my team’s goal is ultimately to make AI much cheaper and lower-latency, and I don’t think that’s good for people right now

I have a lot of bones to pick with Google's morality, but "democratizing the transformer and LLMs" is at the bottom of my list.

So far, 100% of things "democratized" by big tech have been bad for people.

Oh, that's true. I just remembered that I hate Gmail, Google Maps, YouTube, Android, Gemma, Google Docs and free CalDAV syncing.

Woe is me, victim of the 21st century separated from my true calling of paying for software.

Edit (rate limited):

Does Gemma belong to this list?

Yes, and Tensorflow too.

There's no free lunch. You're paying one way or another.

No, sometimes someone else is paying for it. A classic example would be GPS - paid for by US taxpayers but benefiting the world. Yes now there are, for national security reasons, several other GNSSes but still huge swathes of the world ride free.

Interesting thing to write in a forum provided for free by big tech. Probably using a browser that big tech offers for free. On a phone or laptop purchased from big tech. Connected using networking gear and software made by big tech.

All bad?

How much of what you list has been "democratized"? Apart from the forum, and probably the browser, nothing. And both of those things are of questionable goodness to humanity.

Is it consuming too much science fiction that has people thinking like this?

Is it consuming too little science fiction that has people thinking like this?

I think the scepticism and gaslighting of people sounding the alarm over the trajectory of AI is concerning. This feels like a case of "knowing better" than the actual people involved in the projects.

You might be right. You might be wrong. But being overly confident on a topic you're a spectator to is possibly not the right choice.

IMO it's really not hard to extrapolate where this all ends up if you've read e.g. Das Kapital, and even if you haven't...

Maybe because it sounds like a lot of exaggerating ? I get the risk of disrupting the economy or the job markets, or cognitive risks.

But saying it will bring us to doom, comparing it to an extinction-level event, really ? I don't see in which world AI is that kind of risk.

I'd rather my politicians finally have some long-term plan about climate and energy than focus on AI slowdown or not. Climate change is way bigger risk right now that Opus 7

The guy was an insider for years but you call him a noob who just read a fantasy book?

Go back five years on HN and look at what the mass of commenters considered sci-fi delusional thinking about AI. (GitHub Copilot was released just under 5 years ago, for instance, provoking some discussion of what the tech might mean for the programming job market.) Why do you think dismissal as sci-fi is better grounded now? Do you have arguments instead of dismissals?

I for one cannot be convinced that these companies saying they want to slow down AI progress is for the safety of mankind (or any other altruistic reason). However, I respect someone willing to give up a very comfortable career for his convictions.

I’d wait and see what happens next in their professional life. It’d be ironic if they founded a new AI startup or something like that.

I don't get these comments. If he got paid way above his needs for a while he can easily retire already if he continues to keep his expenses in check, and take on a position in his church. Pays with happiness, not money, though if he has enough of the latter he can focus on maximize the former.

I don't get these comments.

Why? It’s not that difficult to imagine. People don’t necessarily do these things out of need. That’s a naive way to think about it IMO.

But that was exactly my point. If it is not out of need, why focus on making even more money instead of focusing on other things in life?

You are welcome to call me naive for such a viewpoint.

That would be ironic! But there's no chance I'll work on anything that accelerates AI. If I was OK with that, I would not have left Google.

I do expect to use AI in my work, as I indicated in my blog post. I haven't (yet?) reached the point where I consider that anathema...

But there's no chance I'll work on anything that accelerates AI.

Fair, but I don’t mean you in particular.

I do expect to use AI in my work

So as I but for your position, don’t you think that’d contribute to what you want to distance yourself from? It’s like leaving a political party but still donating to them, while finding their mission unacceptable. From outside these seem contradictory.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49840940

Isn't AI just the next step in the history of evolution?

I have the feeling it is inevitable that a new species will take over Earth. Just as humans took over a hundred thousand years ago. Now a species even more capable of thinking is coming up.

Thinking a million times faster. Knowing a million times more. Able to wrap its head around a million times more aspects at the same time.

A strong effort to slow it down might slow it down a bit. But does that really make a difference? It's not like we can "brace" ourselves from what is coming. Would the apes have been able to prepare for the arrival of humans if they had had 5 more years?

There's no new species being created here. A tool has been made. Either humanity will wipe itself out using said tool, destroy the tool, or learn to live with the tool.

If you think humans are a net positive to be around, you wouldn't be spending trillions trying to build a machine to replace them; not just their work, but all aspects of their lives.

While I agree with your general sentiment, there is the other side of this coin: these machines enable humans doing gruelling and arduous work to stop doing that work. Ideally we would redistribute the productivity and train those people into other, better kinds of work. That's a governance problem. These machines will soon allow us to work shorter weeks, or stop working altogether, to focus on hobbies, family, and things which bring us meaning. I suspect that the road to this will be rocky, because communism has a very poor track record. However if most products and services are made nearly free by machines, it requires very few people to work, and the entire demand/supply market collapses. That's a great vision for the future, *if* we can navigate the governance problem.

