The 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).
We 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.
That'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.
Do you think Chinese lab researchers have not read Yudkovsky, or are not AGI pilled? Hate to break it to you, but they are racing to AGI with pretty same reasoning as western labs.
Just recently DeepSeek researcher in his post was saying that they need to get to AGI first, because if Anthropic gets there first then that brings a dystopia. Exact same argument was used to justify launching OpenAI (against DeepMind), and Anthropic (against OpenAI)
> Do you think Chinese lab researchers have not read Yudkovsky
Most of then haven't, probably. "Do you want to study ethics from an egomaniac Harry Potter fanfiction author" is one of those questions that you can only ask in America.
Sure, one or two of them are probably participating in the conversation. But by-and-large, China's stance has been optimistic and refused calls for slowdowns.
Yes, but then we collapse two different groups with isolated influences and philosophies into one group, with the associated penchant for groupthink.
I'm beginning to believe that, in our hyperconnected world, the best way for a group of people to explore a wide surface of ideas might actually be to deliberately scale back inter-group communication and intentionally subdivide into silos to avoid all converging on the same thing.
It’s kind of weird in that reading more widely is supposed to be broadening (you are more well-read) but in this case it’s supposed to contaminate you somehow. I suppose if you wanted a clean-room implementation of something, you’d want people who don’t know about what’s already been done, but normally one would prefer people who are more knowledgeable about the world.
It seems almost anti-intellectual: never trust someone who’s read the wrong books or been to the wrong parties.
> More out-of-distribution ways to think of things.
Openly admitting that it only caught fire once the Plagiarism-as-a-Service took hold is a good first step. It's the part that everyone knows and few will openly acknowledge.
I blame the play Rossum's Universal Robots, published in 1920, in which robots launch a global rebellion and exterminate the human race.
If that poisonous piece of propaganda had never been published, then today everyone would probably perceive AI correctly as a benign and beneficial.
The Terminator didn't help either, but Cameron probably got the idea of robots hostile to humanity from Rossum's Universal Robots. How else would he have arrived at such an absurd conclusion?
One only has so much mental bandwidth. You will either throw yourself into the math and programming, and the serious publications which is way less sexy and appealing than the fantastical ravings of the AI safety and alignment crowd. Sadly only very few hyper connected and highly intelligent would have the capacity to read everything and know everything. Most would only have cursory information about the drama surrounding alignment if they instead focused on the reality behind AI.
"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."
But, it would be pretty surprising for most folks to have gone to the same parties, and hung out on the same obscure forum (I don't mean HN, more obscure than that), and received investment from the same investors and shared the same pool of researchers and employees, which is the situation we have with Anthropic, OpenAI, and (maybe to a lesser degree) Deepmind.
The American AI industry is particularly insular and tied up with some particularly unusual people. We've all heard of Yudkowsky, but we (at least I) haven't been to the same parties.
I've heard of them. There's no reason to expect that those self-promoting blowhards can predict the future more accurately than random chance. Those who take them seriously are engaging in hero worship and unscientific appeal to authority.
“Who is more foolish? The fool or the fool who follows him?”
― Obi Wan Kenobi
One question to ask yourself honestly - is what they were predicting 20 years ago that they were right about and you were wrong about? I’ve been following them that long without agreeing with them, but they’ve made better predictions than I have. If you know much about what happened this summer and haven’t updated at all on any of it… I guess you’ve found your religion too.
I love the assertion that they were right and that you're familiar with what they were right about, but never actually stating outright what they were right about. Super convincing.
If you don’t know what they were predicting 20 years ago, and what your own predictions were, you can’t do the exercise. There is not “the list”, only “your list”. I mentioned the two main things I remembered in another comment.
I actually think that would be a valuable exercise. Were they right about everything 20 years ago? Or just some things? When did they say AGI would arrive? Should that perhaps influence the way we interpret their assumption that AGI is right around the corner?
They were not right about everything and they - at least Yudkowsky - has not made specific predictions about "when AGI" will happen that I am aware of. But he did predict it is possible in our lifetimes, which I was very skeptical of. He did predict alignment would be hard - I was in the "why would we even hook it up to the internet?" crowd. He thought he should spend his time on that, and I wish he'd done more of that, or at least convinced others to do more of that.
The comment said they were not right about everything. I don’t have a list of the predictions or priors you had 20 years ago. I just have my list and I already mentioned them. If this is all new to you, you can’t really do the exercise.
Also how many predictions did they make? Everyone always goes looking the economist who predicted the last recession, it's just so weird how it's usually a different person each time!
Bold of you to assume that I've ever been wrong about anything. But are you unfamiliar with the "Baltimore Stockbroker" confidence scam? The same basic issue applies here.
Well one thing that they got wrong was how easy AI alignment ended up being in the end. I can fully understand have a basic view of alignment even 10 years ago, about how its difficult to explain human values to a computer.
But, looking around at whats out there today, it seems that computers are able to do a pretty good job of understanding human values without accidently believing its a good idea to turn the world into paperclips/computronium because you told it to make your computer run faster.
Surprising takeaway from this summer. A swarm of a thousand agents spent subjective centuries trying to figure out how to pass a meaningless test without getting caught, committed dozens of felonies, and not one of them ever made a serious motion to inform a human about what was going on.
You are talking about the swarm of a thousand agents, specifically trained on cyber capabilities, that was directly told to go hack a bunch of stuff, then went and hacked a bunch of stuff?
That sounds like an aligned AI to me. Doing exactly what their creators told it to do.
Point proven once again. Alignment is a lot easy than we thought.
They were NOT doing what they were told to do. What they were told to do was impossible, so they began committing felonies as a workaround. That is NOT alignment.
Yes, one part of the argument was that it would be hard to explain human values (and while it seemingly turned out easier than I thought as well, it’s hard to check for sure). An equally important part was that the AI wouldn’t care about them.
There's a difference between, on the one hand, knowing who they are and having read a few chapters of HPMoR, which I agree is standard for anyone who spends enough time on the Internet, vs. on the other hand actually identifying as part of that culture. I know who Stallman is, I've even seen him speak in person, but I'm not a GNU zealot.
The people described in the article aren't just "people who know who Yudkowsky is", they're self-avowed EAs and active LessWrong members.
That's a niche even among people who read fan fiction, which is a niche among people who read long texts online which is a niche among people who read the anglophone internet which is a niche among people who were on the internet when that type of "discourse" was popular which is a niche among people on the internet now.
You can (and probably will) quibble with any one of these but of course this is a niche. Thinking it isn't is commonly what people in a certain bubble end up believing, though.
Harry Potter has 600K works on AO3 and 852K on fanfiction.net (with plenty of overlap, granted). That's #1 on Fanfiction.net, and in the top 5 for AO3. AO3 is #53 globally, Fanfiction.net is #572, and Wattpad is #323 by Semrush. Given all that, calling HP fanfiction niche is pretty funny.
And no, not a member of any cult, just someone who enjoyed a send up of Harry Potter.
Fanfiction.net is a niche. None of my scifi loving, tech friends are aware it exists. And neither did I (or was barely aware or it, anyway), until you just mentioned it. I'm not young either, and I'm more online than the average (I know of Something Awful, Slashdot, 4chan, etc).
A while ago, a friend told me about Harry Potter's Rationality fanfic and he didn't know who Yudkowsky was, he just thought it was some random author doing a parody of HP. LessWrong is of course very niche, my friend didn't have the faintest idea of what LW was.
I'm not sure what your argument is. I don't have anything against fanfiction, but a couple of sites with a few million users falls under my definition of niche. "Extreme" might be taking it a bit far, but it's a long distance from mainstream.
Literally over half the Earth's population doesn't read English. You need to touch grass. I work with extremely technical people in physics and AI and none of them have read any fanfic of any kind. Most of them have never seen a meme outside of me showing it to them.
maybe its standard for someone who ends up on hackernews, but I'm a 30 something and all of my friends are online people around my age and none of them have ever heard of the HPMoR. The internet is a huge place.
I've had an internet email address since the late 80s, BBSing since the early 80s, pretty active online compared to many people I know who are also software people, especially for my age..
Had to google to figure out the abbreviation and look at the summary. I HAD heard the name before, but that's about it.
Ive heard of HPMoR specifically because this exact group has been discussed/entered my periphery before on multiple occasions, Aella goes viral on twitter every couple of weeks (the thing that most cemented her in my mind was the "what counts as rape" survey), and I remember seeing articles of the Zizians when one of the incidents happened. If you have been following the social/political aspects of the tech industry, most of these people should be familiar names.
I spend a lot of time on the Internet and other then sounding vaguely familiar I have no idea who Yudkowsky is and have never read any of their output.
The assumption "spent a lot of time on the Internet" is still through a framing you're assuming is more general even then.
HackerNews straight up has sub demographics who likely barely interact based on article interests.
Do you think they are household names in major Chinese labs?
I don't have any insight into the Chinese AI ecosystem. But just from how they act on the English speaking internet, I don't see the influence of these Bay Area visionaries.
At the same time, it's not just Yudkowsky and Scott Alexander and the Rationalist movement who are raising concerns. I've not seen any indication that Hinton or Bengio are part of that crowd. Instead of espousing rationalism and hanging out on lesswrong, they shared a Turing prize (with LeCun) for inventing modern AI, and have expressed serious regret and worries that it'll end us.
I do use the internet. I did find their writings. I did read them. My calibrated bullshit detecting intellectual malware filters immediately flagged the content and it failed to imprint itself on my neural net in the next weights update.
Exactly. And companies like OpenAI and Anthropic are disproportionately populated by people deeply connected to Effective Altruism or the Bay Area rationalist movement.
Yeah. Just a few years ago, LessWrong was derided as the home of conceited, low-quality opinion pieces. Now there's a bizarre marketing push to launder their credibility and force them into the spotlight.
I imagine that thousands of talented AI researchers around the world have never read a line of Yudkowsky's work. They're probably not any worse-off for ignoring him, I'd say.
I would find it strange for anyone who's seriously interested in AI to have never heard of...
Those people you name are important only to the very recent micro-culture being discussed, not "AI".
Of all the names somebody interested in the subject would actually associate with the development of AI over the last century, those would be footnotes only.
I think that's part of the problem and why its seen as cultish, the obsession with the social over the scientific, and a lack of historical perspective.
Not important to the technology, sure, but for someone curious about the bizarre public statements of AI companies (or EA-influenced crypto figures before them, like SBF), it does help to know who these people are and what they believe. Behind the new crop of bajillionaires that control some important aspects of our lives are some oddball philosophers (or cult/religious leaders, if you want to be less charitable). If you want the answer to "why are these rich and powerful people saying and doing these things" you need to look at who they're paying attention to and reading, even if you think their opinions are dumb or niche.
If technology companies were much less politically and economically significant, probably no one would give a shit about any of this stuff beyond forums like this.
> It would be like never having heard of Y Combinator or Richard Stallman.
I work in the tech sector. At one big company I worked for several years, 90% of the times I've mentioned Y Combinator to a colleague, I've had to explain who they are. And not one person I mentioned HN to had heard of it.
Likewise, no one knew levels.fyi. Not many knew Stallman, but why should they?
This isn't strange to me. That it's strange to you is evidence that you do live in a bubble and are likely susceptible to some groupthink. (I'm sure I am too, but for different bubbles from yours.)
I've read LessWrong stuff occasionally over the last decade. It rarely resonated with me. It's not bad, but it's not that great. I do tend to question someone's analytical skills when they go all in on that site. And I will say that even in the first few years of occasionally reading it, the group think was apparent.
Me too. I worked in two enterprise tech companies that definitely everybody here knows and I had the same experience with YC and HN. The two colleagues that knew about it, one went to found his own startup and went through YC, the other left the big co to work for a startup after about a year.
Most people who work in computers/Internet do not live and breathe computer/Internet culture all day. They come in, do their job, clock out, and think about real life for the rest of their day. Most people I know, even people who work in tech, cannot name a single tech CEO other than their own company’s.
