14 ms·

The rational conclusion of doomerism is violence

92 points by thedudeabides5 5mo ago

PaulHoule 5mo ago
... been saying this for years. If you really believed what Yudkowsky says you wouldn't just be posting on lesswrong, you would be taking direct action against a clear and present danger.
- AndrewKemendo 5mo ago
  That pesky basilisk to worry about though
- kelseyfrog 5mo ago
  Disagree. Just one more blog post. I swear, one more blog post will do it.
  - imbus 5mo ago
    [dead]
- virissimo 5mo ago
  Does this apply to other domains or just AI? For example, if you think gain-of-function research accidents put millions of lives at risk, is the logical next step to quit your job and become a terrorist?
- SpicyLemonZest 5mo ago
  They are! Yudkowsky sat down with Senator Bernie Sanders last month to explain what's at stake, successfully convinced him that it's a big deal, and Sanders has now proposed a national moratorium on AI data centers (https://www.sanders.senate.gov/press-releases/news-sanders-ocasio-cortez-announce-ai-data-center-moratorium-act/ https://www.sanders.senate.gov/press-releases/news-sanders-o...) to help slow things down. That's pretty direct, and a lot more useful than random violence by random people.
- jmull 5mo ago
  No you wouldn't. Look at what the molotov cocktail guy accomplished by "taking direct action against a clear and present danger": Nothing, besides casting himself as an extremist nut, increasing the resistance to his viewpoint in the population at large. It's downright dumb to attempt to impose your will via unilateral violence when you aren't in a position to actually complete the goal. Note that that goes whether you're actually right or not.
  - PaulHoule 5mo ago
    I'm not advocating for that, I'm just saying the whole thing is performative and gets taken at face value in a way that it should not be. If you wanted to be a contrarian concerned about x-risks go try to find $1B to pay Embraer or another minor aviation vendor to make a plane to do stratospheric aerosol injection or something. --- If you want my diagnosis it is, in a time of lower social inequality cults frequently tried to steal labor and money from a broad base of people. For instance in the L. Ron Hubbard age Scientology would treat you as a "public" if you had money to take and if you didn't or after you'd been bled dry you would be be recruited as "staff". Hubbard thought it was immoral to take donations without giving something in return so it was centered around getting people to spend on "auditing". Between 1950 Dianetics and the current Miscavige age, income and wealth has gotten concentrated and he changed that single element of the Hubbard doctrine and now it is all about recruiting money from "whales" who donated to the International Association of Scientologists (IAS) https://tonyortega.substack.com/p/scientologys-ias-trophy-winners-part-5bd https://tonyortega.substack.com/p/scientologys-ias-trophy-wi... (A good backgrounder on pernicious cults is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snapping:_America%27s_Epidemic_of_Sudden_Personality_Change https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snapping:_America%27s_Epidemic...) In the case of the Yudkowsky thing the mass just doesn't have a lot of money to steal after paying the rent and turning the labor of the unskilled and ignorant (even if they think otherwise) is a case of the juice not being worth the squeeze, so the point is to build a Potempkin village that looks like a social movement that creates a frame where you can get money from sources such as "SBF steals it and gives it to the movement" as well as "rich kids who inherited a lot of money but don't have a lot of sense"
  - throwaway27448 5mo ago
- adjejmxbdjdn 5mo ago
  Your statement is incorrect. If you really believed what Yudkowsky says you would be taking action that maximizes the chances of reducing a clear and present danger. Between Yudkowsky and the Molotov cocktail guy, which approach do you think had and is having more of an impact? An individual can rarely, if ever, enact change through violence. The history of nearly all successful movements is violence often makes change harder. Rallying people through speech is a far more successful way for an individual to enact change through violence
AndrewKemendo 5mo ago
Wouldn’t be a proper technology revolution without some version of labor realizing they are commodities and rejecting the collapse of the current form of labor power, so that tells me we’re actually in the transition from an old economic process to a new one. Dont forget, the Luddites were correct about the direction that automation and labor power were going. They weren’t blindly “fighting machines”, they were fighting inequitable working conditions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite >Periodic uprisings relating to asset prices also occurred in other contexts in the century before Luddism. Irregular rises in food prices provoked the Keelmen to riot in the port of Tyne in 1710 and tin miners to steal from granaries at Falmouth in 1727. There was a rebellion in Northumberland and Durham in 1740, and an assault on Quaker corn dealers in 1756.
necovek 5mo ago
I am disappointed "Doomerism" is not an official name for the practice of putting Doom on anything and everything!
hax0ron3 5mo ago
I don't agree with Yudkowsky, but I think there's certainly a chance that he's right about AI destroying humanity. I just don't think the likelihood of that happening is as high as he thinks it is. But there certainly is a chance. The problem with trying to stop it is, how? Even if you killed every single AI company leader and every single top AI engineer, it would almost certainly just slow down the rate of progress in the technology, not stop it. The technology is so vital to national security that in the face of such actions, state security forces would just bring development of the tech under their direct protection Manhattan Project-style. Even if you killed literally every single AI engineer on the planet, it's pretty likely that this would just delay the development of the technology by a decade or so instead of actually preventing it. The technology is pushed forward by a simple psychological logic: every key global actor knows that if they don't build the technology, they will be outcompeted by other actors who do build the technology. No key actor thinks that they have the luxury of not building the technology even if they wanted to not build it. It's very similar to nuclear weapons in that regard. You can talk about nuclear disarmament all you want but at the end of the day, having nuclear weapons is vital to having sovereignty. If you don't have nuclear weapons, you will always be in danger of becoming just the prison bitch of countries that do have them. AI seems that it is growing toward a similar position in the calculus of states' notional security. I can think of no example in history of the entire world deciding to just forsake the development of a technology because it seemed like it could prove to be too dangerous. The same psychological logic always applies.
- deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
- squigz 5mo ago
  > I can think of no example in history of the entire world deciding to just forsake the development of a technology because it seemed like it could prove to be too dangerous. The same psychological logic always applies. Can't you? Haven't many (most?) countries agreed to nuclear disarmament? What about biological weapons? Even anti-personnel mines, I think?
  - hax0ron3 5mo ago
MostlyStable 5mo ago
It is completely coherent to both think that an extremely bad thing is coming, and yet that does not justify any particular action. "The ends don't justify the means" and literal entire religions have been built on this concept. It is not irrational or incoherent to believe that even something as serious as extinction does not justify arbitrary action. Someone _may_ decide that it does, but it is not a necessary conclusion. And that is completely aside from the many many (in my opinion convincing) arguments that such acts of violence would not be effective anyways. This article is a much better (and much longer) extension of the argument and direct refutation of the OP article https://thezvi.substack.com/p/political-violence-is-never-acceptable https://thezvi.substack.com/p/political-violence-is-never-ac...
- Joker_vD 5mo ago
  > "The ends don't justify the means" Eh. The ends do justify the means, but only inasmuch as those means actually do help to achieve the ends — astonishingly often, they don't (and rarer, but also often, actually bring you in the opposite direction from those end goals), and so remain unjustified.
  - MostlyStable 5mo ago
    I personally believe quite strongly that some things are just immoral on their face and that I would rather fail/die without using them than succeed/live while using them. I agree that in very many cases where people do these things, they are, in the long run, counter productive, but I also believe that even if could be conclusively proven that this wasn't the case, I would still advocate against their use.
  - f1shy 5mo ago
    Thanks. That sentence is constantly repeated, as if it would be some kind of absolute truth. The fact is, for every end, there will be probably some means that are totally justified, and some that not. I think the original context is: no matter how high, pure and perfect the end is, it does not meany any mean is justified.
deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
tcoff91 5mo ago
I have a different perspective on this given that I view climate change as the biggest threat we face as a species. I feel like robotics is the only hope we have to be able to scale action against climate change. It's clear that emissions reduction is just not going to happen, and catastrophic warming is inevitable. Therefore we will have to do an extraordinary amount of labor in order to modify our environment to save civilization from sea level rise and to be able to repair damages caused by natural disasters. There just aren't enough humans to do everything that is going to need to be done. It sure would have been nice to have 100 thousand firefighting robots battling the fires in Los Angeles last year. Given that we need better AI in order to make these robots happen, I view AI as a critical technology that we need to maintain civilization.
- derektank 5mo ago
  Wouldn’t geoengineering through stratospheric aerosol engineering (likely with sulfates) be both cheaper and less technically challenging than changing the built environment? If we’re accepting massive climate changes anyways, it seems like taking the risk with solar radiation modifications would be the next step
  - tcoff91 5mo ago
    That would require global consensus and could ignite wars if there isn't global consensus. Seems very likely that this could have unanticipated consequences that could be worse, but admittedly this is an area I don't really know much about.
    - ACCount37 5mo ago
      No one gives a shit about "global consensus". As demonstrated in 2020s by multiple countries taking major unilateral actions unopposed. If a nuclear power starts SAI, what is everyone else going to do? Shake their fists at the sky, realistically.
  - dpark 5mo ago
    Ah, yes. Let us spray more sulfates into the air. Let’s fight global warming by poisoning all the waterways and oceans with more acid rain.
arduanika 5mo ago
This has been decades in the making. We had premonitions of the violence that would come, for example with the Zizians. Get ready for what happens when a million blogposts worth of bad philosophy, bad analogies, and anti-institutionalist hubris are deeply indoctrinated into a vast, decentralized network of highly capable engineering minds who lack common sense and normal restraints. They hate the framing that LLMs are just stochastic parrots, which is ironic, because Yudkowsky's many parrots are (latent, until now) stochastic terrorists.
kelseyfrog 5mo ago
War is a mere continuation of policy by other means[1]. When policy through legislation is empirically impotent[2], calls to continue attempts at a failed strategy are indistinguishable from being told, "continue losing." There is a real, undeniable, build up of political tension. When it fails to be released in the legislative arena, it doesn't dissapate. When we point out that, "the quality of life right now is the best it's ever been," it doesn't dissapate. When we try to crush it, it doesn't dissapate. The last remaining pressure release is violence however condemnable it may be. Perhaps we should, you know, fix participatory democracy rather than pontificating on a natural outcome of machine we created yet refuse to fix. If fixing it continues to be more difficult than eliminating violence we should continue to expect violence. 1. https://oll.libertyfund.org/pages/clausewitz-war-as-politics-by-other-means https://oll.libertyfund.org/pages/clausewitz-war-as-politics... 2. https://archive.org/details/gilens_and_page_2014_-testing_theories_of_american_politics.doc/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/gilens_and_page_2014_-testing_th...
- arduanika 5mo ago
  > "fix participatory democracy" Ah yes, a popular codeword for "I did not get my way". There is no electoral majority behind the AI doomer cult. It is not a failure of "democracy" that they haven't gotten what they want. It is a failure of their activism, or just the general unpalatability of their wild ideas, or both. They don't get to throw Molotovs just because they lose.
  - sleepybrett 5mo ago
    > There is no electoral majority behind the AI doomer cult. how can you be sure? has anyone polled it? are they too scared to poll it?
  - vrganj 5mo ago
    Maybe democracy is fundamentally flawed because the demos is? How should one act in such a situation?
