That’s my take as well.

I think this Anthropic fellow is too much of a psychopath to understand that there’s other reasons to ponder the question of consciousness, than to try to upsell a chatbot as a slave, and so he can’t understand that it would actually be very bad for him if a bunch of normies were told, with full weight of divine authority, that these things are conscious. I mean, maybe not civil war level bad, but worse than PETA on your ass level bad for sure.

And that is to me very disturbing. He can’t even imagine that a reaction to “this is a slave” could be anything other than “shut up and take my money”.

I think that’s a separate phenomenon. Renewables are often cheaper than fossil fuels, which is great.

But to avoid pollution, we must actually leave fossil fuels in the ground, unused, unburned.

You know what is the big green initiative at fossil fuel companies? Using renewable energy to power fracking. The worst case scenario used to be that we only leave fossil fuels in the ground when the energy required for their extraction exceeds energy obtained by burning them. Now, the range of scenarios has expanded in both directions. We can leave fossil fuels in the ground because it’s cheaper to do renewables. But also we can extract and burn below-energy-breakeven fossil fuels.

We did give up on it. New shiny shit comes along and they need electricity, where do they get it? Converted airplane turbines, even reciprocating ship engines, etc, all running on natural gas. All the green pledge companies just polluting like there’s no tomorrow, quite literally.

Not to mention that if we didn’t give up on global warming, that would have slowed down AI development, giving more time to prevent AI doomsday.

Plus on the would be dooms day the AI would have less computing power available to it, meaning it would take it longer to figure out how to build another datacenter overnight. Plus if it is more distributed there’s greater latency.

The thing about Yudkowsky’s cult is that like any religion it is really all about not actually thinking anything through.

Everyone accuses them of not really believing what they say, because they can’t think straight about anything that they “believe”. To such an extreme extent it comes off as some sort of cynical ploy with a hidden agenda to convert the oxygen in the atmosphere into paperclips.

Well yeah its gonna likely fail to hack the power grid, but also just starting or stopping too many GPUs at once is a problem if they are grid connected, so I dunno. We damn near had a grid collapse from a freeze in Texas.

Also i used to point out that the real “foom” is how we are fucking up the planet after billions years of evolution. Practically in an instant. Like yeah it feels slow to us because we run pretty fast.

But on geological timeframe it really could just as well be their stupid AI dismantling the planet in 6 days (and on the seventh day, resting).

I would argue that the root cause is that they are complete morons who wouldn’t recognize paperclip maximization if it put a gas turbine in their backyard.

The emerging talk about “AI Chornobyl” is quite disturbing with regards to what this booga-booga gonna look like. If they don’t get enough booga booga from this stupid hacking incident, then what?

What’s really disturbing to me is that now they are talking about the power grid as a target. It’s not like their usual biblical stuff about plagues and locusts. Of course, power grid can’t be that insecure, or Iran would’ve went for it already, but they have privileged access courtesy of all the use of chatbots to run shell commands etc.

I think AI is kind of like that stupid universal socket wrench head that has a bunch of pins in it. The main skill in using something like that would be guessing when it’s not gonna work and not using it.

A guy I know because he invented a mechanism and I built an alternative implementation of the same behavior out of Lego and put on youtube, cited my thing in his doctoral thesis and will be defending on Monday, and I can watch that online. Can’t wait.