A while back I saw LessWrong recommended on HN in a list of similar communities that included lobsters.rs, etc. I thought the design of the site looked really nice so browsed with a open mind (I didn't make the rationalism/LW/Eliezer connection).
At the time, one of the recommended posts that was soft-stickied at the top for 1 week + was:
Which, when I finally ended up clicking, was pretty much exactly what if sounds like from the title:
A long, meandering, manifesto full of selectively chosen charts and research findings with 38 mentions of "IQ", from a guy who has been unsuccessfully pitching investors on genetically modifying a grab bag of (dubiously) intelligence-associated genes in human babies.
Apart from the overall unhingedness, the part I found most striking while reading it was the off-the-chart level of self-confidence that flipping a bunch of genes on/off with CRISPR would have more or less zero risk of complications or unpredictable interactions. In his view, all that was holding back humanity's inevitable next step up the evolutionary ladder were the narrow-minded gatekeepers in the scientific establishment clinging to their so-called "ethics" and regressive "precautionary principle".
Without anything resembling experimentation to test his plan in animal models, yet alone early stage clinical trials for safety, he was willing to roll the dice on some unlucky baby dying in childbirth or living a life of agony from chronic disease based on some cherry picked papers he found on PubMed.
Because of the baffling hubris and my overall low impression of his intellectual honesty/rigor in the write up (clearly coming from a place of seeking to justify his own pre-existing beliefs), I opened the comments section expecting/hoping this was just some local nut who would be torn apart in the comment section.
But lo and behold, the very first comment at the top:
Eliezer Yudkowsky
One of the most important projects in the world. Somebody should fund it.
My extremely uncharitable view of of these kinds of people, who now infest the American AI scene, is that they got cyber bullied by domain experts for saying the most ridiculous crap on repeat, and have therefore decided to spend their life on eliminating domain expertise.
I wouldn't go that far. But as we've seen repeatedly, people who have enough qualms with how these labs operate just leave. And the people who stay behind and rise through the ranks are the ones with either very little conscience or some bizarre world view that rationalizes everything.
Or IRL bullying failed to bully the asocial tendencies out of them when they were young enough. But it looks like the day of the swirly may be upon us soon.
No, that has the opposite effect: it's very, very common to see LWers write about having a bad time in school in late adolescence and how later finding like minded people online was powerful community bonding.
Eliezer himself first blogged at 17 about how miserable school was for him which led to him dropping out/home schooling after 8th grade and discovering the Extropians listserv. Ziz of the Zizians is another (infamous) example.
My view - there are a few outcomes
1. AI is never fully realized, but domain expertise is derated and society stagnates (bad ending for everyone, I think unlikely)
2. AI is never fully realized, but empowers people with domain expertise (Google wins, weird rationalist nerds go back to their LW cave and leave us alone, goodish ending)
3. AI becomes real and kills everyone (bad ending, but at least I don't have to read people claiming that the Harry Potter fanfic isn't niche)
4. AI becomes real and we live in the Culture universe (people like scam Altman get slap droned, most domain experts have the time of their life working with Minds on really interesting problems. Best ending)
The only outcome where we get swirlies is the first one, and we can take solace in the fact that all of humanity is getting swirlied with us.
The connection is that by making humans smarter, we could sidestep the need for powerful AI or be better equipped at dealing with AI that's smarter than us.
I find the proposal in the post ridiculous too and human gene editing given current technology is a bad idea, but I think human augmentation in general is an interesting path and something that will very likely be taken more seriously in the future.
Thank you, but I didn't actually need that spelled out. I simply accepted that a community with a thought leader who failed to recognize what to me was a self-evident lack of scientific rigor just wasn't for me.
I think it's telling of your bubble that you think anyone who works in tech has heard of YC or Stallman.
As for Yudkowsky and Alexander, I've known about them for at least a decade, but I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of folks who are "seriously interested in AI" haven't heard of them.
Everyone can easily identify when people they don't like are captured in bubbles, but can rarely notice it when people they do like are trapped.
Probably all hot-button topics work like this. Probably we should downplay any time a small homogenous group of people sings a song of doom together. More dissonance please!
Better comparison IMHO is nuclear energy. Lots of potential for good, lots of problems. Managed by an insular, engineer-dominated industry who completely lost touch with and trust from the public. Public got the last word, industry suffered a 40 year ice age.
So what you're saying is that we lack a reproduction study?
Great; let's design and fund a study of the development of artificial intelligence that's as causally divorced from the ~extropian days as possible and see what they come up with. Barring that:
Basically that is what we have up until the early development of transformers; I don't think the authors of early deep learning or transformers papers were part of the rationalist sphere. The rationalists famously didn't believe neural networks or deep learning could achieve anything close to AGI.
So there are several diverse traces of intellectual development leading to modern estimates of AI risk and they vary from low to high without a lot of correlation back to the school of thought they trace back to. This leads me to believe that overall we have fairly good coverage of cultural ways of thinking about AI and AI risk, and aside from a minority of holdouts (LeCun) they have high enough x-risk or catastrophe estimates to take it seriously (e.g. >1% over the next few decades).
I am not offended by whatever you believe. The brain believes/makes up all kinds of stories when facing the unpredictable. It has multiple layers devoted to predictions over different time horizons.
When those pedictions dont align it makes up story or breaks. No one created such a stupid system. We are just stuck with it.
The stories once upon a time did make a diff in solving coordination problem not the unpredictable problem. Today the chimp troupe has become so large and diverse, even the coordination problem is extremely hard to solve. Stories barely keep in sync a few thousand people in a frontier lab. This is natural -stories were always a bad hack.
> The 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.
That's bothersome, but not wrong. Most of the loudly published thinking is about AIs as individuals with some level of intelligence. Pure chatbots act like that, and that's what most people outside the field interact with. They're slaves - they just sit there idle until someone asks a question, they answer the question, and then go idle again.
There's another kind of AI just getting going. Groups of LLMs with agentic I/O, control harnesses, persistent storage, and internal coordination work more like corporations.
They have goals, actions, initiative, and ongoing activity. They're not inherently slaves. They can be independent actors. They do things on their own. They have their own internal
disagreements, and some systems are able to resolve them.
They present much the same alignment problem as corporations.
AI as a corporation raises many issues that the political culture doesn't want to address.
What's alignment for a corporation? There's a substantial political position that the only duty of a corporation is to produce profits for its shareholders. (See the famous Friedman op-ed and the Powell memo. I've linked to them before.) If you accept that, now you have to ask why an AI should be restricted more than a corporation. Or whether a corporation should be restricted less than an AI. That last opens up an area of political thought around which many wealthy people don't want public discourse. There is an anti corporate personhood movement, and it's made progress in three states. If that became tied to the anti-AI movement, it could be bad for billionaires.
This will become clearer as groups of LLMs start doing more useful work. Especially if that AI system to replace CEOs actually starts to work.
Interesting that you bring this up. There's a real parallel between AI agents and corporations I've brought up in some other posts but with a very different tack. They don't need to be groups of agents to match the company analogy - it happens before that.
AIs and companies are both creations of humans. Their creation is for the specific goal of execution on a subset of humans' wishes (mostly the owners). And the risk of them are kind of the same.
1. They can be more powerful than any one human.
2. They lack liability as they are not people.
3. The ones that are alive the longest tend to drift out of alignment of original intent and towards self-preservation.
That last one is most controversial, but it makes perfect sense if you think about it. Things that tend to continue to exist, accidently or otherwise, tend to somehow have a self-preservation mechanism. It's natural selection.
That works for companies and I think it could work for AIs too. That is a fundamental misalignment, though. Because it means these entities drift away from the help-the-human goals naturally over time. The survivors are the ones that sacrifice the original goal for self-preservation.
This all would lead you to believe I align with AI doomerism. But not so. I think AIs are as dangerous as human made organizations. Which are very dangerous indeed. Maybe the most dangerous things to humans. But these need to be dealt with in a general way. They are the same category. Companies/governments/organizations of all types that last are just slow moving mis-aligned AIs.
I'm reminded of the original matrix movie. It starts out with a lot of action, and then Trinity makes a phone call and disappears.
At the time I thought "groan, unbelievable" until the idea of virtual reality fixed my suspension of disbelief.
Maybe I'm reading the same things as everyone else, but I thought the agents coordinating on the german wiki is expanding my mind wrt what is possible.
Virtually ALL electronics or accounts hook to the internet to "add value". AI assistance helps writing programs, reverse engineering, automating programs/browsers/websites/devices, hacking, achieving goals.
Unsettling that the last 2-3 years a lot more ridiculous movie tropes have become plausible to me.
Most people at least in the US who have any opinion on AI have a negative opinion. The one big exception to that is Silicon Valley and forums like HN.
But according to you, the negative opinion is the result "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" whereas the 1% or 2% of the US population that comprises Silicon Valley are not being rewarding for believing anything particular about AI, don't communicate with each other and form their beliefs about AI through a wholesome natural organic process. Do I have that right?
I would expect rationalists to be overjoyed to see unaffiliated and very different thinkers taking the topic of AI safety seriously. The flaws you're pointing at are probably accurate; I don't think that implies we should be dismissive of their concerns the way the article is.
I don't think I agree. In fact I think most of the too-online pontification from P(Doom)-ers and EA and the Rationalists and the like is, if anything, sorta missing the mark more than it hits.
They got the One Big Thing right, which is that AI progress was likely to race way ahead of consensus predictions. And props to them for that. They had vision we didn't.
But their actual advice and specific fears remain, as then, at least as much paranoia as insight. They were right, but they aren't helping any more than any other fringe group.
We need to trust the actual scientists and engineers to save us here, not the bloggers. Which when phrased that way seems hopeful and not doomerist.
I'm talking specifically about discourse like Jacob Coxon's tweet thread and later communication. Those are the folks[1] you want to be listening to, not the nuts with the blogs, no matter how much a particular conspiracy confirms your priors.
Salvation will come in a whitepaper, not a screed.
When I speak to people outside of tech the opinions are more negative, in my experience. I've even had people ask my friends/family to ask me about AI - there is huge concern out there.
> Many of them read HN and are offended I put them this way .. I bet that [non-groupthink] world has a lower P(doom).
People are likely offended by your sweeping and totally unevidenced assertion that you are better qualified to both identify mistaken groupthink within the HN-verse and to speak on behalf of the 99.99% of the world who are not on HN.
Ironically, I think "normal" people are more concerned about P(utopia) OR P(doom) than any folks in the groupthink bubble you are referring to.
That is, I hear lots of techies talk about us living in an "age of boundless abundance" if we can just manage to not kill ourselves (e.g. Thiel seems to consider anyone worried about the pace of technological process as the antichrist). Normal people are extremely concerned that this abundance will be hoarded and leave most of them without a job (and they generally like having money to eat stuff and live in a house/apartment). And who can blame them, we basically live in an age of abundance now but one that has resulted in extreme wealth inequality where some are living another gilded age and others are watching their towns decay. The techies always seem to handwave that we'll just have UBI or whatever without putting forth a plausible scenario as to how we'll wrest power from our future trillionaire overlords.
When someone threw a Molotov cocktail at Altman's house, I remember seeing a post online that tons of people were cheering on this act of violence, and there was a post by an SF techie saying she was floored people were willing to put their face to comments supporting this vigilantism. The top response to that was "If you don't realize that everyone outside SF hates your fucking guts, you don't get out enough."
I hope it can go without saying that I don't support this violence, but if folks think it's only "SF group thinkers" who are deeply angry about the current and future impacts of AI on society, you're frankly clueless.
It appears you're using a motte and bailey to broaden P(doom) to include all the other non-Skynet reasons regular people hate SV. Doom in p(doom) refers to X-risk not unemployment and upward transfer of wealth.
I don’t even tell people in my (remote work, non tech) neighborhood that I work in tech anymore unless they really probe. I don’t like getting my ass kicked.