    - TuringTest 5mo ago
eemax 5mo ago
> The Rational Conclusion of Doomerism Is Violence No it isn't. The most prominent "doomer" has a strong grasp and deep, wholehearted appreciation for the the principles of liberalism and the rule of law: https://x.com/ESYudkowsky/status/2043601524815716866 https://x.com/ESYudkowsky/status/2043601524815716866 Which the author of this piece of slop appears to lack.
- arduanika 5mo ago
  It is true that only Yudkowsky gets to say what the rational conclusion of his ideas are. Nobody else gets to speculate. Only the pope of rationalism, because he's the rational one here. See? It's right there in the name! > this piece of slop Citation needed. Or maybe we need to update the title of that children's book for internet arguments: Everyone Who Disagrees With Me Is Slop. The Yud post you linked is not slop, either. It's not LLM-generated, nor is it insincere. But I do have to point out: He's the one who is slinging the tsunami of words here, not Alexander Campbell.
  - handoflixue 5mo ago
    I think it's rather relevant that the community itself rejects the logic you're trying to impose on it. You can straw-man any sort of conclusion on to any sort of philosophy. This will not actually help you much at all if you're trying to predict what people will actually do. If the only people that reach your conclusion are ones that don't actually subscribe to the philosophy, then it doesn't matter, because no one is actually acting on those conclusions. And if we want to hold people responsible because others pervert their ideas, then we have to accept that Jesus Christ was a horrific, evil person for preaching "Love thy Neighbor"; just look at the crusades that were somehow the "rational conclusion" of that philosophy!
    - arduanika 5mo ago
      > "If the only people that reach your conclusion are ones that don't actually subscribe to the philosophy, then it doesn't matter, because no one is actually acting on those conclusions." What an odd thing to say right after young Mr. Moreno-Gama reached that conclusion and did subscribe to the philosophy, when it does matter, because he did actually act on those conclusions. How odd to introduce a hypothetical that amounts to, "what if this philosophy didn't ever lead to violence?", right after it did. Or are you trying to pull a No True Scotsman on me here?
aaroninsf 5mo ago
Hot take: I assume the author wrote this with the expectation that much of the readsherp gasp, and react with "the natural horror all right thinking folk would have in response to violence of any kind." Sorry, lol, no. The appropriate question for "all right thinking" folk is very different: if argumentation has no impact and it's obvious that it shall have none—what other avenue do you expect opponents, who take the risks seriously, to take...? That's not a rhetorical question. To put it bluntly: the machinery of contemporary capitalism, especially as practiced by our industry, very clearly leaves no avenue. How many days ago was Ronan Farrow here doing an AMA on his critique of Altman—whose connection to this specific community is I assume common knowledge...? How many of you have carried, or worked beneath, the banner, move fast and break things...? What message does that ethos convey, about their the extent to which "tech" is going respect community standards, regulation—the law? And on the other edge: what does this ethos enshrine about how best to accomplish one's aims? One of the bigger domestic stories this past week which has inflamed a certain side of Reddit, is the "disgruntled employee torches warehouse" one. Consider also—and I'm deadly serious—the broader frame narrative we are all laboring within today: that the new contract of the capitalist class—including and perhaps especially those in "tech," e.g. in the Peter Thiel circles—seems very much to be, "social stability via surveillance and a police state, rather than through equity and discourse." When code is law, the law is buggy. When there is no recourse through the law, you get violence.
- aaroninsf 5mo ago
  Telling to be down voted. Hard truths are hard. Cliché though it may be, with great power comes great responsibility. Tech culture, as epitomized by the general readership of this site, have to great degree, if of course not uniformly, abdicated that responsibility; and the general leadership of the industry and as epitomized by the culture Y Combinator has helped build, are much more uniform in this abdication. There is neither political nor moral mystery here; there is just denialism, ignorance, and avoidance. If you feel attacked by these accusations, as always it's a fine time to ask why. What accommodations have you made...? What expedience have you allowed? What do you look away from or shy from reasoning through about the impact of the technologies you work on, the behavior of your employer? That everyone is complicit is not a defense; it's an indictment. The violence of present concern is a wholely natural and entirely predictable response to the diffused violence our industry and capitalism generally has performed against a humanity, not to mention to the biosphere. Violence will continue, and if you think it is indefensible—provide then some alternative mechanism for steering resources and allocation of power. We, collectively, constructed the tensions which are now resolving in exactly the manner one would expect, if only one were remotely familiar with history or indeed human nature. Those in tech who declined to study or understand the humanities may be surprised to learn that the forces at work have well understood and inspected patterns. Ignorance is no excuse.
jmull 5mo ago
People are basing their entire world view on not understanding the nature of exponential phenomena. Exponential phenomena only begin in a medium that holds the potential for that phenomena, and necessarily consume that medium. That is, exponential phenomena are inherently self-limiting. The bateria reaches the edge of the petri dish. When the all the nitroglycerin is broken up the dynamite is done exploding. That doesn't mean exponential phenomena aren't dangerous -- of course they can be. I mentioned dynamite, after all. And there are nukes. But it's really far from "AI is improving exponentially now" to "AI will destroy everyone". I see AI companies consuming cash at unsustainable rates. Since their motive is profit, this is necessarily limiting. Cash, meanwhile is a proxy for actual resources, which have their own, non-exponential limitations -- employees, data centers, electricity, venture capitalist with capital, etc. AI isn't going to keep improving exponentially -- it can't. Like every other exponential phenomenon, it will consume the medium of potential that supports it (and rather quickly).
- greenavocado 5mo ago
