7 ms·
Sex, AI, and the Apocalypse
- irickt 17d agodupe https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49738411 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49738411
- virtualritz 17d agoSee 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49737985
- RobRivera 17d agoThats certainly a title
- bityard 17d agoI'd watch the movie for sure
- vinkelhake 17d agoI'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.
- CoolestBeans 17d agoAs someone on the periphery looking in, it's because they make up a large web. Its an extended community that shares a lot of people between its many arms. There are also some shared values between all these people, even at the very extended edges. For example, they share a superiority complex. From my experience, most of these people believe that they see further or know more because they believe in certain things that are, on their face, unintuitive. I don't want to pass more judgement than to say, having members believe contradictory or outright falsehoods is a thing that cults do. I'm not saying this is a cult because I haven't seriously sat down and thought about it but that is reminiscent of something cults do.
- woah 17d agoRead HPMOR. Unlike what I thought it might be, the protagonist does not solve problems through pointing out logical fallacies or something. Harry Potter is a straight-up superhero who is infinitely smarter and more talented than anyone around him. It's not so much rationality as a narcissistic fantasy that goes on for hundreds (thousands?) of pages. Even though I had been well-disposed to rationalism and read HPMOR to learn more, I could not take Yudkowsky seriously in any way after I gave up halfway through.
- CoolestBeans 17d agoHad a similar experience trying to read that. You know you meet or have to work with people like that in your life and hopefully you use those experiences to remind yourself what kind of person you don't want to be.
- lstodd 17d ago"There are also some shared values between all these people" is guilt by association by definition. The rest of your comment is even worse. Cults? Consider AGW cult where people reject any attempt of a discourse because "science is settled". Which is equivalent to "God told us this".
- eszed 17d agoFor those of you not familiar with the acronym, "AGW" stands for Anthropogenic Global Warming. (Though, Istodd, please correct me if there is another meaning of which I am not aware. I would be embarrassed to have impugned your credibility in error.)
- totallymike 17d agoI mean they did claim that pointing to science to support your position in an argument is tantamount to dogmatic faith, so I don’t think you need to worry about impugning what isn’t there
- jplusequalt 17d agoIt's a big tent community, in part because these people spend so much time entertaining wild, speculative hypotheticals, which in the process allows some of these particularly toxic ideas to spread.
- iamnothere 17d agoThis is how the internet works now. There are only two clubs, and if you refuse to be associated with either one then someone will helpfully come along and assign a group for you.
- throwaway13337 17d agoThe 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).
- skybrian 17d agoWe all use the same Internet. I would find it strange for anyone who's seriously interested in AI to have never heard of Yudkowsky or Scott Alexander or the Rationalist movement. I'd expect anyone interested in the field to have at least tried reading some of their articles over the years. Like, if you never heard of them, were you living in a cave or something? It would be like never having heard of Y Combinator or Richard Stallman. On the face of it, this is no more suspicious than reading the same best-selling books. Being in touch with what's going on doesn't necessarily mean people agree.
- throwaway13337 17d agoThat's true. But even saying I disagree with Yudkowsky and having an opinion about that /is/ a framing. My perspective has shifted because I read these things which makes me more homogeneous with the group even if I disagree. It's the framing that is important. We fell into a particular framing. We don't have a vocabulary to think about this stuff in a different way. This is water to us. We don't see it. I'd like to see some more entropy in the system. More out-of-distribution ways to think of things. Because I think we over-indexed on some pretty shitty ways to see the world.
- kridsdale1 17d agoTalking to the incredible talent in the Chinese Labs is likely a good way to do that.
- petesergeant 17d agoI'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.
- blactuary 17d agoI have great news then, that absolutely isn't going to happen. And the EA crowd deserves all of the potshots and more
- devindotcom 17d agoI think it's more of a Chicken Little situation. Then the wolf ate us all up.
- wtinasky 17d ago[dead]
- lbrito 17d agoI'd rather have the world end than live in a world where EAs are listened to or respected.
- againstapples 17d agoI agree they’re kinda weird but are they really that bad?
- CGMthrowaway 17d agoHopefully 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.
- deleted 17d ago[deleted]
- arcticfox 17d agoThis 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.
- jackmott42 17d agoThere is a wide gulf between catastrophe and killing us all, and its not just that these people are weird, they seem to be complete clowns, tossing out % predictions about incalculable future states like spock in star trek. Total clown show.