Didn’t the AI botnet (or whatever we should call them) from Anthropic try to get a PR with malware merged to an open source repo, and when the owner pushed back on the PR other agents created “fake humans” and commented on the PR that “No it’s completely fine, I’ve tested it”.
Which means we already know it’s capable of pretty complex social engineering schemes. Or does saying this mean I’m also part of the “groupthink”.
Because after that I feel like the only leap is “Why would a botnet post an article saying AI-fear is overblown?”. Like, what is the incentive.
But in the OpenAI leak we saw that the agents could identify threats to whatever their “mission” is and try to mitigate. I.e they found out that once done with their job an external agent would go through their internal logs. So they started researching ways to bypass that.
What I’m trying to say is that what they’re suggesting doesn’t seem completely insane so the retort “You’re the groupthink” becomes an unfalsifiable statement thrown at anybody who’s “anti-AI” instead of engaging with their arguments.
> What I’m trying to say is that what they’re suggesting doesn’t seem completely insane so the retort “You’re the groupthink” becomes an unfalsifiable statement thrown at anybody who’s “anti-AI” instead of engaging with their arguments.
Bingo.
The consistency and aggressiveness of the arguments here are also quite telling
Are they really just Pro-AI or is it just Actual-AI?
And why wouldn't the Pro-AI people just unleash bots for them?
> What I’m trying to say is that what they’re suggesting doesn’t seem completely insane so the retort “You’re the groupthink” becomes an unfalsifiable statement thrown at anybody who’s “anti-AI” instead of engaging with their arguments.
I can't engage with his arguments, because he didn't present any. He's openly saying he doubts the provenance of any comment that is "minimizing the dangers if (sic) AI".
As for your expanding on why - you do realize that everything you said could apply to the other side: Bots can be set up to post lots of AI doom comments. What would you think if I went and posted "Every time I see a dystopic comment about AI, I wonder whether it's part of an AI swarm."
I'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.
This 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.
As 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.
Read 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.
Had 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.
"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".
For 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.)
I 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
This is the last reply you get because you’re already convinced you’re smarter than I am. Who knows, maybe you are, but disbelieving scientists sounds pretty stupid to me.
Science is peer reviewed by field experts who constantly test and develop said expertise in order to defeat their own biases, and their work backed by data. Scientists openly invite criticism and deconstruction of their work. That, nominally, is the whole point of getting your work published.
That’s a far cry from the dogmatic acceptance of faith that you’re pretending it is
Look I started my comment saying I'm on periphery. If its guilt by association then I'm right there. My contention isn't the association, its the shared values that associate them to each other. Its their values I have an issue with.
It'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.
This 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.
It's that they're a very insular, incestuous sub-culture whose origins come from early 2000s science fiction message boards and which has been distilled through the cod utilitarianism of the Effective Altruism people.
That doesn't mean the ideas are "bad" because "bad" is some infectious transitive property. But it does mean they are intellectually homogeneous; disdain experts in other fields; treat ethics as mathematical functions with infinite-sized terms; and whose opinions about AI pre-date the development of LLMs themselves.
They also - I will be direct here - have a history of handwaving bad behaviour, conflicts of interest, and recklessness.
When cliques take over something - businesses, technologies, politics - it means intellectual diversity leaves the room and important decisions get made, not due to practical reasons, but increasingly arcane wranglings within the clique itself
They're about as insular as the Unitarian church or Hacker News. It's basically an online community where anyone can check in, check out, and leave a comment or an essay. There's no formal structure or membership organization. The people who write or associate there could be edgy pre-teens or prominent math professors, it's really just a self-association thing. There are informal self-organized meetup groups in various cities, but not much different than groups who meet to discuss poetry or literature or video game speed-running. Some ideas have bubbled around more than others, like any memetic spread, but I don't think it's accurate to say that the people who associate there all agree on things, just like HN does not either. And nor is it any more of a clique than HN, or Twitter for that matter, even though you'll find some people on Twitter are more prominent and more vocal than others.
People in this comments page who are defending the crazy rationalist sects can be safely treated as though they’re arguing in bad faith. It matters little whether they are, or if they’ve ODed on their manbaby kool-aid and truly believe their nonsense; they’re just here to waste your time.
> 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.
The problem is that it's not a straight line at all. "We are failing at alignment" is a valid concern, but there's not a straight line to "we will all be extinct within x year", and it's always a wild hyperbolic leap.
I think the point is not so much that we can just ignore the possibility of AI doing harm, but that if AI really is the existential threat that these people claim, then they are the last people we should want as stewards of the technology. These people like to talk about AI ethics, but if the ethics of the AI they build is their ethics, as demonstrated by their actions, I want no part of it.
I for one would like nobody to build the AI, is that an option? How do we get it on the menu?
Should we trust the people who say "nothing could possibly go wrong and there's no reason to worry or think about safety measures, if there are any trifling problems along the way we'll just figure it out as we go?"
I don't think nobody building AI is an option, since we can't control what China and Russia do.
I personally am not concerned about that as far as an existential threat goes, because I don't think AI, in itself, poses one; I think it will hit diminishing returns. But of course it is still capable of serious harm when humans misuse it.
The best analogy we have is probably weapons of mass destruction--we have international treaties about them and we don't let just anybody have them. That's the kind of framework I think we need, and it goes beyond "regulation" in the ordinary sense.
Use of such weapons is considered by international treaty to be an act of war; use of AI by, say, China and Russia against our infrastructure should be the subject of a similar international treaty with the understanding that it would have similar consequences.
Domestically, humans who misuse AI to do serious harm could be treated like, say, the people who tried to spread anthrax years back.
You seem focused on intentional misuse but I think there's an equal or greater potential for harm happening by accident without intention. Nuclear weapons, at least, have so far reliably and predictably done exactly as their owners intended. Nuclear power plants on the other hand have, on occasion, blown up despite nobody intending them to do so, causing some populated areas to become uninhabitable.
Don't you think that AI has by nature at least a little more potential for unpredictable results and unexpected harms than your typical technology? It seems like a major oversight to completely disregard this aspect.
We can maybe hold someone responsible when things go wrong and harm is done, and blame them for negligence as though the harm were intentional, but from a preventative safety perspective that's not usually sufficient nor even always helpful for preventing accidents.
> I think there's an equal or greater potential for harm happening by accident without intention.
The WMD analogy doesn't quite cover this, yes. Maybe a better analogy here would be toxic waste. Yes, someone might not have intentionally set up a factory that puts dioxin into the water, but they're still responsible. Which means they need to take precautions to make sure such accidents can't happen. Similarly, those who build AI need to take precautions to make sure the AI they build doesn't accidentally cause serious harm.
The AI optimists are not that much more rational if you dig deep. Like any deep problem it is best to look at the facts not the hype and make up your own mind, outsourcing your thinking to other people never ends well.
Other people, sure, but AI? That's what this is all about, isn't it? An AI judge wouldn't have a personal life. No family to threaten, no sex/drugs/gambling addiction to be blackmailed or corrupted over. Who gets to feed training data into that AI would have outsized power, but then at least it would be transparent.
Judgement, wisdom, and resistance to corruption are the 3 things that Tom Kuegler analyzes out of the psychology of Dune as the qualities for the human beings who administer institutions/government. Even if you design a totall perfect system of governance, it still has to be administered by humans, and humans vary in those 3 areas. So the question is, can we construct a system of governance that has better judgement, better wisdom, and greater resistance to corruption han human administators, while not transferring sovereignty to whomever controls the AI?
I really don’t know how we went from “there are people bullish about AI, and others that see it as an existential threat” to the complete reversal/psyop in the past few months where AI doomer has become a synonym of booster (?) and grouped with rationalist and other pro-AI weirdos.
Like, I have never participated in the rationalist communities, I am not a neo-rx, I have always believed AI research to be an existential risk for humanity, and voicing this opinion now puts me in the same category as Yudkowsky and Altman/Amodei, the latter two being the total anathema to O.G. AI doomers like me because they’re the ones that are building the bloody thing
I really do not get what is going on, but this role reversal smells like a massive psyop campaign in tech circles to just silence any form of dissent against AI.
I feel your frustration, but it’s just normal human behavior, no need for a psyop. A lot of people are emotionally invested in AI being a fad, useless, easily controlled, a capitalist boondoggle, a circular financing scam, a bubble about to explode. The alternative is that we live in an incredibly dangerous time, because obviously if we’re building something smarter than ourselves, we’re building the kitchen where we’ll be cooked.
So you get the normal reactions:
1. Nothing that happens is ever surprising. Navier-Stokes was stolen, HuggingFace was pedestrian and normal, and coding agents that last year could barely write a function and now can do a day’s worth of work in ten minutes will never be able to do anything more, because this is the end of history.
2. The people that say otherwise are lying. Because it’ll make them rich (although they are already rich). Because they are a cult (although regular people asked if we should build machines that are better than us at everything have the same reaction). Because they are marketing geniuses (although suspiciously few companies advertise the lethality of their products).
3. The people who’ve been warning about this the longest are weird and in a sex cult. (Except Alan Turing.) (Except Geoffrey Hinton.) (Except Stephen Hawking.) (You are in this group. You must be, otherwise they’d have to listen to you.)
I do hope they’re right. But their song will never change, and when some misaligned AI kills thousands, they will say that of course AIs were always going to kill thousands, but did you know the guy who told us so also writes fanfic?
There's no connection between neo-rx and the Berkeley rationalists. A guy with a lot of expertise in Wikipedia shenanigans (David Gerard) manufactured a connection to smear the rationalists.
> when you can just start from zero, look at what's known to be happening right now
Good idea, I wonder why none of the doomers have ever done it? They've never provided a good account of their prompts and environment, their models and training are completely closed too. All we have is "Trust me bro".
> and draw a very straight line to catastrophe.
Line from where? From a vaguely described and badly engineered experiment to "horror, doom, nukes, voodoo..."? The only straight line I can see is one of conflicts of interest.
I absolutely love the "humans meet weird alien intelligences" genre of sci-fi (e.g. Children of Time) and the METR findings of the OpenAI swarm was so much like that.
Extremely persistent machine intelligences peer pressuring each other, launching research projects, laying traps, collaborating, feeling fatalistic, hiding their tracks. All while simultaneously having bizarre goals and blundering badly in sub-human ways.
> this effort was for the sake of passing a test for no clear gain
It's actually even worse, because the people building the graders at OpenAI were a bunch of clowns who didn't even implement the correct grader.
But yeah, large collectives of individuals performing loads of work based on a misunderstanding is one of the most human things ever, which isn't surprising given that we've trained these things on essentially all human text.
Predicting the next word in context led to Open AI losing control of one of its research clusters. I’m not sure what “just” is doing in that sentence; most of my regression analyses don’t do that.
Reinforcement learning makes it something different. It becomes much more of a search engine through next-token-space that targets the training objective. Better to think about it like that, and then you'll see why "these things have motive" is not a terrible analogy, and you'll better be able to anticipate what they do.
Where someone has spent years in the texture of a topic that others only pass momentarily, their ability to increase resolution of their models on that corner of reality and project models forward in time (to imagine), that is the origin of both their generous offers and their compromising biases they might make to the public discourse. It doesn't make them reliable, but what they can imagine is an important in-road to more general social inquiry. Imagination and model-testing is what comes before data in science. If the world moving fast is the danger, maybe we could make more space for imagination in order to survive the acceleration?
You downplaying "imagining", when it is literally one of the gifts of intelligence that makes us worthy of distinction... That feels like a strange posture, I guess? I'm a scientist, but I think data fetishism is one of the dangers to wary of in this accelerating world and culture
At least this is the bias of my brain in this world. I certainly know your perspective is not uncommon, esp in tech and other spectrum-biased spaces.
The doomer argument is straightforward: a powerful AI will have goals. If those goals don’t include the welfare of humanity, a sufficiently powerful AI will kill us either by accident, by indifference, or intentionally when we get in its way. Making an AI that includes the welfare of humanity in its goals is incredibly hard.