In other words, we should not begrudge machines which make our lives better. We should begrudge governance which prevents us from benefiting from that productivity.

It is the art the stories and the videos that we have made forever that is being replaced as well. Why? Because the people in charge can save money, not for some altruistic idea f making humans more productive

As much as I cannot disagree more with the author's fundamental premise (religion), it is refreshing to see someone claim to have a belief and then follow through, change their behaviour to match their belief, at no small cost to themselves, and in pursuit of doing the right thing.

It's not surprising though. The 9/11 hijackers also had a belief and followed through at no small cost to themselves (death). And they believed they were doing the right thing.

I hope you're not serious in drawing an equivalency between a mainstream religious belief and that level of extremism.

My point was more that I see a lot of mainstream Christians who aren't actually interested in doing anything based on their belief that affects their quality of life.

I really enjoyed the work, and for a while I told myself it was relatively harmless, but over time God forced me to confront the reality that the main impact of these tools will be to accelerate the design of a new breed of AI chips...

There's no arguing with someone who claims God forced them to do something, but I do wish this person good luck in whatever they do next.

God, your conscience, it’s all the same.

The more people leaving 'because AI' just makes me sad that there have been so few leaving 'because advertising'.

Advertising is an irritation. AI is a threat.

Advertising is surveillance, and surveillance is a threat.

Are you inferring that AI is not a surveillance tool?

I don’t think that’s what he meant. They both are surveillance tools. He’s just upset only one of those is making people advertise their leave in protest.

It’s funny how the [very real] thing that normalizes the exploitation of user data, enables “reel casinos,” suffocates creators and replaces them with “influencers,” etc. is compared with the [still very abstract] danger of AI.

Even before big money was on the table, people didn’t blink an eye at starting to work for Google/Facebook, “solving fun tasks.”

(OP here) FWIW I despise the addictiveness, er engagement optimization that Google and others do. I have said so inside and outside the company many, many times. I would never have agreed to work on that stuff myself. One of the hobby projects I would like to work on is exploring how to use personal AI to beat those algorithms.

I respect the argument for not working for a company that does addictiveness work anywhere, even if you don't work on it yourself. But that's not where I drew the line.

Also FWIW I disagree the danger of AI is abstract. A lot is happening right now, in education for example.

So it is ok to believe (even despise) it is bad but as long as I don't work directly on it but my super big paycheck gets funded by it, all good! Cheers!!

To a guy who knows nothing about nuclear physics, an atomic bomb is very abstract until it blows up and becomes very concrete. Should we wait until it explodes to consider the risk?

AI is a threat if you're a messy codebase, an unsolved math problem, or cancer. Otherwise you only have an improved quality of living to look forward to IMO.

Spot on. Or because of addictiveness. Or impact on democracy. Or ruining people's ability to focus on anything. Those attention grabbing algos havent been designed by non-technical people.

Is there any particular area of employment for algo geeks that you would approve of? Maybe we should just live off unemployment benefits instead of working?

He's not even leaving "because AI". He's literally leaving to focus more on AI stuff.

I plan to study how AI agents debug code and whether debugging tools that can make them more effective at that.

I want to use AI agents to bring some of my hobby project ideas to life.

I’m keen to reap the benefits of AI

and addresses the anti-AI view:

AI detractors think that AI won’t really work. I think it will. (ed. for brev)

The main reason then is the concern of the velocity of the rollout and the increased pervasiveness of AI. Too fast, too much.

While I get the spirit of your message, advertising has been around for over a century, and I don’t believe it has done near the damage to society over that timespan that AI will likely do in a decade (if we’re not careful and responsible).

I also don’t believe addiction and other psychological exploits are used for the sole purpose of ad revenue. There are other more direct forms of monetization involved, such as microtransactions and subscriptions.

If you really want to blame something, it really all comes down to one word:

Greed.

Agree that greed is the core reason.

Advertising has become 'active', very recently in the overall lifespan of advertising. For most of it's lifespan it was passive, it blared out at you from the TV or radio or bus stop. Now, however, it's reaching out and taking pieces of you back for analysis and reconstruction, and on-selling to any other entity interested in doing the same.

The reason is greed, yes.

We can't regulate human greed, but we can regulate the manifestation of its symptoms.

We can also choose not to work towards expanding the capacity of said symptoms.

We can also choose not to work towards expanding the capacity of said symptoms.

Not if we need to eat and raise our kids. Then we need careers, which depend on what everyone else is doing, so we can't stop, our own future depends on how competitive we remain in the new context. I see an idealist streak here, some kind of naive platonism that ignores everything runs at a cost and nothing executes for free like platonic heaven. We can't take decisions that contradict our own needs.