- solenoid0937 17d agoYes, I wonder who the clowns are: 1. Researchers that have forgotten more about this technology than the average HNer will ever learn 2. Random HNers that think that suddenly they understand the problem better than researchers that have spent their lives on it This is just anti intellectualism in a different coat, and it's not much different from people denying environmental scientists talking about climate change or biologists talking about vaccines. But everyone here thinks they are the smart protagonist and certainly they would never hold a position so silly!
- password54321 17d agoStop doing this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority
- solenoid0937 17d agoIt's not my job to re explain AI safety from scratch to every uninformed take on the internet. Authority serves a useful purpose. Having humility and delegating a topic to people that understand the topic better than you is not a bad thing, and certainly preferred to this state.
- deleted 17d ago[deleted]
- fhdhcndndn 17d agoA 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.
- croemer 17d ago[dead]
- narmiouh 17d agoThe 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.
- kridsdale1 17d agoAs Nixon did.
- narmiouh 16d agoWell at least at that time, bi-partisan ethos was at a level that such acts would actually lead to an impeachment or forced resignation.
- deleted 17d ago[deleted]
- ridicthread 17d ago[dead]
- cameldrv 17d agoWhen 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.
- tbrownaw 17d agoThe basic problem is that out-of-sample predictions don't work very well.
- cameldrv 17d agoDepends on the person. Some people will say wild stuff like Neptune exists or black holes exist and they will be right.
- dinfinity 16d agoExactly. The vast majority of people never progress beyond naive extrapolation into the near future, even in the face of clear evidence that their previous extrapolations were wrong. "Nobody will want to walk around with mobile phones. Who wants to be available any time and everywhere?" People said similar things about Bluetooth headsets and are saying similar things about AR glasses. And these are very simple in terms of reasoning about how the technology evolves and the probability of adoption by people, yet troves of people get it ridiculously wrong; what they experience every day seems so normal that they can't imagine it ever changing. Something as transformative and monumental as (potentially) an entirely new and powerful form of intelligence arising is far, far beyond the imagination of most. I don't mean that in that they are fundamentally incapable of it, but that it takes having been exposed to a bunch of counter-intuitive logic and reasoning about how the universe works, which most people just have not been.
- thrwaway5771 17d ago[dead]
- elendilm 17d agoI 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.
- yummybrainz 17d agoMy favorite writing of his is: https://www.yudkowsky.net/rational/virtues https://www.yudkowsky.net/rational/virtues
- elendilm 16d agoRevisiting after 10 years, it was nice reading through all those virtues again. Thank you for sharing the link. After more than 2 decades of continuous building and problem solving, I see a lot of good things in that article and a handful of places where it goes wrong but was not apparent at the time. But the content is solid as a general path to correctness and truth. In hindsight, a lot of those virtues were not just good, but correct. The nameless void at the end is the most potent of them all.
- iamnothere 17d agoI hate seeing all the blind negativity towards the rationalists, both because the general idea of improving structured thinking is good, and because there were some great essays on Lesswrong and adjacent blogs over the years. People who can’t see that are blinded by their own bias. That said, the most interesting people and discussions seem to have moved on, and now it’s more of a social club. I haven’t read anything compelling from there for a long time. Adjacent bloggers like Scott still put out interesting writing, but their output has dropped significantly.
- 16d ago
- underlipton 17d ago[dead]
- TacticalCoder 17d ago> 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 product TFA 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.
- raincole 17d agoIt 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.
- MarkusQ 17d ago> 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.
- lovich 17d ago> 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.
- ribs 17d agoYeah, I did too. But it doesn’t mean we’re, like, hanging out with ‘em Although perhaps we are excessively online
- lovich 17d agoI think I’m comfortable, even though the aspersion is on me, saying that anyone who can recognize Aella is too chronically online. The zizians were a national headline and you only need to be plugged into US politics a little bit to know of Curtis yarvin given his influence on Peter thiel, musk, and Vance so I’d give knowledge of them a pass Edit: I also know of the sanely diagram meme for her so that’s even more evidence. Maybe I should detox off the internet for a bit
- ChickeNES 17d ago> anyone who can recognize Aella is too chronically online. I dunno, I think a ton of people remember the garden gnomes (I know I do, when I saw the name I was like "nah, can't be", but then I googled lmao)
- walrus01 17d agoOh, 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+the+bastards+zizians https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=behind+th...
