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.
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
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
Exactly. And companies like OpenAI and Anthropic are disproportionately populated by people deeply connected to Effective Altruism or the Bay Area rationalist movement.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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 culture being discussed, not "AI".
Of all the names somebody would _actually_ associate with the development of AI over the last century, those would be very recent cultural footnotes only.
I think that's part of the problem and why its seen as cultish, the obsession with the social over the scientific.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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!
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."
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?"
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".
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
dupe https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49738411
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
Thats certainly a title
I'd watch the movie for sure
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
Exactly. And companies like OpenAI and Anthropic are disproportionately populated by people deeply connected to Effective Altruism or the Bay Area rationalist movement.
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:
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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 culture being discussed, not "AI".
Of all the names somebody would _actually_ associate with the development of AI over the last century, those would be very recent cultural footnotes only.
I think that's part of the problem and why its seen as cultish, the obsession with the social over the scientific.
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.
Do you assume that every post criticizing anything is part of a sockpuppet disinformation campaign as well?
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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
I'd rather have the world end than live in a world where EAs are listened to or respected.
I agree they’re kinda weird but are they really that bad?
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
And? The Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks were both socialist factions who were coming from the same intellectual milieu, and they killed each other.
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.
I don’t see why I would judge a whole group based on isolated examples?
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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!
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."
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.
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".
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.
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?
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).
you have the anthropic mindset. the new aristocracy, or rather, kleptocracy.
These people are more like creationists, in that they assume that their intended conclusion is true, and then argue backwards from that.
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.
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.
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.
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
I don't think that comparison is quite apropos
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
The argument was fairly specific: there is a groupthink involved, and so the enterprise is suspect.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
I hate that I know who that is from this scant description.
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
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 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.
Probably best read with [Venkatesh Rao on EA Safety](https://substack.com/home/post/p-216194276) as a companion piece.
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
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...
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.
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.
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/
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!
The best piece of reporting on the subject I have ever seen.
This writing smells like the aggrandizement of subcultures seen in early Wired articles.
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.