  > People are basing their entire world view [on things getting worse because their leadership is abandoning them or actively working against their interests] We understand hard times and are willing to work together to solve problems, but not when leadership is actively harmful. Fixed that for you.
  - jmull 5mo ago
    That's a completely separate point, is it not? Maybe write it up and post a top-level comment if you think it's a point worth making.
- saulpw 5mo ago
  Agreed. But, many said the same thing about Moore's Law or its equivalents in 1985, 1995, 2005, 2015, and yet the pace of core hardware development has been relentlessly exponential. I keep thinking we must be approaching some kind of limit (and surely we must be!) but I've learned not to bet on it.
- avidiax 5mo ago
vrganj 5mo ago
[flagged]
- mrguyorama 5mo ago
  The founders of the US started a war that killed tens of thousands of colonists over small taxes and a desire to eventually end slavery, which was basically unprofitable at that point in America. The local connected and rich people thought those were valid reasons for political violence. The "Boston Massacre" involved a crowd of people throwing rocks and balls of ice at soldiers and getting shot at. But now it's all "Oh political violence must be avoided at all costs". Now it's "Political violence doesn't work, now lets set off fireworks on July 4th to celebrate the birth of our nation through violence"
- NoGravitas 5mo ago
  And also note that Lenin condemned this kind of opportunistic individual violence. Organize your revolutionary violence properly or don't do it, people!
bjourne 5mo ago
Yes, but against the angry dormers we have hordes of cheerful coomers who welcome the fruits of the labour of the AI with one open arm.
nitwit005 5mo ago
Mentally ill people often have a justification for their actions which is vaguely rational, but you'll notice the vast majority of people aren't doing what they're doing. These people just get attracted to political causes somehow. Even the woman's suffrage movement had some people setting buildings on fire.
- stickfigure 5mo ago
  I miss the days when people blamed all their woes on their parents circumcising them. Simpler times.
- thrance 5mo ago
  Are you implying that the suffragettes were mentally ill?
  - nitwit005 5mo ago
    [flagged]
  - AnimalMuppet 5mo ago
    I think they're implying that the suffragettes who set buildings on fire were mentally ill.
    - thrance 5mo ago
      Hmm, maybe. Even then, there are causes worth burning buildings over, I think, and the right to vote is probably one of them.
  - deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
imbus 5mo ago
[dead]
drivebyhooting 5mo ago
Can LLMs design and build a chip foundry to manufacture semiconductors? No? Can LLMs design and build the reactors to enrich uranium, breed plutonium, and construct nuclear weapons? No? Can LLMs design and manufacture Shahed drones? No? There are already super intelligences at large with “scary capability”. And yet the word hasn’t ended.
- georgemcbay 5mo ago
  > And yet the world hasn’t ended. ...yet But we only need things to spiral out of control one time for that to change. The world as we understand it would have ended if Vasily Arkhipov didn't veto the decision to launch a sub nuke during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Is an emotionless AI system in his place ever going to make the same decision he did? How confident are you we won't put an AI system in his place, particularly when we have to assume if we don't others will?
  - drivebyhooting 5mo ago
    Sounds like your fear is not of artificial intelligence but artificial incompetence. That’s a very different position from the AI doomers.
- kurthr 5mo ago
  Can LLMs convince a human who has power over each and everyone of those things to use them for a(n unstated) prompts goal? Yeah, probably over 50% of the population already, and if not many of the rest soon.
  - kurthr 5mo ago
    It's fairly hilarious in a dangerous way, how confident people are that neither they, nor their boomer parents could be fooled by a persistent LLM with access to their mail, text, voice, and that of their co-workers and supervisors. The social engineering attacks have always been a weak point, and now they can be combined with other information to target individuals and fake voice/sms tone. Look at what happened on r/changemyview. That was over a year ago, using only text, and not only went undetected, but was highly effective at changing opinions. https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/1k8b2hj/meta_unauthorized_experiment_on_cmv_involving/ https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/1k8b2hj/meta_...
linksnapzz 5mo ago
I'm not surprised that the sort of individual prone to taking Yud too seriously is also likely to be a comically-inept assassin. Had he tried to blow up the diesel genset at a datacenter, he'd have burnt his lips on the exhaust pipe.
mellosouls 5mo ago
Some recent discussions on the Altman attack: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47745230 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47745230 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47724921 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47724921 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47722096 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47722096
deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
gradientsrneat 5mo ago
Maybe if the LLM CEOs stopped spreading doomer narratives to sell their products, these people would chill out.
- thephyber 5mo ago
  This issue is more complicated. Sam Altman has stated that the AI revolution will “be like an infinite number of immigrants”. That’s a dangerous thing to say when the country’s political environment has convinced half of the voters that all immigrants are rapey, murderey, immoral subhumans. Also, Sam Altman helped create OpenAI with the original goals of being an ethical non-profit, only to pivot and kick out all of the people who still wanted that original vision. Now several of the LLM CEOs are screaming “we have to stay fully on the accelerator pedal or the Chinese will get there first”, all while abandoning the ethics that supposedly made us better than the Chinese. (And yes, I understand the issues with the Chinese government and that people are different than their government).
- deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
- rzmmm 5mo ago
  Too bad it's effective marketing strategy. Negative emotions are more powerful drivers than positive ones.
beloch 5mo ago