I also don’t believe addiction and other psychological exploits are used for the sole purpose of ad revenue

Instagram? Tiktok? Facebook?

Social media feeds off addiction to generate ad revenue.

And how much damage has social media done to political and social institutions and to collective mental health?

Ads on other web properties are not weaponised in the same way.

Social media feeds off addiction to popularity, a human thing. Remove the ads and it will not stop.

It won't stop but it will slow down to a crawl.

Eating too much fruits has never been healthy, but gorging oneself on raw sugar is worse. Perfect is the enemy of the good.

It will not slow to a crawl because popularity = power. Even if the the platforms themselves stop ads, the users will not, either for other or for themselves.

Why is uncertainty about the motives of one form of superintelligence terrifying, whilst, at the same time, uncertainty about the motives of another, omnipotent supernatural intelligence comforting? i.e. the “I don’t know God’s plan, but I sleep well knowing He has one” line of reasoning.

God’s been around for thousands of years and we are still here and flourishing, so obviously God is in some way “aligned”; the same cannot be said for AGI.

edit: Guys, I said “in some way”, not “perfectly”.

If god would allow the creation of an unaligned superintelligence, how aligned is he really?

Survivorship bias. Ask all the humans that have died in horrific screaming agony, and saw everything they worked for turned to dust how well that was aligned with their interests.

I have never heard survivorship bias applied to perspective on the goodness of God. Even as an agnostic, I'm enjoying the thought.

This little blue marble of Earth is an as-yet undiscovered anti-entropic bug in an otherwise accurately functioning entropy-respectingly beautiful wasteland of a universe.

I'm sorry by I'm stealing this

Christians believe that God is inherently good. “This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you: that God is light and in him is no darkness at all.”

You have to differentiate between the old and the new testament in Bible. God is good and caring derived from the new testament where Jesus God's son ultimately died for all our sins.

In the old testament God was hard and judging heartless, killing his creation through flood, wanting sacrifices, killed 1st borns, leveled two whole cities Sodom and Ghomora, and was in general an hardhearted God that you should fear.

This is incorrect and very puerile (it’s theological slop) and even in a Christian frame this is known as Marcionism which is a heresy.

What

Book 2, Capter 2 of Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis explains the logical problems with dualism

Even aside from how aligned the plan is with us, what about how aligned we are with the plan?

I’m always intrigued by the duality and conflict of “I have free will and must choose to act the right way” and “God has a plan so everything will be alright”.

Either free will allows us to deviate from the plan, or the plan will always be carried out and free will doesn’t really matter in the end. Arguing for God’s plan as the thing that will save us is eerily similar to nihilism, because they’re really arguing none of our actions truly matter.

Yeah, it's an age-old question. My high-level answer is, God's plan will be done regardless of what I do, but my actions determine (at least from my point of view) whether I'm aligned with the plan or not. And I want to be aligned with the plan.

They’re related psychological phenomena (also highly related is going to be your perception of and relationship with your own father). This is why an understanding of the goodness of G-d is important to cultivate.

It should also be noted that it says in Genesis that G-d promises not to destroy the world ever again like He did with the flood. This is important psychologically because it prevents this type of apocalyptic millenarianist thinking.

Why are you writing G-d instead of God?

When you use a name for some thing, especially when you use it in a familiar way, it makes you feel like you understand that thing (nominalism), but G-d is ineffable so it’s important to be considerate of that, even if we’re using English and the word we use is Germanic in origin.

AI isn't (for the foreseeable future) a superintelligence, certainly not one with its own motives.

Right now AI exists to do two things:

- sidestepping legal and regulatory inconveniences like copyright (which drives a massive chunk of investment the same way crypto did by sidestepping financial regulations, AirBnB did by sidestepping housing regulations, Uber did by sidestepping passenger transport regulations and it and the various delivery and other "gig work" apps did by sidestepping labor laws)

- drastically reducing the cost of (and drastically lowering the bar in terms of skillset and effort for) churning out large amounts of low to medium quality assets/code, saturating various systems designed to pay for intellectual property (e.g. ad or subscription based music/video streaming apps with revenue sharing programs, but also literally any form of digital contract work at almost any scale of business)

Neither of these are helping people (in general) and in fact they're extremely destructive (or "disruptive" if you want to make it sound positive) to the existing systems society relies on because they became feasible and (thanks to massive private subsidies, aka "investments", by VC firms and extremely creative accounting) very affordable extremely quickly.

What's worse - while it seems extremely likely that most of the AI generated "works" aren't actually considered copyrightable works by law and it's entirely possible that the use of copyright-protected works in training data does in fact not violate copyright, this does not in fact create a "world without copyright" because IP laws continue to exist and continue to apply, they just no longer meaningfully protect creative labor (i.e. anyone whose profession relies on producing works, whether that's an artist or a programmer) because anything they produce can be cheaply mass reproduced while they still have to stay clear of claims of anyone with enough funds to enforce rights against them.