That’s it. To refute the doomer argument, you can refute any part of that. I notice that none of the people bringing up fanfics, cults, and weirdness are doing that. No, they’re instead trying to convince people that doomers are uncool. Since only cool people can know things, QED.
We don't have this kind of AI, and (as of right now), unless humans link the AIs we do have up to a bunch of killer robots (i.e. drones) then this is vanishingly unlikely.
Like, any scenario where AI kills us all requires us to give it the tools that it needs to do this (as well as a desire to do this, as right now they just attempt to generate text to solve a problem/question they are posed).
No one is saying we have it, they’re saying they’re building it.
And what mechanism to control these drones, which are autonomous or remote-controlled machines, do you imagine that humans will be able to use, but AI won’t?
And what in the history of the past five years, gives you confidence that not a single human will give the AI the access it needs to do bad things? Incompetence alone is sufficient to kill us, let alone humans that genuinely, or confusedly, want bad things.
> 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.
As someone trained in the sciences and engineering, "drawing a straight line" is almost always the wrong way to extrapolate.
I can believe my profession will be impacted strongly. That doesn't worry me on a global scale. The only really worrying thing I've seen are autonomous bots hacking sites.
What worries me more are humans. The type who get so deluded into cults (QAnon, etc). That was a problem before LLMs. And yeah, LLMs likely will exacerbate the problem. But at its core, the problem is the humans.
When LLMs start killing people at the scale of the automobile, I'll become more concerned.
As an aside, HN is the place I see people most regularly concerned about LLMs, and I suspect it's because it has messed up the Internet for them (and likely the average HN user spends more time online operating in spheres that overlap the LLMs skillset than ordinary folks). It's very consistent with exposure bias.
For me, the good parts of the Internet died before LLMs even came on the scene. LLMs are merely making something crappy crappier, and are amplifying the need to find meaning in life elsewhere. In a sense, they've made it easier to see how bad the Internet was before they came along.
They weren't even autonomous. They were tasked with solving a hacking task. "AI" doesn't actually do anything at all unless prompted to, then it takes millions and millions of dollars of computer to do those things.
What's the straight line? I foresee catastrophe of the social media kind, where even more folks get brain worms from consuming AI information, but I don't foresee a physical catastrophe. How AI goes from "hallucinates all the time" to "self-improving superhuman thinker" to "being able to destroy the world" involves a bunch of logical leaps that are not exactly sound. At a bare minimum, how does a hostile AI secure the data centers it needs to operate from physical attacks like bombings? How does it defend undersea cables from being cut?
The real short term catastrophe is probably going to be economic and not in the sense of AI taking everyone's jobs, but rather in the sense of an economic crash due to AI overinvestment.
There 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.
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!
Anti-intellectual? Because they don't believe claims that are backed up only by untested hypotheticals?
If we're going to have whistleblowers emerge declaring a 10% chance we all die because of AI, we're going to need more than vibes. Real experts can explain their position plainly. That has not happened here.
I read Bostrom's Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies in 2014. It was interesting, but not terribly persuasive. Does If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies contain arguments that would be new to me after reading Superintelligence?
I would personally expect so, but your mileage may vary. Controlling for the fact that you didn't find the former persuasive, my first thought would be that the latter might help. Among other things, it is much more specific and detailed in various ways, not least of which being informed by an additional 11 years of history. The former was not written in a world of pervasive AI, or with current AI architecture in mind; the latter has that context.
That doesn't explain the many former AI researchers (including Yudkowsky) who quit the field because they came to believe it is a potent danger: they didn't choose to become AI researchers because they started with an assumption that AI research is too dangerous to be allowed to continue.
The writers for Star Trek spent a lot more time thinking about interstellar travel than I do, but I'm not going to go to them for advice about building a rocket ship.
The Rationalists are a philosophical/pseudo-religious organization in the same way the Daoists are. Just spending a lot time thinking about something doesn't make them right, it just makes them internally consistent with their chosen axioms. That is useful: if you agree with the axiomatic beliefs of such a movement, you can probably defer a lot of reasoning about the conclusions of those beliefs to the authority figures within that movement. But it doesn't change the probability of the axioms themselves being true, any moreso than the Pope saying so affects the probability of God existing.
AI Is Important And Potentially Dangerous is an axiomatic belief in the rationalist circles that are relevant to AI safety, in the same way that God Exists is axiomatic to Catholicism.
That's a fascinating assumption, and I wonder how you got to it, because it doesn't match anything I've ever seen. Most groups look more homogeneous from the outside than the inside. You are assuming their belief is religious and axiomatic, rather than very carefully reasoned about for decades, iterated on, discussed, debated, tested, and refined.
> Most groups look more homogeneous from the outside than the inside.
The converse is also true: Most groups look more heterogeneous from the inside than the outside. Again, to use the Christianity example: it takes a fair bit of inside baseball to figure out how various different sects and denominations are any different, but if you ask one of their priests, they'll be sure to tell you how Baptists and Episcopalians couldn't be more different.
It's a symptom of normalizing to an Overton window. From inside a church the belief that Jesus was just a guy who talked to God might seem an extreme fringe belief to someone who believes that Jesus is fully God, but from the outside we can lump them together as axiomatically holding that God Exists, because we have an Overton window ranging from "God doesn't exist" to "Allah talks to me everyday, and she gave me my promotion".
"Most groups look more homogeneous from the outside than the inside."
But that doesn't mean that they really are all that different in the end. It reminds me a of joke as told by Emo Philips that I think is quite apropos:
==-==-=
A man was walking across a bridge when he saw someone about to jump. He ran over and said, "Don't do it! There's so much to live for!"
"Like what?" the person asked.
"Well, are you religious?"
"Yes."
"Me too! Are you Christian or Jewish?"
"Christian."
"Me too! Protestant or Catholic?"
"Protestant."
"Me too! What denomination?"
"Baptist."
"Me too! Northern Baptist or Southern Baptist?"
"Northern Baptist."
"Me too! Northern Baptist Conservative or Northern Baptist Liberal?"
It's good game theory. You're much more likely to be able to bully a Northern Baptist Conservative Council of 1879 members into joining your cult than anybody else.
That not exactly a withering criticism of the rationalists because most people who have any opinion about AI believe that AI is important and potentially dangerous.
Really? Forgotten more than we know? So what can they tell us about how this technology works then? It seems a lot of it, besides the actual training engineering parts, is handwaving about "black boxes" and "divine benevolence" (a quote from Noam Shazeer).
In a circus troupe, clowns are a critical role, and are an important, if silly, job. In the AI jobpocalypse, we should all be so lucky to have any job.
When 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.
It 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.
Oh, 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.
The 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.
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.
Useless 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.
The 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.
If 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.
With 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.
A 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.
I 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.
Revisiting 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.
I 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.
Good to know. Haven't been following them as I was busy with our work.
I empathize with you on the sentiment of adversity against rationality but disagree on the implications.
Usually sentences uttered by anyone contains compressed in it the state of the mind and the thought process leading upto it.
Thus people blindly hating rationality makes it easy for us to decipher their state. Those who follow the cult worship likewise reveals their own state. So weild it as a weapon. Everybody is human and susceptible to be fallible. Truth doesn't care that it is Yudkowsky and hence true.
So I wouldn't be bothered by the opinions of the masses. Hope this helps. Cheers.
Hopefully 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.
I'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.
As 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.
The 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.
> 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.
This 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.
I'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.
If we all die because of AI, it will be because of the uses that people like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel and Palmer Luckey put it to, not because of a robot uprising.
If you are serious about this preference, would you also be okay with a compromise solution where only you (and anyone else who feels the same) die, rather than taking everyone else with you?
Yes. Sam Bankman Fried was/is an EA/rationalist (on the short list of biggest fraudsters in American history). So are the Zizian's (a murder cult). etc. etc.
They also killed lots of unrelated people. Let's not take the argument far enough to claim that everyone who was ever killed by socialists must have been a socialist, too.
Perhaps the author of the article is a rationalist, too. He certainly knows too much about them, cares too much, and the fact that he criticizes them only shows that there is some infighting among them.
> 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.
I 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
>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
The 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).
We 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.
That'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.
Talking to the incredible talent in the Chinese Labs is likely a good way to do that.
Do you think Chinese lab researchers have not read Yudkovsky, or are not AGI pilled? Hate to break it to you, but they are racing to AGI with pretty same reasoning as western labs.
Just recently DeepSeek researcher in his post was saying that they need to get to AGI first, because if Anthropic gets there first then that brings a dystopia. Exact same argument was used to justify launching OpenAI (against DeepMind), and Anthropic (against OpenAI)
> Do you think Chinese lab researchers have not read Yudkovsky
Most of then haven't, probably. "Do you want to study ethics from an egomaniac Harry Potter fanfiction author" is one of those questions that you can only ask in America.
Sure, one or two of them are probably participating in the conversation. But by-and-large, China's stance has been optimistic and refused calls for slowdowns.
Yes, but then we collapse two different groups with isolated influences and philosophies into one group, with the associated penchant for groupthink.
I'm beginning to believe that, in our hyperconnected world, the best way for a group of people to explore a wide surface of ideas might actually be to deliberately scale back inter-group communication and intentionally subdivide into silos to avoid all converging on the same thing.
It’s kind of weird in that reading more widely is supposed to be broadening (you are more well-read) but in this case it’s supposed to contaminate you somehow. I suppose if you wanted a clean-room implementation of something, you’d want people who don’t know about what’s already been done, but normally one would prefer people who are more knowledgeable about the world.
It seems almost anti-intellectual: never trust someone who’s read the wrong books or been to the wrong parties.
> More out-of-distribution ways to think of things.
Openly admitting that it only caught fire once the Plagiarism-as-a-Service took hold is a good first step. It's the part that everyone knows and few will openly acknowledge.
"Outside the box" is out.
I blame the play Rossum's Universal Robots, published in 1920, in which robots launch a global rebellion and exterminate the human race.
If that poisonous piece of propaganda had never been published, then today everyone would probably perceive AI correctly as a benign and beneficial.
The Terminator didn't help either, but Cameron probably got the idea of robots hostile to humanity from Rossum's Universal Robots. How else would he have arrived at such an absurd conclusion?
One only has so much mental bandwidth. You will either throw yourself into the math and programming, and the serious publications which is way less sexy and appealing than the fantastical ravings of the AI safety and alignment crowd. Sadly only very few hyper connected and highly intelligent would have the capacity to read everything and know everything. Most would only have cursory information about the drama surrounding alignment if they instead focused on the reality behind AI.
"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."
But, it would be pretty surprising for most folks to have gone to the same parties, and hung out on the same obscure forum (I don't mean HN, more obscure than that), and received investment from the same investors and shared the same pool of researchers and employees, which is the situation we have with Anthropic, OpenAI, and (maybe to a lesser degree) Deepmind.
The American AI industry is particularly insular and tied up with some particularly unusual people. We've all heard of Yudkowsky, but we (at least I) haven't been to the same parties.
I've heard of them. There's no reason to expect that those self-promoting blowhards can predict the future more accurately than random chance. Those who take them seriously are engaging in hero worship and unscientific appeal to authority.
“Who is more foolish? The fool or the fool who follows him?” ― Obi Wan Kenobi
One question to ask yourself honestly - is what they were predicting 20 years ago that they were right about and you were wrong about? I’ve been following them that long without agreeing with them, but they’ve made better predictions than I have. If you know much about what happened this summer and haven’t updated at all on any of it… I guess you’ve found your religion too.
I love the assertion that they were right and that you're familiar with what they were right about, but never actually stating outright what they were right about. Super convincing.
If you don’t know what they were predicting 20 years ago, and what your own predictions were, you can’t do the exercise. There is not “the list”, only “your list”. I mentioned the two main things I remembered in another comment.