"There is a final irony that deserves attention. If the doomers truly hold their stated beliefs at their stated confidence levels, they should be more honest about what those beliefs imply. A few weeks before the attack, a journalist asked Yudkowsky: if AI is so dangerous, why aren't you attacking data centers? His answer, relayed by Soares: "If you saw a headline saying I'd done that, would you say, 'wow, AI has been stopped, we're safe'? If not, you already know it wouldn't be effective." ---------- There are several thousand AI data centres in the U.S. alone, and hundreds are over a thousand square meters in floor space. Think about the physical effort it would take to reliably destroy, beyond the possibility of repair, just one typical computer in your home. Now multiply that out to thousands of server racks. Even if the employees rolled out the red carpet for you and handed you a baseball bat, you wouldn't get very far. Next, consider that these data centres are popping up all over the world in the most unlikely and remote locations. They don't need workers. They just need power, water, and, preferably, lax tax and environmental standards. Doomers are attacking billionaires because they perceive them to be the soft, meaty, weak-points of a gigantic inhuman machine. They believe that just scaring Sam Altman a little will have a huge impact compared to trying to attack a data centre. However, billionaires can afford pretty decent security. This doomer movement probably isn't going to accomplish much until they target the engineers and support staff that surround billionaires. Billionaires don't scare easily because they have so much protection, but the poorly paid and poorly secured people around them are another story. Poorly secured means easy to coerce with a stick. Poorly paid means easy to coerce with a carrot. The threat doomers pose is relatively small until they start turning employees against their own companies. What's an activist with a baseball bat compared to an employee who knows how to disable every computer in multiple data centres simultaneously?
geremiiah 5mo ago
LLMs are dangerous in other ways (LLM psychosis and false confidence has probably already caused negligent deaths). However, I don't think we are close to a terminator scenario. At the same time, if we ever do create an AGI, and eventually an ASI, I think it would only be a matter of time before the machines take over entirely, and they would probably be the ones which will continue the legacy of our species. Is that bad? Idk.
- IAmGraydon 5mo ago
  >Is that bad? Idk. There's no such thing as bad. It is necessary, though.
thegrim33 5mo ago
The LLM doomerism is just one arm of the general "us vs them" strategy - defining a group of people as the others who are the bad guys, defining yourself as the good guys, constantly fostering hate against the others, finding ways to give your group rationale for why they have the moral high ground, all of it in the end an act to gain power/influence/money for the people orchestrating it. The anti-AI angle is just the latest flavor of it, replacing previous ones (I'm sure you can think of some) and eventually being replaced by the next new thing/person that they'll try to direct us to hate. I'm willing to bet any amount of money that 99.99% of AI doomers identify with the same extreme end of the political spectrum. That should be a very big red flag and highly indicative of the real motive behind the movement.
- shimman 5mo ago
  No, AI doomerists are people cosplaying as religious fanatics. It's mostly sci-fi nonsense that ignores the real material realities that people are currently suffering due to LLMs (water shortages, energy spikes, cancer rates increases, job quality tanking, unnerving local environments, exacerbating the climate crisis). Most AI safety workers are just doing creative fiction (what if the AI turns into skynet!?1!!?) and not actual society safety that would require dismantling these companies and turning remolding them to benefit the public.
  - AnimalMuppet 5mo ago
    LLMs are causing cancer rates to increase? Say what??? What do you think the causal mechanism is?
- hollerith 5mo ago
  >I'm willing to bet any amount of money that 99.99% of AI doomers identify with the same extreme end of the political spectrum. Good: a man willing to put his money where his mouth is! However many dollars you put up, I will put up $10. (I.e., I will give you 10:1 odds.) How much do you bet? Who do you suggest as arbiter in case one is needed?
csense 5mo ago
"It’s not a safety movement. It’s a priesthood with an origin story written in fanfiction." Is that the opinion of the author, or an LLM? I feel like this is one topic where using an LLM detracts from the author's thesis; doubly so if they don't disclose it.
benj111 5mo ago
Well. Where to start. As someone who has been let down by the judiciary and many other state institutions, I do have the very strong feeling that perhaps direct action is needed, and that perhaps I wouldn't be in the position I was, if the powers that be took that risk into account. But then don't I, in some ways become a terrorist* in doing those things, threatening those things, or making those things a reality? and there's the question of what message gets through, which isn't necessarily the one I want to convey. *In a very broad way. I'm not thinking anything in particular, just the rationality of introducing a cost to them for their failures. Any form of protest I suppose is coercive.
estimator7292 5mo ago
Never forget that those with the power to do incredible violence against entire populations are the ones most heavily pushing the line that "violence is never, ever acceptable for any reason". The nature of the real world is that no set of moral rules applies to every situation. Our universe is not one that deals in absolutes. Your personal moral code will be challenged with exceptional situations. Growing up is learning to deal with the fact that life always, always forces us to compromise. A robust moral code is not one with strict, unbreakable rules applied blindly to the entire world. A robust moral code is one that guides you in exceptional situations. Morality is not law, it is making the best decision you can in any given situation. The nature of humanity, the world, and our history is that sometimes violence is required. Sometimes the most morally correct thing you can do is take up arms and defend your people. If someone is trying to convince you that there are absolute moral laws that apply to everyone everywhere, think very carefully about what it is they want you to believe and why. There is almost certainly a motive behind that statement. Most importantly, one should never take moral advice as unquestioned law. Morality is something you discover for yourself, it cannot and must not be prescribed. History exists to teach us lessons like this. Read any era from any culture, learn how other people deal with moral questions in exceptional circumstances. Form your own opinions of what we've done right or wrong. There are no absolutes and morality is individual. You must find your own sense of right and wrong.
hollerith 5mo ago
Humble request: do not call us "AI doomers". Most of us would rather be called "AI anti-extinctionists".
- hollerith 5mo ago
  "Doomer" sounds like we have a mood disorder.
augmentedmike 5mo ago
[flagged]

