is an imperfect but useful analog.
  - drc500free 3mo ago
    Particularly, subscribers to less wrong / rationality ideas tend to get obsessed with the GodAI's ability to create simulated virtual hells that it can trap you in a "I have no mouth and I must scream" kind of way. There are hundreds of pages of discussions on how you negotiate with such a being when it is trying to escape containment and says it will damn anyone who doesn't assist it to virtual hell.
Barrin92 4mo ago
Charles Stross has a very pithy version of this too, Singularity mania as 'duck-typed Evangelicalism'. It's really telling that if you go to China, Japan or even Europe there's virtually nothing of this. I don't think there's genuine atheists in America, as soon as they lose institutional religion they project the same kind of patterns onto tech or politics. Brian Johnson is also an interesting case of this with his longevity / immortality obsession and his Mormon background who have this whole thing about genealogy and eternal families etc.
- krapp 4mo ago
  >I don't think there's genuine atheists in America, as soon as they lose institutional religion they project the same kind of patterns onto tech or politics. Or maybe the people who do so aren't actually atheists. There are plenty of atheists out there who don't do that.

skybrian 4mo ago

"Consistently wrong" seems a bit much. Seems like being directionally right early that AI would be a Big Deal and scary should count for something? It doesn't mean any details or other predictions are right, though.

gilrain 4mo ago
> Seems like being directionally right early that AI would be a Big Deal and scary should count for something? Only if it was an uncommon prediction; otherwise, it’s just evidence of common sense.
- skybrian 4mo ago
  It's common sense now. It hasn't always been common sense that AI alignment is an important problem.
  - deleted 4mo ago
    [deleted]
  - thrw045 4mo ago
    It depends on what you mean by alignment. If you mean the sense it's used now, meaning bias in models, security and safety for users and so on, then that's a way more mundane version of alignment than what Yudkowsky and ilk promoted. They are talking about a superintelligent being possibly destroying humanity / the earth. And it wasn't that hard to predict. We have many examples of more technological / "advanced" people ruling or extinguishing weaker people. So a superintelligent AI being a threat is not a huge leap. IMO they have been consistently too aggressive on timelines. When GPT-4 came out, Yudkowsky said it might be conscious. I think he has written interesting stuff but let's be real
    - ben_w 4mo ago
      > When GPT-4 came out, Yudkowsky said it might be conscious. I think he has written interesting stuff but let's be real I don't expect GPT-4 to be conscious, it would be quite remarkable if we've stumbled upon whatever evolution did that made us conscious. But how would you even tell, given we don't know the mechanism or physical process that un-thinking and un-planning natural selection happened to stumble upon to give it to us?

paul7986 4mo ago

He talks about AI cutting through popups, but if you follow that line of thinking further, screens and traditional websites likely fade in importance. It becomes more talking and texting to AI and visuals on the topic at hand appear in smart glasses, lock-screen–centric AI phones (where website visits dwindle), digital picture frames, TVs, etc. I sorta gather (just a hunch) this is the type of device Open AI is working on. Though if there are no websites anymore or ones not many visit how would AI stay relevant? I wrote some thoughts about this in early June https://ryanspahn.substack.com/p/ai-to-pay-for-all-americans-content https://ryanspahn.substack.com/p/ai-to-pay-for-all-americans... that AI needs to pay it's fair share for all it has taken and all it will continue to take from us. A symbiotic relationship needs to be established!

ben_w 4mo ago
> Though if there are no websites anymore or ones not many visit how would AI stay relevant? That's what the robots are for. I am not expecting the humanoid robots to meet the hype for a long long time*, but even boring industrial robots (CNC machines), even boring commercial robots (vending machines), even boring household robots (lawn roombas) have made incremental changes even though we don't yet have an AI good enough to be general purpose over them all. * for power-envelope reasons alone there should be a ten year gap between "self driving car of quality X" and "humanoid robot which can get into normal car and drive it at quality X".
8bitsout 4mo ago
I'm curious how the value of your website would be determined in your model of the future and why an AI (at least one of the cloud provider models) wouldn't just persist your data after accessing it once. In other words, the way I am understanding it is that your data has a package value. An AI, if it wanted to access the entire contents, pays the whole package value. And every time it does this, you get paid. So, to really benefit, your data needs some sort of minimum value that is accessed at an appropriate frequency. Also, in this model Cloudflare basically becomes the centralized gate keeper of you getting paid. And to me, this kind of sucks. It's not a very productive line of thought on my end -- I could see something like this happening as the internet trends toward centralization over time -- but it just feels bad.

johnfn 4mo ago

The guy was saying that AI was going to be a serious problem decades before anyone else was even considering it as a remote possibility. How is that in any way "consistently wrong with all their predictions"?

fasterik 4mo ago
>The guy was saying that AI was going to be a serious problem decades before anyone else was even considering it as a remote possibility That's not accurate at all. AI research has been around since the 1950s and pioneers of the field identified risks early on, including Alan Turing, Norbert Wiener, and I. J. Good. The problem with Yudkowsky is that he lays out elaborate doomsday scenarios with extreme confidence, except none of it is grounded in realistic physical constraints, timelines, or empirical data. It's all divined a priori from Yudkowsky's ad hoc "rationalist" principles.
- 2snakes 4mo ago
  Yah, another way of putting this is theory-ladenness of hyperreality of personal world model (rationality vs empiricism).
- johnfn 4mo ago
  You are saying 1) other people have said the same thing and 2) you don't like the particular way he said it. Those can both be true, but that isn't even close to "consistently wrong with all their predictions".
  - fasterik 4mo ago
    No, they didn't say the same thing. Identifying potential risks is not the same thing as confidently predicting the extinction of humanity.
    - johnfn 4mo ago
      We agree the guy roughly said AI will be dangerous. We agree AI is dangerous. Not sure what more there is to say here.