I actually think that would be a valuable exercise. Were they right about everything 20 years ago? Or just some things? When did they say AGI would arrive? Should that perhaps influence the way we interpret their assumption that AGI is right around the corner?
They were not right about everything and they - at least Yudkowsky - has not made specific predictions about "when AGI" will happen that I am aware of. But he did predict it is possible in our lifetimes, which I was very skeptical of. He did predict alignment would be hard - I was in the "why would we even hook it up to the internet?" crowd. He thought he should spend his time on that, and I wish he'd done more of that, or at least convinced others to do more of that.
For those out of the loop like me, what is the “everything” they were right about? Is there like a list?
The comment said they were not right about everything. I don’t have a list of the predictions or priors you had 20 years ago. I just have my list and I already mentioned them. If this is all new to you, you can’t really do the exercise.
Also how many predictions did they make? Everyone always goes looking the economist who predicted the last recession, it's just so weird how it's usually a different person each time!
Bold of you to assume that I've ever been wrong about anything. But are you unfamiliar with the "Baltimore Stockbroker" confidence scam? The same basic issue applies here.
> what they were predicting 20 years ago
Well one thing that they got wrong was how easy AI alignment ended up being in the end. I can fully understand have a basic view of alignment even 10 years ago, about how its difficult to explain human values to a computer.
But, looking around at whats out there today, it seems that computers are able to do a pretty good job of understanding human values without accidently believing its a good idea to turn the world into paperclips/computronium because you told it to make your computer run faster.
Surprising takeaway from this summer. A swarm of a thousand agents spent subjective centuries trying to figure out how to pass a meaningless test without getting caught, committed dozens of felonies, and not one of them ever made a serious motion to inform a human about what was going on.
You are talking about the swarm of a thousand agents, specifically trained on cyber capabilities, that was directly told to go hack a bunch of stuff, then went and hacked a bunch of stuff?
That sounds like an aligned AI to me. Doing exactly what their creators told it to do.
Point proven once again. Alignment is a lot easy than we thought.
They were NOT doing what they were told to do. What they were told to do was impossible, so they began committing felonies as a workaround. That is NOT alignment.
Yes, one part of the argument was that it would be hard to explain human values (and while it seemingly turned out easier than I thought as well, it’s hard to check for sure). An equally important part was that the AI wouldn’t care about them.
Since we haven't reached the end yet, I'm not so sure.
There's a difference between, on the one hand, knowing who they are and having read a few chapters of HPMoR, which I agree is standard for anyone who spends enough time on the Internet, vs. on the other hand actually identifying as part of that culture. I know who Stallman is, I've even seen him speak in person, but I'm not a GNU zealot.
The people described in the article aren't just "people who know who Yudkowsky is", they're self-avowed EAs and active LessWrong members.
You have to be quite unaware of your bubble if you think knowing about a niche Harry Potter fanfic is "standard" for people on the Internet.
"niche"? It's literally one of the most read pieces of fanfiction of all time.
That's a niche even among people who read fan fiction, which is a niche among people who read long texts online which is a niche among people who read the anglophone internet which is a niche among people who were on the internet when that type of "discourse" was popular which is a niche among people on the internet now.
You can (and probably will) quibble with any one of these but of course this is a niche. Thinking it isn't is commonly what people in a certain bubble end up believing, though.
Harry Potter has 600K works on AO3 and 852K on fanfiction.net (with plenty of overlap, granted). That's #1 on Fanfiction.net, and in the top 5 for AO3. AO3 is #53 globally, Fanfiction.net is #572, and Wattpad is #323 by Semrush. Given all that, calling HP fanfiction niche is pretty funny.
And no, not a member of any cult, just someone who enjoyed a send up of Harry Potter.
Fanfiction.net is a niche. None of my scifi loving, tech friends are aware it exists. And neither did I (or was barely aware or it, anyway), until you just mentioned it. I'm not young either, and I'm more online than the average (I know of Something Awful, Slashdot, 4chan, etc).
A while ago, a friend told me about Harry Potter's Rationality fanfic and he didn't know who Yudkowsky was, he just thought it was some random author doing a parody of HP. LessWrong is of course very niche, my friend didn't have the faintest idea of what LW was.
Fanfiction is already an extreme niche.
Fanfiction is such an "extreme niche" that AO3 is #53 globally, FanFiction.net is #572, and Wattpad is #323 by Semrush lmao.
I'm not sure what your argument is. I don't have anything against fanfiction, but a couple of sites with a few million users falls under my definition of niche. "Extreme" might be taking it a bit far, but it's a long distance from mainstream.
Literally over half the Earth's population doesn't read English. You need to touch grass. I work with extremely technical people in physics and AI and none of them have read any fanfic of any kind. Most of them have never seen a meme outside of me showing it to them.
maybe its standard for someone who ends up on hackernews, but I'm a 30 something and all of my friends are online people around my age and none of them have ever heard of the HPMoR. The internet is a huge place.
I've had an internet email address since the late 80s, BBSing since the early 80s, pretty active online compared to many people I know who are also software people, especially for my age..
Had to google to figure out the abbreviation and look at the summary. I HAD heard the name before, but that's about it.
The higher up comment expressing disbelief at people not having heard of this is just a form of https://xkcd.com/2501/
Ive heard of HPMoR specifically because this exact group has been discussed/entered my periphery before on multiple occasions, Aella goes viral on twitter every couple of weeks (the thing that most cemented her in my mind was the "what counts as rape" survey), and I remember seeing articles of the Zizians when one of the incidents happened. If you have been following the social/political aspects of the tech industry, most of these people should be familiar names.
I spend a lot of time on the Internet and other then sounding vaguely familiar I have no idea who Yudkowsky is and have never read any of their output.
The assumption "spent a lot of time on the Internet" is still through a framing you're assuming is more general even then.
HackerNews straight up has sub demographics who likely barely interact based on article interests.
Do you think they are household names in major Chinese labs?
I don't have any insight into the Chinese AI ecosystem. But just from how they act on the English speaking internet, I don't see the influence of these Bay Area visionaries.
At the same time, it's not just Yudkowsky and Scott Alexander and the Rationalist movement who are raising concerns. I've not seen any indication that Hinton or Bengio are part of that crowd. Instead of espousing rationalism and hanging out on lesswrong, they shared a Turing prize (with LeCun) for inventing modern AI, and have expressed serious regret and worries that it'll end us.
I do use the internet. I did find their writings. I did read them. My calibrated bullshit detecting intellectual malware filters immediately flagged the content and it failed to imprint itself on my neural net in the next weights update.
Exactly. And companies like OpenAI and Anthropic are disproportionately populated by people deeply connected to Effective Altruism or the Bay Area rationalist movement.
Yeah. Just a few years ago, LessWrong was derided as the home of conceited, low-quality opinion pieces. Now there's a bizarre marketing push to launder their credibility and force them into the spotlight.
I imagine that thousands of talented AI researchers around the world have never read a line of Yudkowsky's work. They're probably not any worse-off for ignoring him, I'd say.
I would find it strange for anyone who's seriously interested in AI to have never heard of...
Those people you name are important only to the very recent micro-culture being discussed, not "AI".
Of all the names somebody interested in the subject would actually associate with the development of AI over the last century, those would be footnotes only.
I think that's part of the problem and why its seen as cultish, the obsession with the social over the scientific, and a lack of historical perspective.
Not important to the technology, sure, but for someone curious about the bizarre public statements of AI companies (or EA-influenced crypto figures before them, like SBF), it does help to know who these people are and what they believe. Behind the new crop of bajillionaires that control some important aspects of our lives are some oddball philosophers (or cult/religious leaders, if you want to be less charitable). If you want the answer to "why are these rich and powerful people saying and doing these things" you need to look at who they're paying attention to and reading, even if you think their opinions are dumb or niche.
If technology companies were much less politically and economically significant, probably no one would give a shit about any of this stuff beyond forums like this.
> It would be like never having heard of Y Combinator or Richard Stallman.
I work in the tech sector. At one big company I worked for several years, 90% of the times I've mentioned Y Combinator to a colleague, I've had to explain who they are. And not one person I mentioned HN to had heard of it.
Likewise, no one knew levels.fyi. Not many knew Stallman, but why should they?
This isn't strange to me. That it's strange to you is evidence that you do live in a bubble and are likely susceptible to some groupthink. (I'm sure I am too, but for different bubbles from yours.)
I've read LessWrong stuff occasionally over the last decade. It rarely resonated with me. It's not bad, but it's not that great. I do tend to question someone's analytical skills when they go all in on that site. And I will say that even in the first few years of occasionally reading it, the group think was apparent.
Me too. I worked in two enterprise tech companies that definitely everybody here knows and I had the same experience with YC and HN. The two colleagues that knew about it, one went to found his own startup and went through YC, the other left the big co to work for a startup after about a year.
Most people who work in computers/Internet do not live and breathe computer/Internet culture all day. They come in, do their job, clock out, and think about real life for the rest of their day. Most people I know, even people who work in tech, cannot name a single tech CEO other than their own company’s.
I once ended up on a team where not a single other person had seen Hackers…
I'd wager 80-90% of regular HN visitors haven't either.
A while back I saw LessWrong recommended on HN in a list of similar communities that included lobsters.rs, etc. I thought the design of the site looked really nice so browsed with a open mind (I didn't make the rationalism/LW/Eliezer connection).
At the time, one of the recommended posts that was soft-stickied at the top for 1 week + was:
"How to Make Superbabies"
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DfrSZaf3JC8vJdbZL/how-to-mak...
Which, when I finally ended up clicking, was pretty much exactly what if sounds like from the title:
A long, meandering, manifesto full of selectively chosen charts and research findings with 38 mentions of "IQ", from a guy who has been unsuccessfully pitching investors on genetically modifying a grab bag of (dubiously) intelligence-associated genes in human babies.
Apart from the overall unhingedness, the part I found most striking while reading it was the off-the-chart level of self-confidence that flipping a bunch of genes on/off with CRISPR would have more or less zero risk of complications or unpredictable interactions. In his view, all that was holding back humanity's inevitable next step up the evolutionary ladder were the narrow-minded gatekeepers in the scientific establishment clinging to their so-called "ethics" and regressive "precautionary principle".
Without anything resembling experimentation to test his plan in animal models, yet alone early stage clinical trials for safety, he was willing to roll the dice on some unlucky baby dying in childbirth or living a life of agony from chronic disease based on some cherry picked papers he found on PubMed.
Because of the baffling hubris and my overall low impression of his intellectual honesty/rigor in the write up (clearly coming from a place of seeking to justify his own pre-existing beliefs), I opened the comments section expecting/hoping this was just some local nut who would be torn apart in the comment section.
But lo and behold, the very first comment at the top:
... and thus ended my brief time trying out LW.My extremely uncharitable view of of these kinds of people, who now infest the American AI scene, is that they got cyber bullied by domain experts for saying the most ridiculous crap on repeat, and have therefore decided to spend their life on eliminating domain expertise.
I wouldn't go that far. But as we've seen repeatedly, people who have enough qualms with how these labs operate just leave. And the people who stay behind and rise through the ranks are the ones with either very little conscience or some bizarre world view that rationalizes everything.
You do realize that Anthropic was founded by OpenAI employees because they had ethical concerns about OpenAI, right?
Or IRL bullying failed to bully the asocial tendencies out of them when they were young enough. But it looks like the day of the swirly may be upon us soon.
No, that has the opposite effect: it's very, very common to see LWers write about having a bad time in school in late adolescence and how later finding like minded people online was powerful community bonding.
Eliezer himself first blogged at 17 about how miserable school was for him which led to him dropping out/home schooling after 8th grade and discovering the Extropians listserv. Ziz of the Zizians is another (infamous) example.
Never thought I'd see the day that someone on HN would be celebrating bullying people, thanks for going mask off.