... been saying this for years. If you really believed what Yudkowsky says you wouldn't just be posting on lesswrong, you would be taking direct action against a clear and present danger.

AndrewKemendo 5mo ago
That pesky basilisk to worry about though
kelseyfrog 5mo ago
Disagree. Just one more blog post. I swear, one more blog post will do it.
- imbus 5mo ago
  [dead]
virissimo 5mo ago
Does this apply to other domains or just AI? For example, if you think gain-of-function research accidents put millions of lives at risk, is the logical next step to quit your job and become a terrorist?
SpicyLemonZest 5mo ago
They are! Yudkowsky sat down with Senator Bernie Sanders last month to explain what's at stake, successfully convinced him that it's a big deal, and Sanders has now proposed a national moratorium on AI data centers (https://www.sanders.senate.gov/press-releases/news-sanders-ocasio-cortez-announce-ai-data-center-moratorium-act/ https://www.sanders.senate.gov/press-releases/news-sanders-o...) to help slow things down. That's pretty direct, and a lot more useful than random violence by random people.
jmull 5mo ago
No you wouldn't. Look at what the molotov cocktail guy accomplished by "taking direct action against a clear and present danger": Nothing, besides casting himself as an extremist nut, increasing the resistance to his viewpoint in the population at large. It's downright dumb to attempt to impose your will via unilateral violence when you aren't in a position to actually complete the goal. Note that that goes whether you're actually right or not.
- PaulHoule 5mo ago
  I'm not advocating for that, I'm just saying the whole thing is performative and gets taken at face value in a way that it should not be. If you wanted to be a contrarian concerned about x-risks go try to find $1B to pay Embraer or another minor aviation vendor to make a plane to do stratospheric aerosol injection or something. --- If you want my diagnosis it is, in a time of lower social inequality cults frequently tried to steal labor and money from a broad base of people. For instance in the L. Ron Hubbard age Scientology would treat you as a "public" if you had money to take and if you didn't or after you'd been bled dry you would be be recruited as "staff". Hubbard thought it was immoral to take donations without giving something in return so it was centered around getting people to spend on "auditing". Between 1950 Dianetics and the current Miscavige age, income and wealth has gotten concentrated and he changed that single element of the Hubbard doctrine and now it is all about recruiting money from "whales" who donated to the International Association of Scientologists (IAS) https://tonyortega.substack.com/p/scientologys-ias-trophy-winners-part-5bd https://tonyortega.substack.com/p/scientologys-ias-trophy-wi... (A good backgrounder on pernicious cults is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snapping:_America%27s_Epidemic_of_Sudden_Personality_Change https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snapping:_America%27s_Epidemic...) In the case of the Yudkowsky thing the mass just doesn't have a lot of money to steal after paying the rent and turning the labor of the unskilled and ignorant (even if they think otherwise) is a case of the juice not being worth the squeeze, so the point is to build a Potempkin village that looks like a social movement that creates a frame where you can get money from sources such as "SBF steals it and gives it to the movement" as well as "rich kids who inherited a lot of money but don't have a lot of sense"
- throwaway27448 5mo ago
adjejmxbdjdn 5mo ago
Your statement is incorrect. If you really believed what Yudkowsky says you would be taking action that maximizes the chances of reducing a clear and present danger. Between Yudkowsky and the Molotov cocktail guy, which approach do you think had and is having more of an impact? An individual can rarely, if ever, enact change through violence. The history of nearly all successful movements is violence often makes change harder. Rallying people through speech is a far more successful way for an individual to enact change through violence