Under the current economic system there are exactly four ways to earn money to buy back a share of society's resources to sustain your own life (let alone that of your dependents, e.g. kids or aging/impaired parents/spouses/family members):

1. Simple labor: you generally get paid based on your output or a very low flat day rate conditional to maintaining a measurable level of performance. This is typically "low-skilled" menial production labor. Much of this has been replaced by automation in factories and offices alike and most of what couldn't be automated has been moved into countries with fewer labor protections and a higher supply of desperate people willing to accept what are often bad working conditions because cost of labor is usually one of the biggest contributor to overall production cost. In "the West", this kind of work is now scarce and even when it's relatively safe it's often exhausting and unrewarding. A traditional example would be a seamstress or factory line worker, a more modern example would be someone working in visual effects overseas or content moderation / AI training. How much money you can make is ultimately limited by the physical limitations of how much output you can produce per waking/working hour. For the entrepreneurial-minded this would also include people selling their home-made goods on sites like etsy.

2. Time-based: this can be anything from a masseuse to a lawyer or technician. Unlike simple labor the only relevant metric here is time spent. Although employment contracts may specify a fixed wage or at least a fixed component, the understanding is still that this fixed amount is conditional to a minimum average amount of billable time provided. Most employment contracts specify an expected number of working hours for various reasons but we're specifically talking about jobs where the output from the worker to the customer is "billable time". Arguably most service work (e.g. barristas, store clerks, waitresses, performers/mascots in amusement parks) also falls into this category because while customers often don't directly pay for access time the understanding is that you are paid to perform a certain role for the duration of the opening hours (i.e. act like a friendly, welcoming host or assistant). How much money you can make is directly tied to how much time you can spend working or justify billing.

3. Assets: you produce or buy works/products and lend/license them for use. This is in part where a lot of the original "gig work" lived (e.g. facilitating "couch surfing" or renting out your spare lawnmower) but also includes many simple rental businesses and arguably also landlords. The limiting factor here is the starting capital required to produce or buy things in the first place. Physical assets often also come with storage and maintenance overhead whereas software licensing often comes with expectations of continuing maintenance updates or improvements. Note that software inherently lives in this category rather than the first because unless you're selling away exclusive rights (such as usually required by the terms of employment contracts for wage labor) you only ever sell licenses, not the software itself.

4. Capital: although I said landlords arguably belong in the previous category, real estate traders/investors definitely belong in this one. The idea here is that you don't need to produce anything, you don't need to spend certain amounts of time, you don't need to produce or buy anything substantial and facilitate its use, you make your money entirely in the abstract. Whether it's margin trading, investing in derivatives or holding company stock until you sell it when the line has gone up far enough. The easiest way to make signficant amounts of money reliably is to start with many orders of magnitude more than what you want to make so that percentile gains are still significant - or that you can make enough risky high-risk high-reward bets for the occasional successful moonshot to offset the losses. Nowadays in many countries retirement funds are tied to the stock market, so in a way most people participate in this in some way but actually earning an "income" this way requires access to significant amounts of capital.

Advances in technology and especially low cost of transport and thus access to cheap labor overseas have significantly drained the ability for most people to earn their living via category 1. While there was a short-lived boom in "DIY retail" that one (alongside much of traditional retail) has largely been drowned out by white label dropshipping thanks to the disinterest from platforms like Amazon which are now flooded by nearly identical copies of the same knock-off doodads you can also find on Temu and Alibaba (respectively at decreasing fractions of the price).

Despite some astroturf campaigns trying to sell you on believing otherwise so they can run away with your money after the next cryptocurrency rugpull, category 4 isn't really a meaningful option for the vast majority of people although it can sometimes be a good way to slowly grow excess wealth (i.e. money you don't currently need and ideally can afford to lose) - but that still narrows it down to a small segment of the overall population.

Category 2 used to be a jumping off point to category 3: you work overtime, save up the extra income to buy or rent a studio or office or equipment or factory, or to be able to afford to take some time off to develop and launch your own asset (or SaaS) - it's how many startups with technical founders started out and it's literally the "American Dream". But hourly wages have mostly stagnated (or even decreased) relative to the rising cost of living (even more so if you include expenses expected to "participate in society", which naturally also often increase with the income bracket of your peer group - or the parents of your kid's peer group if you have kids).