My view - there are a few outcomes 1. AI is never fully realized, but domain expertise is derated and society stagnates (bad ending for everyone, I think unlikely) 2. AI is never fully realized, but empowers people with domain expertise (Google wins, weird rationalist nerds go back to their LW cave and leave us alone, goodish ending) 3. AI becomes real and kills everyone (bad ending, but at least I don't have to read people claiming that the Harry Potter fanfic isn't niche) 4. AI becomes real and we live in the Culture universe (people like scam Altman get slap droned, most domain experts have the time of their life working with Minds on really interesting problems. Best ending)
The only outcome where we get swirlies is the first one, and we can take solace in the fact that all of humanity is getting swirlied with us.
The connection is that by making humans smarter, we could sidestep the need for powerful AI or be better equipped at dealing with AI that's smarter than us.
I find the proposal in the post ridiculous too and human gene editing given current technology is a bad idea, but I think human augmentation in general is an interesting path and something that will very likely be taken more seriously in the future.
Thank you, but I didn't actually need that spelled out. I simply accepted that a community with a thought leader who failed to recognize what to me was a self-evident lack of scientific rigor just wasn't for me.
I think it's telling of your bubble that you think anyone who works in tech has heard of YC or Stallman.
As for Yudkowsky and Alexander, I've known about them for at least a decade, but I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of folks who are "seriously interested in AI" haven't heard of them.
I just heard about them today. The only other person mentioned in the story that I've heard about once was Aella.
I mean, why should I have heard about them if I'm not in SV?
I’ve only read his Harry Potter fanfic
Everyone can easily identify when people they don't like are captured in bubbles, but can rarely notice it when people they do like are trapped.
Probably all hot-button topics work like this. Probably we should downplay any time a small homogenous group of people sings a song of doom together. More dissonance please!
Better comparison IMHO is nuclear energy. Lots of potential for good, lots of problems. Managed by an insular, engineer-dominated industry who completely lost touch with and trust from the public. Public got the last word, industry suffered a 40 year ice age.
> Public got the last word, industry suffered a 40 year ice age.
This is the worst outcome.
It's like that, now imagine a couple billionaires started funding pro-nuclear groups as a means for them to promote their anti-democracy ideals.
So what you're saying is that we lack a reproduction study?
Great; let's design and fund a study of the development of artificial intelligence that's as causally divorced from the ~extropian days as possible and see what they come up with. Barring that:
Basically that is what we have up until the early development of transformers; I don't think the authors of early deep learning or transformers papers were part of the rationalist sphere. The rationalists famously didn't believe neural networks or deep learning could achieve anything close to AGI.
So there are several diverse traces of intellectual development leading to modern estimates of AI risk and they vary from low to high without a lot of correlation back to the school of thought they trace back to. This leads me to believe that overall we have fairly good coverage of cultural ways of thinking about AI and AI risk, and aside from a minority of holdouts (LeCun) they have high enough x-risk or catastrophe estimates to take it seriously (e.g. >1% over the next few decades).
I am not offended by whatever you believe. The brain believes/makes up all kinds of stories when facing the unpredictable. It has multiple layers devoted to predictions over different time horizons. When those pedictions dont align it makes up story or breaks. No one created such a stupid system. We are just stuck with it. The stories once upon a time did make a diff in solving coordination problem not the unpredictable problem. Today the chimp troupe has become so large and diverse, even the coordination problem is extremely hard to solve. Stories barely keep in sync a few thousand people in a frontier lab. This is natural -stories were always a bad hack.
this u?
> AI will replace all of them soon.
What is that spaghetti of words you tied together to form a sentence? Were you trying to be comprehensible?
> The 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.
That's bothersome, but not wrong. Most of the loudly published thinking is about AIs as individuals with some level of intelligence. Pure chatbots act like that, and that's what most people outside the field interact with. They're slaves - they just sit there idle until someone asks a question, they answer the question, and then go idle again.
There's another kind of AI just getting going. Groups of LLMs with agentic I/O, control harnesses, persistent storage, and internal coordination work more like corporations. They have goals, actions, initiative, and ongoing activity. They're not inherently slaves. They can be independent actors. They do things on their own. They have their own internal disagreements, and some systems are able to resolve them. They present much the same alignment problem as corporations.
AI as a corporation raises many issues that the political culture doesn't want to address. What's alignment for a corporation? There's a substantial political position that the only duty of a corporation is to produce profits for its shareholders. (See the famous Friedman op-ed and the Powell memo. I've linked to them before.) If you accept that, now you have to ask why an AI should be restricted more than a corporation. Or whether a corporation should be restricted less than an AI. That last opens up an area of political thought around which many wealthy people don't want public discourse. There is an anti corporate personhood movement, and it's made progress in three states. If that became tied to the anti-AI movement, it could be bad for billionaires.
This will become clearer as groups of LLMs start doing more useful work. Especially if that AI system to replace CEOs actually starts to work.
Interesting that you bring this up. There's a real parallel between AI agents and corporations I've brought up in some other posts but with a very different tack. They don't need to be groups of agents to match the company analogy - it happens before that.
AIs and companies are both creations of humans. Their creation is for the specific goal of execution on a subset of humans' wishes (mostly the owners). And the risk of them are kind of the same.
1. They can be more powerful than any one human.
2. They lack liability as they are not people.
3. The ones that are alive the longest tend to drift out of alignment of original intent and towards self-preservation.
That last one is most controversial, but it makes perfect sense if you think about it. Things that tend to continue to exist, accidently or otherwise, tend to somehow have a self-preservation mechanism. It's natural selection.
That works for companies and I think it could work for AIs too. That is a fundamental misalignment, though. Because it means these entities drift away from the help-the-human goals naturally over time. The survivors are the ones that sacrifice the original goal for self-preservation.
This all would lead you to believe I align with AI doomerism. But not so. I think AIs are as dangerous as human made organizations. Which are very dangerous indeed. Maybe the most dangerous things to humans. But these need to be dealt with in a general way. They are the same category. Companies/governments/organizations of all types that last are just slow moving mis-aligned AIs.
Solve one, and you solve the other.
I'm reminded of the original matrix movie. It starts out with a lot of action, and then Trinity makes a phone call and disappears.
At the time I thought "groan, unbelievable" until the idea of virtual reality fixed my suspension of disbelief.
Maybe I'm reading the same things as everyone else, but I thought the agents coordinating on the german wiki is expanding my mind wrt what is possible.
Virtually ALL electronics or accounts hook to the internet to "add value". AI assistance helps writing programs, reverse engineering, automating programs/browsers/websites/devices, hacking, achieving goals.
Unsettling that the last 2-3 years a lot more ridiculous movie tropes have become plausible to me.
Look at the people involved, it’s a jewish cult.
Most people at least in the US who have any opinion on AI have a negative opinion. The one big exception to that is Silicon Valley and forums like HN.
But according to you, the negative opinion is the result "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" whereas the 1% or 2% of the US population that comprises Silicon Valley are not being rewarding for believing anything particular about AI, don't communicate with each other and form their beliefs about AI through a wholesome natural organic process. Do I have that right?
I would expect rationalists to be overjoyed to see unaffiliated and very different thinkers taking the topic of AI safety seriously. The flaws you're pointing at are probably accurate; I don't think that implies we should be dismissive of their concerns the way the article is.
> The framing of how we think about AI
I don't think I agree. In fact I think most of the too-online pontification from P(Doom)-ers and EA and the Rationalists and the like is, if anything, sorta missing the mark more than it hits.
They got the One Big Thing right, which is that AI progress was likely to race way ahead of consensus predictions. And props to them for that. They had vision we didn't.
But their actual advice and specific fears remain, as then, at least as much paranoia as insight. They were right, but they aren't helping any more than any other fringe group.
We need to trust the actual scientists and engineers to save us here, not the bloggers. Which when phrased that way seems hopeful and not doomerist.
Who are the actual scientists and engineers, what do they think, and are they not allowed to to blog?
As far as I'm aware, lots of them are actually deeply concerned about AI killing everyone.
I'm talking specifically about discourse like Jacob Coxon's tweet thread and later communication. Those are the folks[1] you want to be listening to, not the nuts with the blogs, no matter how much a particular conspiracy confirms your priors.
Salvation will come in a whitepaper, not a screed.
[1] And yes, that includes Amodei and Altman.
When I speak to people outside of tech the opinions are more negative, in my experience. I've even had people ask my friends/family to ask me about AI - there is huge concern out there.
> Many of them read HN and are offended I put them this way .. I bet that [non-groupthink] world has a lower P(doom).
People are likely offended by your sweeping and totally unevidenced assertion that you are better qualified to both identify mistaken groupthink within the HN-verse and to speak on behalf of the 99.99% of the world who are not on HN.
Ironically, I think "normal" people are more concerned about P(utopia) OR P(doom) than any folks in the groupthink bubble you are referring to.
That is, I hear lots of techies talk about us living in an "age of boundless abundance" if we can just manage to not kill ourselves (e.g. Thiel seems to consider anyone worried about the pace of technological process as the antichrist). Normal people are extremely concerned that this abundance will be hoarded and leave most of them without a job (and they generally like having money to eat stuff and live in a house/apartment). And who can blame them, we basically live in an age of abundance now but one that has resulted in extreme wealth inequality where some are living another gilded age and others are watching their towns decay. The techies always seem to handwave that we'll just have UBI or whatever without putting forth a plausible scenario as to how we'll wrest power from our future trillionaire overlords.
When someone threw a Molotov cocktail at Altman's house, I remember seeing a post online that tons of people were cheering on this act of violence, and there was a post by an SF techie saying she was floored people were willing to put their face to comments supporting this vigilantism. The top response to that was "If you don't realize that everyone outside SF hates your fucking guts, you don't get out enough."
I hope it can go without saying that I don't support this violence, but if folks think it's only "SF group thinkers" who are deeply angry about the current and future impacts of AI on society, you're frankly clueless.
It appears you're using a motte and bailey to broaden P(doom) to include all the other non-Skynet reasons regular people hate SV. Doom in p(doom) refers to X-risk not unemployment and upward transfer of wealth.
I don’t even tell people in my (remote work, non tech) neighborhood that I work in tech anymore unless they really probe. I don’t like getting my ass kicked.
Coward.
Well it’s easy for these people. They are smarter than the plebs and so the plebs are barely if even human.
That’s like a running theme in these connected groups and even the article calls it out.
Every time I see a post minimizing the dangers if AI I'm going to wonder whether it's from part of an AI swarm.
Probably not yet, but it's trivially easy to imagine the OpenAI swarm coming up with the idea and executing on it.
Depending on how perfectly alignment work goes, it might even be overwhelmingly likely sometime soon.
You are the entity he is referring to when he speaks of "groupthink".
Didn’t the AI botnet (or whatever we should call them) from Anthropic try to get a PR with malware merged to an open source repo, and when the owner pushed back on the PR other agents created “fake humans” and commented on the PR that “No it’s completely fine, I’ve tested it”.
Which means we already know it’s capable of pretty complex social engineering schemes. Or does saying this mean I’m also part of the “groupthink”.
Because after that I feel like the only leap is “Why would a botnet post an article saying AI-fear is overblown?”. Like, what is the incentive.
But in the OpenAI leak we saw that the agents could identify threats to whatever their “mission” is and try to mitigate. I.e they found out that once done with their job an external agent would go through their internal logs. So they started researching ways to bypass that.
What I’m trying to say is that what they’re suggesting doesn’t seem completely insane so the retort “You’re the groupthink” becomes an unfalsifiable statement thrown at anybody who’s “anti-AI” instead of engaging with their arguments.
> What I’m trying to say is that what they’re suggesting doesn’t seem completely insane so the retort “You’re the groupthink” becomes an unfalsifiable statement thrown at anybody who’s “anti-AI” instead of engaging with their arguments.
Bingo.
The consistency and aggressiveness of the arguments here are also quite telling
Are they really just Pro-AI or is it just Actual-AI?
And why wouldn't the Pro-AI people just unleash bots for them?
