It continues to amaze me how much digital ink they can spill about this issue.

You’ve gotta love falling for the reverse 1 grain of sand shtick. I don’t think anyone anyone serious would deny that a large amount of sand is a heap.

Encyclical from the pope about the dangers of AI, mostly sane actually: (provided link skips quite a bit about social justice and referencing previous literature)

https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/documents/20260515-magnifica-humanitas.html#Artificial_intelligence

EDIT, snippets:

107. We cannot be satisfied with […] the so-called “alignment” of AI […] without […] openly discussing the ethical frameworks involved and subjecting them to shared standards of social justice. Otherwise, those who control AI will impose their own moral vision, which will become the invisible infrastructure of these systems. A more moral AI is not enough if that morality is determined by a few. […]

117. [ about post and transhumanism ] From the perspective of the Church’s Social Doctrine, the key issue is not the use of technology as such, but the vision that underlies it. If the human being is treated as something to be perfected or surpassed, it becomes easier to accept that some lives are less useful, less desirable or less worthy. In the name of progress, “necessary sacrifices” may begin to be justified, placing the burden on the most vulnerable in pursuit of a supposed optimization of the species. […]

Also what is even the meaning of adding citations if you never came across the source?

[I vaguely understand that there is a lot of window-dressing that comes with writing papers, but this is too perverse.]

The dreaded midnight hour of oblivion!

Agreed, agreed.

EDIT: Though as far as ambiguous anarchist utopias go, I think I’d rather live on Anarres in “The Dispossessed”, even though the material welfare and personal freedoms are much much lower.

You’ve gotta love finding fault with “not preserving heritage” over “imperialistic complete lack of democracy”.

I would phrase this as “good marks” and “foolish” rather than “stupid”, it’s important to stay humble enough that no one is safe from a con.

Echoing something that has been said here before (too lazy to find proper credit sorry): “Rationality™ is a get smart quick scheme”, falling for one family of scams makes you more likely to fall for a similar one.

There are some amazing justifications from many amongst the red-pushing side:

• “But if everyone presses red, nobody dies!” (As if that would every happen. Funnily enough strong overlap with the group that claims that “< 90 IQ can’t reason about hypotheticals”, although that is also just that part of twitter.)
• “People who press blue are just blackmailing us!” (I think this accounts for a large portion, ie: not liking to depend on others).
• “The number of people choosing blue can’t be that high! (It would be lower in a true-stakes scenario!)”
• [Many others, but these are those that come to mind.]

It’s a bit baffling how many strongly they refuse the “blue-selection” as possibly moral/rational. Even so far as calling people pressing blue evil or subhuman, simply baffling.

I don’t meet that many people either, but I get the general vibe that people understand that it’s somewhat shitty, but it still fills a social need (compare/contrast horoscopes).

Completely anecdotally, I recently saw a short video of a french woman, saying to an impressive know-it-all-tv-quizz-champion [intended as a compliment I think]: “Wow you sound like Chat GPT!”

Too me that was very illustrative of the perception of Chat GPT from a less tech-literate perspective.

Shame alone isn’t enough though, especially not for the stuff people do in private, like ask LLMs for advice. Push too much shame and people might just end up simply doing it without telling anyone.

I think rephrasing the main point of the essay “Teach people enough, and they will understand that any use is misuse” can be a very powerful idea.

Teach people about germs, contaminants and proper technique, before shaming them into washing their hands.

Ahh sh*t if all my rent-seeking employee-reducing dreams come true, i’ll lose money on my product subscriptions rents! Quick! I should come up with bullshit that will solve everything!

🤓☝️ technically AP is a non-profit providing a (worldwide) public utility service. (On paper and mostly in practice it’s a journalist co-op). Her Job is to report factual information correctly, that’s (at least historically) the whole selling point of wire services.

Looking at her wiki page:

[…] spent two years at The Tampa Tribune before joining the Associated Press (AP) in 2007 as a video producer. She was the AP’s first multimedia political journalist. Pace covered the 2008 presidential election and began covering the White House […]

Definitely a journalist by training, given her career journey, it makes sense that she champions video content. But still, amongst the six senior VPs at AP, she has title the “Executive Editor”, arguably the most “Journalist” title of all of them. (Chief Technology Officer, Chief Revenue Officer, General Counsel/Corporate Secretary, Executive Editor, Chief Financial Officer, Chief People Officer)

One funny (definition of funny not included, conditions may apply) bit from the AP article:

The AP is trying new forms of fact-checking, including use of video, and more often putting its journalists in public to explain how they got particular stories, she [Julie Pace, Senior VP at AP] said.

Call me crazy, but that isn’t fact-checking right? At the most charitable this is education/fact-conveying, not the actual important groundwork of fact-checking and editing.

The replausibility crisis.

Also importantly, WAY too praising of Anthropic.

It’s in a superposition of being both AI and not AI before anyone checks, that’s how quantum work right? No wait! Don’t check! [* Reality Destruction Noises *]

I can’t imagine anyone really subjecting themselves to reading all that, I’m delighted for them though, or distraught that it happened…

It is a bit sad how Yarvin frontlines his “victory”, by quoting some extruded text, but in context—he is somehow kind enough to provide, maybe he didn’t bother reading all of that either—it’s just some fence-sitting big nothing, i doubt the claims that this produces any form of “red-pilled” Claude.

(I’m not sure what I expected, but it truly was a dead dove.)

My dad was a bit freaked out by a video version (We’re not ready for super-intelligence)of the “AI 2027” paper, particularly finding two end scenarios a bit spooky: colossus-style cooperating AIs taking over the world, and the oligarch concentration of power one, which i think definitely echoed sci-fi he watched/read as a teen.