And now AI is coming along and just like cheap white label dropshipping of knock-off goods turned out to be the more successful strategy for taking advantage of the technological innovations believed to make it easier to launch your own physical products (via 3D printing, cheap overseas sourcing of parts, online advertising, etc), AI has turned out to be the more successful strategy for taking advantage of platforms and schemes marketed as making it easier to launch your own digital services - in addition to completely eliminating the market for paid "just good enough" quality digital assets, such as the kind of work found on sites like Fiverr or Upwork, i.e. the kind of work that often provided early experience to professionals not yet qualified or confident enough to take on higher paid work.

There is a solution to this problem of "AI going to kill everyone".

- Create powerful AI but don't release it and keep it secret.

- Ask this AI to create some sort of virus that can be delivered to every human in the world without them knowing it and this virus does a fundamental change to the human brain such that humans never ever could even think of hurting other humans.

- Release this powerful AI to everyone.

Will that work?

... this virus does a fundamental change to the human brain such that humans never ever could even think of hurting other humans.

I do believe this is possible for a virus to achieve, I just don't think it's possible without killing the human.

This is not an airport.

Sorry, you’re saying people shouldn’t be allowed to write about their career changes on (checks notes) their own blog?

You said that.

This was announced on X [0] and Bluesky [1] (First post) with that intention.

He knows he would get more reach on those platforms than here.

[0] https://x.com/rocallahan/status/2103368176369324093

[1] https://bsky.app/profile/rocallahan.bsky.social/post/3mwd4u5...

We had people departing from OpenAI, Anthropic and now Google. The pace the frontier open letter was signed by over 1,000 experts. At which point do we believe the message?

Never, because it's not true. Multiple people saying the same thing doesn't cause it to become more true.

What part is not true?

That there is competitive pressure to sell access to AI that would cause mass harm.

Can you say more here?

You don't think that there is competitive pressure between Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, the various Chinese model companies, and others, to advance the capabilities of their AIs?

Or you don't think that sufficiently advanced AI can cause (mass) harms?

I am saying that if they lost alignment and their new model started injecting cryptolockers, dropping all tables of productions databases into the software or if it stated writing poisonous cooking recipes there would be backlash, lawsuits, and more towards such a lab. Consumers don't want to trust such a dangerous model so they won't buy the tokens and the lab will not want to spend money on lawsuits.

Or you don't think that sufficiently advanced AI can cause (mass) harms?

Even a feather can cause mass harm if it's used to sign a declaration of war. Something merely being capable of causing mass harm is not an issue and doesn't mean that the existence of feathers are an issue.

But this assumes an evil superintelligence. We don't even need that for terrible things to happen; we just need people doing people things and AI doing AI things at scale, and that scale is rapidly exploding as we scramble to deploy AI in the real world.

Case in point, that hallucination (which, if it was an evil superintelligence, could have been "strategic") that almost led to US boarding a Chinese ship over suspicions of nuclear weapons: https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/other/us-military-ai-failure-...

It doesn't have SkyNet, it just has to be WOPR. And it doesn't have to be people who are motivated to cause harm, it just has to be people making consequential decisions who are careless, distracted, paranoid or anxious -- which everybody is at some point or another.

When Astra and Fable stop making absolutely brain dead mistakes on simple tasks and not a moment sooner because I’m grounded in reality. Are you aware tech bros have been saying this same thing about every AI advancement since the 1950s? The reason being every AI researcher deep down wants to believe they’re God. This happens to also be why they’re some of the most insufferable people.

Someone says that they believe there is a 0.1 probability of their worsening human life in a decade

Then they say they are going to keep doing it...

Forgive me for alerting you: they are liars

keep in mind he doesn't work in AI but in creating tools for hardware design.

FWIW I was in the GDM GenAI unit. Not exactly working on AI directly, or I would have quit earlier, but in the middle of it.

so you don't think realized goods like AlphaFold don't out weigh unrealized fears of AI doom? so you quit?

Makes some important and objectively correct points and then completely blows any chance of looking sane or being taken seriously in the last paragraph. Is the coming collapse not also part of God's plan from your framework or is it only relevant when it's comforting?

For a resignation letter that is unusually detailed w.r.t. "what comes next?" It may not be uncommon to write why you leave, but the rest of that text does not read like what you send to HR to quit but what you send to your (soon to be ex-)coworkers afterwards.

Indeed, that message was for my coworkers. HR gets a form.

Unrelated to the thread of discussion, but thank you for posting it on your personal site, and not on Twitter/X.

I'd also be interested in how much your opinion on the existential threat of AI changes during your ten day backpacking trip, assuming it'll be a pretty offline experience.

Whilst I am involved in technology in my work and some of my hobbies, I do enough things 'away from the desk' that it feels to me that a lot of the doomerism is from people who have too much of their own personality and self-worth tangled up with the internet; the serially-online. I don't know where you naturally exist on that scale, but you already said you're outside the bubble and aren't the typical AI-rationalist-tech-bro (and surely the natural beauty of New Zealand is impossible to ignore).