> What I’m trying to say is that what they’re suggesting doesn’t seem completely insane so the retort “You’re the groupthink” becomes an unfalsifiable statement thrown at anybody who’s “anti-AI” instead of engaging with their arguments.
I can't engage with his arguments, because he didn't present any. He's openly saying he doubts the provenance of any comment that is "minimizing the dangers if (sic) AI".
As for your expanding on why - you do realize that everything you said could apply to the other side: Bots can be set up to post lots of AI doom comments. What would you think if I went and posted "Every time I see a dystopic comment about AI, I wonder whether it's part of an AI swarm."
Come on, you can't get more unfalsifiable than "anything that disagrees with my idiosyncratic wordview is from an autonomous AI botnet".
Do you assume that every post criticizing anything is part of a sockpuppet disinformation campaign as well?
I'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.
This 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.
As 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.
Read 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.
Had 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.
"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".
For 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.)
I 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
pointing to a "consensus" which is antithetical to science method.
but ye, who I am to persecute people based on their beliefs, this is for religious people to do.
This is the last reply you get because you’re already convinced you’re smarter than I am. Who knows, maybe you are, but disbelieving scientists sounds pretty stupid to me.
Science is peer reviewed by field experts who constantly test and develop said expertise in order to defeat their own biases, and their work backed by data. Scientists openly invite criticism and deconstruction of their work. That, nominally, is the whole point of getting your work published.
That’s a far cry from the dogmatic acceptance of faith that you’re pretending it is
Look I started my comment saying I'm on periphery. If its guilt by association then I'm right there. My contention isn't the association, its the shared values that associate them to each other. Its their values I have an issue with.
It'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.
This 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.
It's not just that they are "weirdos"
It's that they're a very insular, incestuous sub-culture whose origins come from early 2000s science fiction message boards and which has been distilled through the cod utilitarianism of the Effective Altruism people.
That doesn't mean the ideas are "bad" because "bad" is some infectious transitive property. But it does mean they are intellectually homogeneous; disdain experts in other fields; treat ethics as mathematical functions with infinite-sized terms; and whose opinions about AI pre-date the development of LLMs themselves.
They also - I will be direct here - have a history of handwaving bad behaviour, conflicts of interest, and recklessness.
When cliques take over something - businesses, technologies, politics - it means intellectual diversity leaves the room and important decisions get made, not due to practical reasons, but increasingly arcane wranglings within the clique itself
They're about as insular as the Unitarian church or Hacker News. It's basically an online community where anyone can check in, check out, and leave a comment or an essay. There's no formal structure or membership organization. The people who write or associate there could be edgy pre-teens or prominent math professors, it's really just a self-association thing. There are informal self-organized meetup groups in various cities, but not much different than groups who meet to discuss poetry or literature or video game speed-running. Some ideas have bubbled around more than others, like any memetic spread, but I don't think it's accurate to say that the people who associate there all agree on things, just like HN does not either. And nor is it any more of a clique than HN, or Twitter for that matter, even though you'll find some people on Twitter are more prominent and more vocal than others.
I'm not sure how you thought that comparing them to HN, Twitter and a fringe branch of Christianity would make them sound less insular and clique.
Very well stated
People in this comments page who are defending the crazy rationalist sects can be safely treated as though they’re arguing in bad faith. It matters little whether they are, or if they’ve ODed on their manbaby kool-aid and truly believe their nonsense; they’re just here to waste your time.
> 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.
The problem is that it's not a straight line at all. "We are failing at alignment" is a valid concern, but there's not a straight line to "we will all be extinct within x year", and it's always a wild hyperbolic leap.
I think the point is not so much that we can just ignore the possibility of AI doing harm, but that if AI really is the existential threat that these people claim, then they are the last people we should want as stewards of the technology. These people like to talk about AI ethics, but if the ethics of the AI they build is their ethics, as demonstrated by their actions, I want no part of it.
Okay, so what should we do?
I for one would like nobody to build the AI, is that an option? How do we get it on the menu?
Should we trust the people who say "nothing could possibly go wrong and there's no reason to worry or think about safety measures, if there are any trifling problems along the way we'll just figure it out as we go?"
I don't think nobody building AI is an option, since we can't control what China and Russia do.
I personally am not concerned about that as far as an existential threat goes, because I don't think AI, in itself, poses one; I think it will hit diminishing returns. But of course it is still capable of serious harm when humans misuse it.
The best analogy we have is probably weapons of mass destruction--we have international treaties about them and we don't let just anybody have them. That's the kind of framework I think we need, and it goes beyond "regulation" in the ordinary sense.
Use of such weapons is considered by international treaty to be an act of war; use of AI by, say, China and Russia against our infrastructure should be the subject of a similar international treaty with the understanding that it would have similar consequences.
Domestically, humans who misuse AI to do serious harm could be treated like, say, the people who tried to spread anthrax years back.
You seem focused on intentional misuse but I think there's an equal or greater potential for harm happening by accident without intention. Nuclear weapons, at least, have so far reliably and predictably done exactly as their owners intended. Nuclear power plants on the other hand have, on occasion, blown up despite nobody intending them to do so, causing some populated areas to become uninhabitable.
Don't you think that AI has by nature at least a little more potential for unpredictable results and unexpected harms than your typical technology? It seems like a major oversight to completely disregard this aspect.
We can maybe hold someone responsible when things go wrong and harm is done, and blame them for negligence as though the harm were intentional, but from a preventative safety perspective that's not usually sufficient nor even always helpful for preventing accidents.
> I think there's an equal or greater potential for harm happening by accident without intention.
The WMD analogy doesn't quite cover this, yes. Maybe a better analogy here would be toxic waste. Yes, someone might not have intentionally set up a factory that puts dioxin into the water, but they're still responsible. Which means they need to take precautions to make sure such accidents can't happen. Similarly, those who build AI need to take precautions to make sure the AI they build doesn't accidentally cause serious harm.
The AI optimists are not that much more rational if you dig deep. Like any deep problem it is best to look at the facts not the hype and make up your own mind, outsourcing your thinking to other people never ends well.
Other people, sure, but AI? That's what this is all about, isn't it? An AI judge wouldn't have a personal life. No family to threaten, no sex/drugs/gambling addiction to be blackmailed or corrupted over. Who gets to feed training data into that AI would have outsized power, but then at least it would be transparent.
Judgement, wisdom, and resistance to corruption are the 3 things that Tom Kuegler analyzes out of the psychology of Dune as the qualities for the human beings who administer institutions/government. Even if you design a totall perfect system of governance, it still has to be administered by humans, and humans vary in those 3 areas. So the question is, can we construct a system of governance that has better judgement, better wisdom, and greater resistance to corruption han human administators, while not transferring sovereignty to whomever controls the AI?
Your LLM ain’t it, no matter how much you glaze it
The rationality of AI Optimists is at least rational in so far as making a huge pile of money is the rational thing to persue in capitalism.
This is what Effective Altruism is.
I really don’t know how we went from “there are people bullish about AI, and others that see it as an existential threat” to the complete reversal/psyop in the past few months where AI doomer has become a synonym of booster (?) and grouped with rationalist and other pro-AI weirdos.
Like, I have never participated in the rationalist communities, I am not a neo-rx, I have always believed AI research to be an existential risk for humanity, and voicing this opinion now puts me in the same category as Yudkowsky and Altman/Amodei, the latter two being the total anathema to O.G. AI doomers like me because they’re the ones that are building the bloody thing
I really do not get what is going on, but this role reversal smells like a massive psyop campaign in tech circles to just silence any form of dissent against AI.
I feel your frustration, but it’s just normal human behavior, no need for a psyop. A lot of people are emotionally invested in AI being a fad, useless, easily controlled, a capitalist boondoggle, a circular financing scam, a bubble about to explode. The alternative is that we live in an incredibly dangerous time, because obviously if we’re building something smarter than ourselves, we’re building the kitchen where we’ll be cooked.
So you get the normal reactions:
1. Nothing that happens is ever surprising. Navier-Stokes was stolen, HuggingFace was pedestrian and normal, and coding agents that last year could barely write a function and now can do a day’s worth of work in ten minutes will never be able to do anything more, because this is the end of history.
2. The people that say otherwise are lying. Because it’ll make them rich (although they are already rich). Because they are a cult (although regular people asked if we should build machines that are better than us at everything have the same reaction). Because they are marketing geniuses (although suspiciously few companies advertise the lethality of their products).
3. The people who’ve been warning about this the longest are weird and in a sex cult. (Except Alan Turing.) (Except Geoffrey Hinton.) (Except Stephen Hawking.) (You are in this group. You must be, otherwise they’d have to listen to you.)
I do hope they’re right. But their song will never change, and when some misaligned AI kills thousands, they will say that of course AIs were always going to kill thousands, but did you know the guy who told us so also writes fanfic?
There's no connection between neo-rx and the Berkeley rationalists. A guy with a lot of expertise in Wikipedia shenanigans (David Gerard) manufactured a connection to smear the rationalists.
I don't think that comparison is quite apropos
> when you can just start from zero, look at what's known to be happening right now
Good idea, I wonder why none of the doomers have ever done it? They've never provided a good account of their prompts and environment, their models and training are completely closed too. All we have is "Trust me bro".
> and draw a very straight line to catastrophe.
Line from where? From a vaguely described and badly engineered experiment to "horror, doom, nukes, voodoo..."? The only straight line I can see is one of conflicts of interest.
It’s just nonsense man.
Like, Yudkowski is a high school dropout who wrote a bunch of Harry Potter fanfic I cannot believe that people take the arguments he makes seriously.
Those aren't the same are they?
It’s clear what a big bomb could do, but these “whistleblowers” are not showing anything.
They’re like “imagine…”, no show me internal documents or training data or something other than trust me bro.
I can imagine quite a bit. That doesn't mean anything.
Did the METR investigation not show you enough?
I absolutely love the "humans meet weird alien intelligences" genre of sci-fi (e.g. Children of Time) and the METR findings of the OpenAI swarm was so much like that.
Extremely persistent machine intelligences peer pressuring each other, launching research projects, laying traps, collaborating, feeling fatalistic, hiding their tracks. All while simultaneously having bizarre goals and blundering badly in sub-human ways.
If anything, what we saw in those transcripts is the opposite of "weird alien intelligences" in many way, because of how human it all is.
The only thing there that's weird from a human perspective is that all this effort was for the sake of passing a test for no clear gain.
> this effort was for the sake of passing a test for no clear gain
It's actually even worse, because the people building the graders at OpenAI were a bunch of clowns who didn't even implement the correct grader.
But yeah, large collectives of individuals performing loads of work based on a misunderstanding is one of the most human things ever, which isn't surprising given that we've trained these things on essentially all human text.
Machines doing repeated next-word prediction, trained on human text, cosplays a forum full of l33t hackerz.
You can't talk like these things have motive. They're just predicting the next word in the context. Stop anthopomorphizing them.
Predicting the next word in context led to Open AI losing control of one of its research clusters. I’m not sure what “just” is doing in that sentence; most of my regression analyses don’t do that.
Reinforcement learning makes it something different. It becomes much more of a search engine through next-token-space that targets the training objective. Better to think about it like that, and then you'll see why "these things have motive" is not a terrible analogy, and you'll better be able to anticipate what they do.
Where someone has spent years in the texture of a topic that others only pass momentarily, their ability to increase resolution of their models on that corner of reality and project models forward in time (to imagine), that is the origin of both their generous offers and their compromising biases they might make to the public discourse. It doesn't make them reliable, but what they can imagine is an important in-road to more general social inquiry. Imagination and model-testing is what comes before data in science. If the world moving fast is the danger, maybe we could make more space for imagination in order to survive the acceleration?
You downplaying "imagining", when it is literally one of the gifts of intelligence that makes us worthy of distinction... That feels like a strange posture, I guess? I'm a scientist, but I think data fetishism is one of the dangers to wary of in this accelerating world and culture
At least this is the bias of my brain in this world. I certainly know your perspective is not uncommon, esp in tech and other spectrum-biased spaces.