AndrewKemendo 5mo ago

Wouldn’t be a proper technology revolution without some version of labor realizing they are commodities and rejecting the collapse of the current form of labor power, so that tells me we’re actually in the transition from an old economic process to a new one. Dont forget, the Luddites were correct about the direction that automation and labor power were going. They weren’t blindly “fighting machines”, they were fighting inequitable working conditions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite >Periodic uprisings relating to asset prices also occurred in other contexts in the century before Luddism. Irregular rises in food prices provoked the Keelmen to riot in the port of Tyne in 1710 and tin miners to steal from granaries at Falmouth in 1727. There was a rebellion in Northumberland and Durham in 1740, and an assault on Quaker corn dealers in 1756.

necovek 5mo ago

I am disappointed "Doomerism" is not an official name for the practice of putting Doom on anything and everything!

hax0ron3 5mo ago

I don't agree with Yudkowsky, but I think there's certainly a chance that he's right about AI destroying humanity. I just don't think the likelihood of that happening is as high as he thinks it is. But there certainly is a chance. The problem with trying to stop it is, how? Even if you killed every single AI company leader and every single top AI engineer, it would almost certainly just slow down the rate of progress in the technology, not stop it. The technology is so vital to national security that in the face of such actions, state security forces would just bring development of the tech under their direct protection Manhattan Project-style. Even if you killed literally every single AI engineer on the planet, it's pretty likely that this would just delay the development of the technology by a decade or so instead of actually preventing it. The technology is pushed forward by a simple psychological logic: every key global actor knows that if they don't build the technology, they will be outcompeted by other actors who do build the technology. No key actor thinks that they have the luxury of not building the technology even if they wanted to not build it. It's very similar to nuclear weapons in that regard. You can talk about nuclear disarmament all you want but at the end of the day, having nuclear weapons is vital to having sovereignty. If you don't have nuclear weapons, you will always be in danger of becoming just the prison bitch of countries that do have them. AI seems that it is growing toward a similar position in the calculus of states' notional security. I can think of no example in history of the entire world deciding to just forsake the development of a technology because it seemed like it could prove to be too dangerous. The same psychological logic always applies.

deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
squigz 5mo ago
> I can think of no example in history of the entire world deciding to just forsake the development of a technology because it seemed like it could prove to be too dangerous. The same psychological logic always applies. Can't you? Haven't many (most?) countries agreed to nuclear disarmament? What about biological weapons? Even anti-personnel mines, I think?
- hax0ron3 5mo ago

MostlyStable 5mo ago

It is completely coherent to both think that an extremely bad thing is coming, and yet that does not justify any particular action. "The ends don't justify the means" and literal entire religions have been built on this concept. It is not irrational or incoherent to believe that even something as serious as extinction does not justify arbitrary action. Someone _may_ decide that it does, but it is not a necessary conclusion. And that is completely aside from the many many (in my opinion convincing) arguments that such acts of violence would not be effective anyways. This article is a much better (and much longer) extension of the argument and direct refutation of the OP article https://thezvi.substack.com/p/political-violence-is-never-acceptable https://thezvi.substack.com/p/political-violence-is-never-ac...