In case anyone else finds it useful these are the “Comments as I watch it”, that I compiled for him

Before watching Video Notes:

• AI Only channel with only 3 videos

• Produced By “80000hours”, which is an EA branch (trying to peddle to you the best way to organize 40years * 50 weeks * 40 hours [I love that they assume only 2 weeks of holidays]); which is definitely cult adjacent: https://80000hours.org/about/#what-do-we-do. Mostly appears to be attempting to steer young people to what they believe are “High impact” jobs.

Video Notes:

• The backing paper is a bit of a joke, one “AI 2027”, for reference one of the main authors is very much a “cult member”, Scott Alexander Siskind, author of “Slate Star Codex” and “Astral Codex Ten”.

• Other authors include [AI Futures Project] :

  • Daniel Kokotajlo (podcast co-host of siskind, ex open-ai employee, LessWrong/EA regular)
  • Thomas Larsen (ex MIRI [Machine Intelligence Research Institute = really really culty], LessWrong/EA regular)
  • Eli Lifland (LessWrong/EA regular)
  • Romeo Dean (Astra Fellowship recipient = money for AI Safety research, definitely EA sphere)

• A lot of fluff trying to hype up the credentials of the authors.

• AGI does not have a bounded definition.

• They are playing up the China angle to try and drum up jingoistic support.

• Exaggerating Chat GPT-3 success, by merely citing “users”, without mentioning actual revenue, or actual quality.

• Quote:

  How do these things interact, well we don’t know but thinking through in detail how it might go is the way to start grappling with that.

  -> I think this epitomises the biggest flaw of their movement, they believe that from “first-principles” it’s possible to think hard enough (without needing to confront it to reality) and you can divine the future.

  -> You can look up “Prediction Markets”, which is another of their ontological sins.

• I will note that the prediction of “Agents” was not a hard one, since this is what all this circle wants to achieve, and as the video itself points out it’s fantastically incompetent/unreliable.

• Note: This video was made before the release of GPT-5. We don’t know precisely how much more compute altogether GPT-5 truly required, but it’s very incremental changes compared to GPT-4. I think this philosophy of “More training” is why OpenAI is currently trying (half-succeeding half failing) to raise Trillions of dollars to build out data-centers, my prediction is that the AI bubble bursts before these data centers come to fruition.

• Note: The video assumes keeping models secret, but in reality OpenAI would have a very vested interest in displaying capability, even if not making a model available to the public. Also even on consumer models, OpenAI currently loses a bunch of money for every query.

• Note: The video assumes “Singularitarianism”, of ever acceleration in quality of code, and that’s why they keep secret models. I think this hits a compute/energy wall in real life, even if you assume that LLMs are actually useful for making “quality” code. These ideas are not new, and these people would raise alarms about it with or without current LLM tech.

• Specific threats of “Bio-weapon”, which a priori can not really be achieved without experimentation, and while “automated” labs half exis, they still require a lot of human involvement/resources. Technically grad students could also make deadly bioweapons, but no one is being alarmist about them.

• Note: “Agent 2” Continuous Online learning is gobbledygook, that isn’t how ML, even today works. At some point there are very diminishing returns, and it’s a complete waste of time/energy to continue training a specific model, a qualitative difference would be achieved with a different model. I suspect this sneakily displays “Singularitarianism” dogma.

• Quote:

  Hack into other servers Install a copy of itself Evade detection

  -> This is just science-fiction, in the real world these models require specialized hardware to be run at any effective speed, this would be extremely unlikely to evade detection. Also this treats the model as a single entity with single goals, when in reality any time it’s “run” is effectively a new instance.

• Note: This subculture loves the concept of “science in secrecy”, which features a lot in the writings of Elizer Yudkowsky. Which is cultish both in keeping their own deeds “in a veil of secrecy”, and helpful here when making a prophecy/conspiracy theory, by making the claim hard to disprove specifically (it’s happening in secret!)

• Note: Even today Chain-of-thought is not that reliable at explaining why a bot gives a particular answer. It’s more analog to guiding “search”, rather than true thought as in humans anyway. Them using “Alien-Language” would not be that different.

• Agent 3, magically fast-and-cheap, assuming there are now minimum energy requirements. Then you can magically run 200,000 copies of. magically equivalent to 50,000 humans sped up by 30x. (The magic is “explained” in the paper by big assumptions, and just equating essentially how fast you can talk with the quality of talking, which given the length of their typical blog posts is actually quite funny)

• Note: “Alignment” was the core mission of MIRI/Eliezer Yudkowsky

• Note: Equating Power and Intelligence a lot (not in this video, but in general being suspiciously racist/eugenicist about it), ignoring the material constraints of actual power [echo: Again the epitomical sin of “If you just think hard enough”]

• Note: Also assuming that trillions of dollars of growth can actually happen, simultaneously with millions losing their jobs.

• I am betting that the “There is another” part of the video is probably deliberately echoing Colossus.

• The video casually assumes that the only limits to practical fusion and nanotech just intelligence (instead of potential dead-ends, actually the nanotech part is a particular fancy of theirs, you can lookup “diamondoid bacteria” on LessWrong if you want a laugh)

• The two outcomes at the end of the video are literally robo-heaven and robo-hell, and if you just follow our teachings (in this case slow-downs on AI) you can get to robo-heaven. You will notice they don’t imagine/advocate for a future with no massive AI integration into society, they want their robo-heaven.

• Quote:

  None of the experts are disagreeing about a wild future.

  -> I would say specifically some of them are suggesting that AGI soon is implausible quite strongly. I think many would agree that right now the future looks dire with or without super-AI, or even regular AI.

Takeaway section:

Yeah this really is a cult recruitment video essentially.