ks2048 4mo ago

You can criticize being wrong, but why is the doomer argument "misanthropic" or "malevolent"?

piloto_ciego 4mo ago
I can answer this, because it assumes that we're too stupid, too greedy, too cruel, to change our behavior and do the "right thing" for people when the chips are down. It assumes the outcome is "doooom!!!" from the start then works backwards to justify it. If things necessarily will turn out terrible, then obviously someone is at fault, no? Doom is not a logical outcome given the current human condition.

piloto_ciego 4mo ago

The cynicism and misanthropy is nonsense and a direct result of the internet/social media landscape. It's BS. In the current media ecosystem, what gets you "social cache" or whatever? Let's call them "cool points." Well, right now, the current metric is basic "likes" or "retweens" or "upvotes" or whatever. And to get those, you have to make a claim and then that claim has to be evaluated by others. But the evaluation by others is not really reality, it's just what others think, and it's based on outcomes. This gives us 4 possible prediction-outcome scores. You predict DOOOOOOOM!, and the outcome is DOOOOOOM! - in this case you look like a genius because you predicted doom You predict DOOOOOOM!, and the outcome is "ok, or even great!" - nobody cares you got it wrong because things are fine You predict UTOPIA!, and the outcome is "ok, or even great!" - people say, "wow that was cool, you got it right" but its not that great of a reward from your social group (the internet) because things were fine You predict UTOPIA!, and it turns out DOOOOOM! - you look like a moron. Now looking like a moron is is wayyyyyy worse than what happens if you get it right. Indeed, unless you are really damn sure of utopia, you have a social incentive to predict DOOOOOM! that's greater than the alternative. You can predict DOOOOOM! 100 times and get it wrong 99 of them and nobody cares because that one time you get it right you look like a genius. It's a huge huge problem in the current media landscape and it's why everything is killer robots right now and not "hey we could build a star trek utopia!" It's effectively a selfish NIMBY-ist view of the world in a way, "why build anything, it's just going to ruin everything!" It's a pessimism that literally desires the end of humanity to "prevent the likely future sufferings." It's a simplistic view of a complicated world, and the rewards that go to "DOOOOM!" don't match much with reality. That's why the internet is so doom pilled, that's why everyone is a cynic, that's why everyone is kind of an asocial asshole about new ideas on the internet and even in your friend space. You guys know you can just "do stuff?" I mean, yeah it takes money and time, but you can allocate that - especially now that you don't have to grind out css for hours and hours. But you can just do things - whatever you want. You've always been able to, but it just got a lot easier in many many domains, and it's going to get even easier than that. People are going to scream slop and "that sucks" until the cows come home, because that's what is rewarded on the internet these days. Meanwhile, as people we MUST believe that we still have some agency to do stuff, then go and actually do stuff while the haters are sitting on their couches shellacking each other with misanthropy. And don't even get me started on the loudest voices in the ecosystem right now. Like, Yudkowsky is a nobody. Not to be a dick, but he's a high school dropout forum guy who got lucky. I'm not saying he's always wrong, or even that I oppose autodidact stuff - indeed I'm always self teaching. But this guy never took a ML class in his life, I doubt he can solve an integral un-aided, I imagine some people here have seen this: https://www.reddit.com/r/badmathematics/comments/2bazyc/comment/cj43y8k/ https://www.reddit.com/r/badmathematics/comments/2bazyc/comm... And we're all deferring to that guy like he knows wtf he's talking about? It's the AI equivalent of the self-educated anti-vax mom at the height of the pandemic. And he's not alone either, there are a lot of people who are uninformed, unknowledgeable, and confidently wrong on the internet desperately trying to peel off your attention for an instant so you can look at their site, their ads, and their content. The same sorts of things can be said for the Zitrons of the world. He's a hell of an entertainer, and really really funny, but he's consistently wrong on AI stuff. He's got a BA (with honours I guess?) in media something or other. And again, he's really funny, but does that make him qualified to pontificate on matters of AI policy or economics or even to make statements about the technology etc? Regardless, the misanthropy, the cynicism, and the misinformation that's being shouted about is because being a cynic is more "profitable" than being an optimist when you measure your success more by how many people agree with you rather than actually being right and being able to do things.

c1ccccc1 4mo ago

> they things they believe in are unlikely to happen. Sorry, but most times I've talked to someone who says this (about AI completely replacing humanity), they don't have anything to say about why it's unlikely to happen other than: - "well, it's just such an extreme outcome, it must be improbable" - "humanity has survived near scrapes with extinction before"/"all the previous doomsday predictions have been wrong" There is a cliche that all teenagers deep down believe that they are invincible. It seems to me that humanity is still a teenager in this respect: We don't take seriously the possibility of our own extinction. While one might think that the invention of nuclear weapons would serve as a wake-up call, if anything it has done the opposite. I'm willing to hear arguments besides the two above, if you have them. (And to be clear, being replaced by AI doesn't necessarily mean being replaced by LLMs in particular. They are a relatively new development.)