I personally think that the old analogue world is big enough that some kind of AI-pocalypose wouldn't be anywhere near a civilisationally existential threat.

At risk of coming across an arrogant prick in telling you to do something: Consider your opinion now, and record it somehow. Then revisit it when you get back from your trip and see how far you've strayed from that as a baseline.

Thanks for the thoughtful comment. I go on this sort of trip pretty regularly so I don't expect this one to reorient me dramatically. They are good for my mental health though, for sure.

I think there are pretty clear mechanisms by which AI (a few model generations from now) could bring down civilization as we know it. One of them is a runaway cybersecurity scenario where hacking one set of systems quickly enables the AI to hack more systems (via supply chains, stolen credentials etc) and also host more instances of itself, and eventually everything Internet-connected that's not invulnerable just falls apart, which probably includes most electrical grids and a lot of other infrastructure. Yeah, the wilderness and countryside would still be there, but I for one can't live there without returning to the supermarket regularly for supplies. A lot of people would suddenly have to live (or not) without their meds. It would be bad.

Are fears of AI anti-intellectualism 2.0 ?

Why do people automatically associate intellectual capability with evil?

Does American anti-intellectualism explain the difference in perception of AI by Americans and Chinese?

Why do people automatically associate intellectual capability with evil?.

No intellectual capability, but non-human, inherently amoral intellectual capability that has already been proven act in hard-to-predict, illegal, and unethical ways. I think that's a very rational thing to be afraid of.

I don't think many associate intellectual capability with evil. What many do, however, is associate serious risk with living alongside vastly more intelligent entities. Especially if those entities are not aligned with us.

There are two major categories of AI doomerism.

The first is that AI will actuallly the world Skynet-style. I actually consider this unlikely. People are unlikely to completely remove people from the decisions to launch nuclear missiles, for example. Look at the Soviet/Russian design for Dead Hand [1], as one example.

The second is that AI destroys so many jobs that society falls apart. This is the far more problematic and likely scenario (IMHO). To put this in context, I see two general outcomes for AI:

1. AI will be used for further widen the inequality gap as the already ultra-wealthy will get, well, more wealthy, for literally no reason. This is the outcome where you still need a job to survive but a whole bunch of them disappear and aren't replaced. The world of The Expanse was kind of like this (on Earth); or

2. AI makes everyone's lives easier so less work needs to be done. Crappy jobs get automated. People in general get more leisure time and quality of life.

I believe (1) is far more likely at this stage and it's not going to be pretty. But this is an issue of economics not technology. Put another way: our society isn't structured to handle this change. Put yet another way: no amount of guardrails or slowdowns on AI will solve the fundamental issue of wealth distribution. And put even yet another way: this is capitalism vs socialism.

We have a preview of what this looks like when you compare the US to China.

The US has crumbling infrastructure, has lost the ability to manufacture everything but weapons and about 1000 people are insanely wealthy while everyone else are struggling to survive while AI systems drive up the cost of everything necessary to live like food and housing through demand pricing. We now spend over $1 trillion a year on a military to essentially siphon money to those 1000 from everyone else.

And what's China done? It's invested in infrastructure and its people. China's vision for AI isn't to maximize shareholder value at all costs. It will be strictly regulated so society as a whole gets to benefit.

So while I can respect people such as this author leaving on principle, I think they're still focusing on the wrong problem.

[1]: https://www.military.com/history/russias-dead-hand-soviet-bu...

And what's China done? It's invested in infrastructure and its people. China's vision for AI isn't to maximize shareholder value at all costs. It will be strictly regulated so society as a whole gets to benefit.

China is not in an ideal place right now, youth unemployment is way up, lots of dead end jobs, a 35 age employment limit that isn't just a meme. China has disparate visions for AI but maximizing owner (erm, sort of like shareholder) value is definitely one of them. Don’t get me wrong, China could get this right in the end, but it’s not a forgone conclusion right now.

China at least has a demonstrable capacity to serve anything other than bottom line of the shareholders. It is not perfect, but it at least has capacity for improvement.

I absolutely agree that China has problems and youth unemployment is absolutely on that list.

Here's the difference though: in the US that would be treated as a personal moral failure ("git gud", if you will) whereas China is actively dealing with such issues.

You see all this play out with how China and the US treat AI models. The US is busy trying to build a moat around AI for the benefit of the investors in OpenAI, Anthropic, SpaceX, etc. Chinese labs are essentially destroying "shareholder value" by releasing open weight models. China wants to commoditize (even democratize) the models themselves so society itself benefits and, geopolitically, the US doesn't become an AI monopoly.

We really should avoid putting China on a pedestal here because as soon as its position flips with the USA (inevitable at this point), they are going to look a lot less appealing to the rest of us. Alibaba, Tencent, etc… are absolutely not more moral than American big techs, they aren’t being altruistic even if acts to check the American big techs.