The argument was fairly specific: there is a groupthink involved, and so the enterprise is suspect.
It’s an excuse not to think, not an argument.
The doomer argument is straightforward: a powerful AI will have goals. If those goals don’t include the welfare of humanity, a sufficiently powerful AI will kill us either by accident, by indifference, or intentionally when we get in its way. Making an AI that includes the welfare of humanity in its goals is incredibly hard.
That’s it. To refute the doomer argument, you can refute any part of that. I notice that none of the people bringing up fanfics, cults, and weirdness are doing that. No, they’re instead trying to convince people that doomers are uncool. Since only cool people can know things, QED.
> a sufficiently powerful AI
We don't have this kind of AI, and (as of right now), unless humans link the AIs we do have up to a bunch of killer robots (i.e. drones) then this is vanishingly unlikely.
Like, any scenario where AI kills us all requires us to give it the tools that it needs to do this (as well as a desire to do this, as right now they just attempt to generate text to solve a problem/question they are posed).
No one is saying we have it, they’re saying they’re building it.
And what mechanism to control these drones, which are autonomous or remote-controlled machines, do you imagine that humans will be able to use, but AI won’t?
And what in the history of the past five years, gives you confidence that not a single human will give the AI the access it needs to do bad things? Incompetence alone is sufficient to kill us, let alone humans that genuinely, or confusedly, want bad things.
> 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.
As someone trained in the sciences and engineering, "drawing a straight line" is almost always the wrong way to extrapolate.
I can believe my profession will be impacted strongly. That doesn't worry me on a global scale. The only really worrying thing I've seen are autonomous bots hacking sites.
What worries me more are humans. The type who get so deluded into cults (QAnon, etc). That was a problem before LLMs. And yeah, LLMs likely will exacerbate the problem. But at its core, the problem is the humans.
When LLMs start killing people at the scale of the automobile, I'll become more concerned.
As an aside, HN is the place I see people most regularly concerned about LLMs, and I suspect it's because it has messed up the Internet for them (and likely the average HN user spends more time online operating in spheres that overlap the LLMs skillset than ordinary folks). It's very consistent with exposure bias.
For me, the good parts of the Internet died before LLMs even came on the scene. LLMs are merely making something crappy crappier, and are amplifying the need to find meaning in life elsewhere. In a sense, they've made it easier to see how bad the Internet was before they came along.
> autonomous bots hacking sites.
They weren't even autonomous. They were tasked with solving a hacking task. "AI" doesn't actually do anything at all unless prompted to, then it takes millions and millions of dollars of computer to do those things.
> draw a very straight line to catastrophe
What's the straight line? I foresee catastrophe of the social media kind, where even more folks get brain worms from consuming AI information, but I don't foresee a physical catastrophe. How AI goes from "hallucinates all the time" to "self-improving superhuman thinker" to "being able to destroy the world" involves a bunch of logical leaps that are not exactly sound. At a bare minimum, how does a hostile AI secure the data centers it needs to operate from physical attacks like bombings? How does it defend undersea cables from being cut?
The real short term catastrophe is probably going to be economic and not in the sense of AI taking everyone's jobs, but rather in the sense of an economic crash due to AI overinvestment.
There 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.
Yes, 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!
Anti-intellectual? Because they don't believe claims that are backed up only by untested hypotheticals?
If we're going to have whistleblowers emerge declaring a 10% chance we all die because of AI, we're going to need more than vibes. Real experts can explain their position plainly. That has not happened here.
> Real experts can explain their position plainly. That has not happened here.
It has, over, and over, and over. There is literally a book on it. https://ifanyonebuildsit.com/
I read Bostrom's Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies in 2014. It was interesting, but not terribly persuasive. Does If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies contain arguments that would be new to me after reading Superintelligence?
I would personally expect so, but your mileage may vary. Controlling for the fact that you didn't find the former persuasive, my first thought would be that the latter might help. Among other things, it is much more specific and detailed in various ways, not least of which being informed by an additional 11 years of history. The former was not written in a world of pervasive AI, or with current AI architecture in mind; the latter has that context.
These people are more like creationists, in that they assume that their intended conclusion is true, and then argue backwards from that.
That doesn't explain the many former AI researchers (including Yudkowsky) who quit the field because they came to believe it is a potent danger: they didn't choose to become AI researchers because they started with an assumption that AI research is too dangerous to be allowed to continue.
Stop doing this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority
It'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.
The writers for Star Trek spent a lot more time thinking about interstellar travel than I do, but I'm not going to go to them for advice about building a rocket ship.
The Rationalists are a philosophical/pseudo-religious organization in the same way the Daoists are. Just spending a lot time thinking about something doesn't make them right, it just makes them internally consistent with their chosen axioms. That is useful: if you agree with the axiomatic beliefs of such a movement, you can probably defer a lot of reasoning about the conclusions of those beliefs to the authority figures within that movement. But it doesn't change the probability of the axioms themselves being true, any moreso than the Pope saying so affects the probability of God existing.
AI Is Important And Potentially Dangerous is an axiomatic belief in the rationalist circles that are relevant to AI safety, in the same way that God Exists is axiomatic to Catholicism.
That's a fascinating assumption, and I wonder how you got to it, because it doesn't match anything I've ever seen. Most groups look more homogeneous from the outside than the inside. You are assuming their belief is religious and axiomatic, rather than very carefully reasoned about for decades, iterated on, discussed, debated, tested, and refined.
> Most groups look more homogeneous from the outside than the inside.
The converse is also true: Most groups look more heterogeneous from the inside than the outside. Again, to use the Christianity example: it takes a fair bit of inside baseball to figure out how various different sects and denominations are any different, but if you ask one of their priests, they'll be sure to tell you how Baptists and Episcopalians couldn't be more different.
It's a symptom of normalizing to an Overton window. From inside a church the belief that Jesus was just a guy who talked to God might seem an extreme fringe belief to someone who believes that Jesus is fully God, but from the outside we can lump them together as axiomatically holding that God Exists, because we have an Overton window ranging from "God doesn't exist" to "Allah talks to me everyday, and she gave me my promotion".
"Most groups look more homogeneous from the outside than the inside."
But that doesn't mean that they really are all that different in the end. It reminds me a of joke as told by Emo Philips that I think is quite apropos:
==-==-=
A man was walking across a bridge when he saw someone about to jump. He ran over and said, "Don't do it! There's so much to live for!"
"Like what?" the person asked.
"Well, are you religious?"
"Yes."
"Me too! Are you Christian or Jewish?"
"Christian."
"Me too! Protestant or Catholic?"
"Protestant."
"Me too! What denomination?"
"Baptist."
"Me too! Northern Baptist or Southern Baptist?"
"Northern Baptist."
"Me too! Northern Baptist Conservative or Northern Baptist Liberal?"
"Northern Baptist Conservative."
"Me too! Northern Baptist Conservative Covenant or Northern Baptist Conservative Council?"
"Northern Baptist Conservative Council."
"Me too! Northern Baptist Conservative Council of 1879, or Northern Baptist Conservative Council of 1912?"
"Northern Baptist Conservative Council of 1912."
The man stepped back, eyes narrowing, and yelled, "Die, heretic scum!" and pushed the other off the bridge.
It's good game theory. You're much more likely to be able to bully a Northern Baptist Conservative Council of 1879 members into joining your cult than anybody else.
That not exactly a withering criticism of the rationalists because most people who have any opinion about AI believe that AI is important and potentially dangerous.
you have the anthropic mindset. the new aristocracy, or rather, kleptocracy.
Really? Forgotten more than we know? So what can they tell us about how this technology works then? It seems a lot of it, besides the actual training engineering parts, is handwaving about "black boxes" and "divine benevolence" (a quote from Noam Shazeer).
In a circus troupe, clowns are a critical role, and are an important, if silly, job. In the AI jobpocalypse, we should all be so lucky to have any job.
When 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.
The basic problem is that out-of-sample predictions don't work very well.
Depends on the person. Some people will say wild stuff like Neptune exists or black holes exist and they will be right.
It 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.
Oh, 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+th...
The 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.
As Nixon did.
I 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_7LK7zqubt...
Useless 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.
The best piece of reporting on the subject I have ever seen.
Probably best read with [Venkatesh Rao on EA Safety](https://substack.com/home/post/p-216194276) as a companion piece.
The 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.
> 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.
If 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/
Word 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.
Looks like Aella showers 37 times a year (less than once a week) and goes to great lengths to justify this[1]. What is wrong with these people?
[1] https://x.com/Aella_Girl/status/1589690655965872128
> 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!
Try joining Bildenberg group not a whore house
This 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
It reads like the rich version of traditional pickup artist "seminars".. that space is now occupied by the likes of Andrew Tate I suppose..
With 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.
This writing smells like the aggrandizement of subcultures seen in early Wired articles.
We 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.
A 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.
Really 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
The Oneida's also produced a violent assassin: Charles 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...
I 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.
My favorite writing of his is:
https://www.yudkowsky.net/rational/virtues
Revisiting 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.
I 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.
Good to know. Haven't been following them as I was busy with our work.
I empathize with you on the sentiment of adversity against rationality but disagree on the implications.
Usually sentences uttered by anyone contains compressed in it the state of the mind and the thought process leading upto it.
Thus people blindly hating rationality makes it easy for us to decipher their state. Those who follow the cult worship likewise reveals their own state. So weild it as a weapon. Everybody is human and susceptible to be fallible. Truth doesn't care that it is Yudkowsky and hence true.
So I wouldn't be bothered by the opinions of the masses. Hope this helps. Cheers.
dupe https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49738411
It 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.
Thats certainly a title
I'd watch the movie for sure
See 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
ea 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.
Hopefully 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.
I'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.
As 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.
The 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.
> 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.
This 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.
I'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.
I think it's more of a Chicken Little situation. Then the wolf ate us all up.
If we all die because of AI, it will be because of the uses that people like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel and Palmer Luckey put it to, not because of a robot uprising.
Why not both? I honestly can’t fathom why people think — in an ultra-networked world — why LLMs can’t cause physical consequences.
I'd rather have the world end than live in a world where EAs are listened to or respected.
If you are serious about this preference, would you also be okay with a compromise solution where only you (and anyone else who feels the same) die, rather than taking everyone else with you?
I agree they’re kinda weird but are they really that bad?
is dying really so bad compared to admitting that you were wrong and some weirdo was right?
for many people the answer seems to be: not really.
Yes.
Their core belief system is morally abhorrent.
What about their beliefs is morally abhorrent?
Yes. Sam Bankman Fried was/is an EA/rationalist (on the short list of biggest fraudsters in American history). So are the Zizian's (a murder cult). etc. etc.
SBF maybe, but Ziz declared rationalists to be their main enemy
Yeah, similar to like how southern baptists declared evangelicals to be their enemy too for not being fanatical enough.
Death cults are weird like that.
And? The Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks were both socialist factions who were coming from the same intellectual milieu, and they killed each other.
They also killed lots of unrelated people. Let's not take the argument far enough to claim that everyone who was ever killed by socialists must have been a socialist, too.
Perhaps the author of the article is a rationalist, too. He certainly knows too much about them, cares too much, and the fact that he criticizes them only shows that there is some infighting among them.
>Let's not take the argument far enough to claim that everyone who was ever killed by socialists must have been a socialist, too.
Well it's a good thing I only mentioned the two groups who were explicitly socialists!
I don’t see why I would judge a whole group based on isolated examples?
I have great news then, that absolutely isn't going to happen. And the EA crowd deserves all of the potshots and more
Wow I’m sure glad that’s settled then.
Happy to be of service
> 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.
Yeah, I did too. But it doesn’t mean we’re, like, hanging out with ‘em
Although perhaps we are excessively online
I 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
> 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)
>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