- jmoggr 17d agoThe 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.
- Arubis 17d agoProbably best read with [Venkatesh Rao on EA Safety](https://substack.com/home/post/p-216194276 https://substack.com/home/post/p-216194276) as a companion piece.
- disgruntledphd2 16d agoRao's piece is much, much better. You should submit it as a top-level link!
- Arubis 16d agoI took this advice and posted at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49757722 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49757722. Thanks for the nudge! Just generally speaking, I find Rao's writing to be a really good, well-informed counterbalance to...well, darn near everyone else that writes in the same sectors these days.
- stupidfurrythin 17d ago>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
- alexpotato 17d agoI 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_7LK7zqubtlw8tM2Tli5FS https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLUouZgbTp2o_7LK7zqubt...
- tbrownaw 17d agoWith 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.
- jgord 17d agoWe 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.
- Animats 17d agoIf 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/ https://www.slutcon.com/
- Viliam1234 17d ago> Tickets are $3,300 to $10,000. Joining the Illuminati who rule the world is surprisingly cheap. Next time a similar article gets on HN front page, it will be about you!
- profstasiak 16d agoTry joining Bildenberg group not a whore house
- augment_me 17d agoThis seems just like a money grab of tech bros who didn't develop social skills. Look at the schedule: How to get the hot girl to like you Flirting for the submissive man What women want, taken from sex novels 80% of the schedule seems like self-help talks for men
- swat535 16d agoIt reads like the rich version of traditional pickup artist "seminars".. that space is now occupied by the likes of Andrew Tate I suppose..
- afedghionoi 17d agoWord of advice: don't take advice on sex from people who famously don't shower. I have heard from reputable sources that Aella smells like a latrine.
- upwosjfjlakf 16d ago
- epsteingpt 17d agoThe best piece of reporting on the subject I have ever seen.
- LastTrain 17d agoThis writing smells like the aggrandizement of subcultures seen in early Wired articles.
- ball_of_lint 17d agoUseless 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 17d agoReally struck by some of the parallels with other "perfection cults", e.g. the Oneida Community circa 1850's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oneida_Community https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oneida_Community The Oneida's also produced a violent assassin: Charles Guiteau https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_J._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...
- cindyllm 16d ago[dead]
- S-E-P 17d agoIt 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.
- kypro 17d agoAs 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.
- eloisius 17d agoThe overarching reason people see y’all as a group is the insufferable superiority fantasy that you walk around with, exemplified by utterances like “we can’t do the groupthink thing” or whatever the screed written on your profile is.
- kypro 16d agoI can only speak for myself, but I definitely don't see my inability to socially align with others as a superiority thing. It can give me some predictive advantage when there's social stigma around a certain belief. But that's really about it. In most cases, especially professionally, it's very hard to navigate and I'd rather be naturally more aligned with people. But yes, my profile is cringe and I'm sorry someone has downvoted you for sharing your view. There should be less of a taboo about telling people we dislike them if that is how we feel. It's better than to lie.
- eloisius 16d agoI appreciate your thoughtful reply, and sorry for misreading your words as superiority complex. The straw man I thought I was responding to is the type of person who believes their inability (or unwillingness) to level with people is evidence of their Spock-like intellectual superiority, which I find juvenile and grating. The p(doom) stuff is certainly cringe though, and I'd spend a few cycles evaluating what your intention is for flashing your p(doom) around like a badge.
- deleted 15d ago
- hirvi74 17d agoI'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.
- aidenn0 16d agoThat's a question without a good answer; compare asking the same question about e.g. Thomas Road Baptist Church (minus the "Bay Area" part). Many members of the Effective Altruism movement have given away substantial fractions of their income to e.g. paying for mosquito nets in Africa. A non-trivial fraction have donated a kidney to a stranger. They're also an onanistic Bay Area group.
- zeckalpha 17d agoThis 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.
- z3ratul163071 17d agoea would turn out to be the millennial's peak "gift" to humanity: the most spoiled, detached and deranged group that will either end or enslave all.
- jalapenok 16d ago[dead]
- aidenn0 16d agoAnyone know why this site brings Firefox to its knees (I'm on a Ryzen 9700X with 64GiB of RAM and scrolling has about a 2-second lag)?
- verdverm 15d agorelated / additional https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/ea-safety https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/ea-safety