The logical fallacy here is that we can't use a hypothetical future harm to justify a current real harm because you can justify anything that way.

Open weight models, for example, are forever. Proprietary models are intentionally building a moat to extract more value from people. I know which one I prefer.

A lot of China fearmongering (in general, not you in particular) is just xenophobia. You will see the argument that the US has to do imperialism because if it doesn't, then China will become dominant and do the exact same sins. It's also a bit of a self-report: we tend to assume other people will act like us if given the chance so any accusation is really a confession.

China is neither good nor bad, it will do whatever is in its best interests. They are, however, smart, smarter than the current USG (which isn't hard), so maybe they will pull out more win-wins? Take their investments in new energy and EV, it’s completely due to self interest, but has the potential to lift up the rest of the world. But then they are also already a mass surveillance state, face recognition and cameras are everywhere, it’s like flock on steroids, that is tech they are also exporting to the rest of the world. Better AI is just going to make that issue worse.

When it becomes dominant, China’s sins will probably be very different from the USA’s, but they are still going to be there.

The thing people need to understand about China is that they tell you exactly what they're doing and why. There's no mystery in it. They have five year plans. They have doctrines. They love writing stuff down. And you will better understand and be able to predict China than 95% of Western analysts if you simply take what China says at face value. Seriously.

Consider Xi Jinping Thought on Ecological Civilization doctrine [1]. At the UN Summit on Biodiversity in 2020 Xi Jinping said [2]. He is saying that the world cannot support the developing world living in a resource-intensive way that Western societies currently do and you need a more ecological way of living. So when China massively pushes solar and other renewables, it's just the natural extension of their political philosophy.

The US, on the other hand, is just 5 companies in a trench coat.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xi_Jinping_Thought_on_Ecologic...

[2]: https://en.chinadiplomacy.org.cn/2021-01/27/content_77158874...

"The most important thing I’m confident about is that the Jesus of the Bible is real and therefore God has a plan that’s good for us"

The post resonates with me and the author shows the way.

I’m also very concerned about other AI-related issues: cognitive surrender, AI-induced psychosis

How's he so sure he's not already in both of these groups? His post about the AGI boogeyman sounds like it to me. Why is he bothering working on both of his projects if AGI is right around the corner anyways?

I definitely want my future work to be unambiguously pro-human.

Stay away from the lucrative then? Why did you ever think it was a good idea to start at Google? I don't think Jesus would have approved.

I recall when Google was the exciting bleeding edge frontier

Then came so much money, and by being chaotic evil even more money..

Still makes me sad. I was so sweetly naive

roc used to work for Mozilla though, and witnessed Google cannibalizing us for Chrome in order to feed its ad business. Between then and now there has not been a time when it wasn't all about the money.

Uhhh have you tried having a better browser? Chrome won because Chrome is faster, and I write this on Firefox.

I didn't, and still don't, think Google was unambiguously good or evil. They did dirty stuff with Chrome, they do addiction optimization, but they also provide great free services, fight endless wars against spammers, and provide reliable secure infrastructure to a lot of other people, and lots of other good things. I would never have joined the Chrome team, or worked on addictiveness, but I felt fine about working on optimization projects to make Google more efficient, which is basically what I did for my first few years there.

It's pretty hard to live in the world and be completely disconnected from anything unethical. Jesus doesn't seem to demand that (e.g. he didn't tell centurions to leave the Roman army).

The only new thing (to me) was the observation that some of our societal timeframes (e.g picking a 4yr university degree) hinge on assuming a specific rate of societal change. If the rate of disruption exceedes that assumption, the timeframes become inadequate.

AI is developing faster than humans can individually and collectively understand it and adapt to it. People trying to plan their futures, e.g. trying to plan for a world several years in the future as they enter university, can no longer do so the way previous generations could.

I tried asking this before on here, and didn't really get many useful replies (and I guess I won't again now the algorithm has decided this post has too many comments and not enough upvotes, or whatever it is that's caused it to sink off the front page), but I'm honestly interested in what people here with (school age) children are telling their kids about the future, and what that looks like in terms of decisions around education, careers etc.

This isn't because I think that having children gives people any extra insights, but because it's pretty hard to think of other situations in which people have to plan for the happiness of others they care about over a timescale of decades and where there's significantly more ability to change course than for many adults (kids tend not to have short-term financial commitments that lock them into existing career decisions, for example).

Historically I think a lot of people in tech would have recommended it as a good career (whilst at the same time, reputedly, the people who made generational wealth out of tech were arranging their children's lives to minimise exposure to the products that made them rich). Is that still what people are saying?

https://juliawise.net/raising-children-on-the-eve-of-ai/

Thanks.

The conclusions there seem to be roughly:

* Keep calm and carry on, because we don't have any better ideas

* Sometimes it's OK to eat the damn marshmallow (i.e. in the face of future uncertainty, remember to do things that make your kids happy today)

I kind of suspect that the first one in particular is more or less people's default response. But I also wonder about what changes people _have_ made, if any.

Whether you agree or not with his decision, you gotta respect his integrity.

I believe he is acting with integrity but I can't respect it as I think it's not well grounded. It seems based in fear of AI tied in with some beliefs about the supernatural. I really can't see the solid concrete reason to quit his job making tools for helping create better hardware chips that somehow seems rational.

What's the most ideal form of a company, in the eyes of it's board? Low cost due to cheap workforce or replacing of humans by automation, higher revenues due to faster deliveries and increased market footprint. Those directions remain as the strategic focus with or without AI.

However, let's imagine the most "ideal" situation where it's possible to replace 90% of the workforce with AI automation. Then the remaining 10% workforce will enjoy 10 times more income, assuming revenues didn't go down (or increased). Now comes an interesting situation. Where are the revenues coming from? Who can afford buy the products/service of this company when 90% of the workforce is out of job?

Case-1: Since there is a flood of products and services - all automated and bot-based - the prices would fall to rock bottom and to there is no longer a need for humans to work hard hard to afford the material affluence.

Case-2: This results in an extreme concentration of delivery capacity for products and services. A few companies are now capable of serving the needs of entire humanity. Everyone should work for these companies for pennies and still can be happy, because things cost pennies, thanks to automations.

Case-3: Humans revolt. They break their shackles - their needs. Rediscover what they really need for living. They go for minimal living. Abandon cities and expensive living, go country side and do farming just enough to feed their families. No college, no office, no car, no highways. They realize what their basic needs are as humans. Sort of Amish.

Case-4: There is still some work left that can't be automated. But there are very less number of jobs and they require hard work. The current generation can't handle it. They were schooled and grown up in cities, expecting a milder office work. They fall out of employment. But they were not built to deal with hard reality. They lost their survival instincts a few generations ago. The genes are gone. The job of rebuilding the survival instincts is delegetaed to future generations. Meanwhile the so-called developed nations undergo generational cycles of poverty and richness.

Case 3 is leftist dream. They want to make it happen.

Case 4 is the likely result of their (ill) effort.

If capitalism with mild restrictions have it's way, we end up with case 1 or 2. Both will increase the quality of life for most of the population compared to current.

These AI doomers never understand that they can't eat money. It is the wealth creation. The more we create, the more we lift up the bottom part.

Im at a point where i think the way to steer the situation we are in is to steer the machine from the inside, not quit and leave the people with the opposite mindset keep all the economic resources.

I doubt a movement of the people from the outside will work this time when all of the capital is in the other peoples hands. We need at least some of it held by someone with the opposite view to make the movement credible. And I dont think VC and IPO dynamics are compatible with this.

If you are already thinking of quiting, you can organize and internal movement and use the power of your labor to steer things. One person quitting is nothing for the company. The risk of big group quitting at the same time on the other hand... The labor is the only thing the company cares about. So we cannot wait until we are all replaceable by AI and we lose that leverage.

Clearly the details matter in this making such a decision, and not everyone has the same capabilities to "steer the ship" from within or out. You don't know if there are concerned people within acting, but see most obviously concerned people leaving to act (or at least refuse to act).

What’s interesting is that there are two types of doomers. Those who are scared about the capability of AI (like the author) and others like Zitron who think AI is hype and there are no capabilities. Lot of discussions get muddled because of this confusion between the type of doomers.

Those who are scared about the capability of AI (like the author)

Did they say that? I read they didn't like the pace of progression- that's a complaint about rushing ever faster into something not yet really thought out in terms of consequences and how it integrates with humans.

I’m confident that AI capability will continue to keep increasing steadily as long as we keep working on it. I wish that AI would hit some kind of plateau, or that we would identify important human cognitive abilities that AI will never replicate without a paradigm shift, but I don’t expect those wishes to come true

I'm not seeing "scared" - what prompted you to use the word "scared" ?

The latter are not doomers at all, that's just a misuse of the term.

A year ago I would have described that group as AI skeptics or AI deniers depending on how charitable I felt on any given sany. At this point AI truthers seems more appropriate.

Am I the only one who is more worried about LLMs real demonstrable effects on the way humans use, namely use less, of their own intelligence?

Is this not the clear and present danger, instead of elusive promises of robot apocalypses? Is the AI embodied for example in TikTok, Instagram, etc, not a more directly hurtful?

It’s sad to think that there are kids out there with cancer that could be saved by AI-enabled advancements and you are busy sandbagging it because of your own personal issues.

We had machine learning solving medical problems way before trillion-dollar word-vomiting neural networks. What's sad is that the latter is now getting all the funding.