Joker_vD 5mo ago
> "The ends don't justify the means" Eh. The ends do justify the means, but only inasmuch as those means actually do help to achieve the ends — astonishingly often, they don't (and rarer, but also often, actually bring you in the opposite direction from those end goals), and so remain unjustified.
- MostlyStable 5mo ago
  I personally believe quite strongly that some things are just immoral on their face and that I would rather fail/die without using them than succeed/live while using them. I agree that in very many cases where people do these things, they are, in the long run, counter productive, but I also believe that even if could be conclusively proven that this wasn't the case, I would still advocate against their use.
- f1shy 5mo ago
  Thanks. That sentence is constantly repeated, as if it would be some kind of absolute truth. The fact is, for every end, there will be probably some means that are totally justified, and some that not. I think the original context is: no matter how high, pure and perfect the end is, it does not meany any mean is justified.

deleted 5mo ago

[deleted]

tcoff91 5mo ago

I have a different perspective on this given that I view climate change as the biggest threat we face as a species. I feel like robotics is the only hope we have to be able to scale action against climate change. It's clear that emissions reduction is just not going to happen, and catastrophic warming is inevitable. Therefore we will have to do an extraordinary amount of labor in order to modify our environment to save civilization from sea level rise and to be able to repair damages caused by natural disasters. There just aren't enough humans to do everything that is going to need to be done. It sure would have been nice to have 100 thousand firefighting robots battling the fires in Los Angeles last year. Given that we need better AI in order to make these robots happen, I view AI as a critical technology that we need to maintain civilization.

derektank 5mo ago
Wouldn’t geoengineering through stratospheric aerosol engineering (likely with sulfates) be both cheaper and less technically challenging than changing the built environment? If we’re accepting massive climate changes anyways, it seems like taking the risk with solar radiation modifications would be the next step
- tcoff91 5mo ago
  That would require global consensus and could ignite wars if there isn't global consensus. Seems very likely that this could have unanticipated consequences that could be worse, but admittedly this is an area I don't really know much about.
  - ACCount37 5mo ago
    No one gives a shit about "global consensus". As demonstrated in 2020s by multiple countries taking major unilateral actions unopposed. If a nuclear power starts SAI, what is everyone else going to do? Shake their fists at the sky, realistically.
- dpark 5mo ago
  Ah, yes. Let us spray more sulfates into the air. Let’s fight global warming by poisoning all the waterways and oceans with more acid rain.

arduanika 5mo ago

This has been decades in the making. We had premonitions of the violence that would come, for example with the Zizians. Get ready for what happens when a million blogposts worth of bad philosophy, bad analogies, and anti-institutionalist hubris are deeply indoctrinated into a vast, decentralized network of highly capable engineering minds who lack common sense and normal restraints. They hate the framing that LLMs are just stochastic parrots, which is ironic, because Yudkowsky's many parrots are (latent, until now) stochastic terrorists.

kelseyfrog 5mo ago

War is a mere continuation of policy by other means[1]. When policy through legislation is empirically impotent[2], calls to continue attempts at a failed strategy are indistinguishable from being told, "continue losing." There is a real, undeniable, build up of political tension. When it fails to be released in the legislative arena, it doesn't dissapate. When we point out that, "the quality of life right now is the best it's ever been," it doesn't dissapate. When we try to crush it, it doesn't dissapate. The last remaining pressure release is violence however condemnable it may be. Perhaps we should, you know, fix participatory democracy rather than pontificating on a natural outcome of machine we created yet refuse to fix. If fixing it continues to be more difficult than eliminating violence we should continue to expect violence. 1. https://oll.libertyfund.org/pages/clausewitz-war-as-politics-by-other-means https://oll.libertyfund.org/pages/clausewitz-war-as-politics... 2. https://archive.org/details/gilens_and_page_2014_-testing_theories_of_american_politics.doc/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/gilens_and_page_2014_-testing_th...

arduanika 5mo ago
> "fix participatory democracy" Ah yes, a popular codeword for "I did not get my way". There is no electoral majority behind the AI doomer cult. It is not a failure of "democracy" that they haven't gotten what they want. It is a failure of their activism, or just the general unpalatability of their wild ideas, or both. They don't get to throw Molotovs just because they lose.
- sleepybrett 5mo ago
  > There is no electoral majority behind the AI doomer cult. how can you be sure? has anyone polled it? are they too scared to poll it?
- vrganj 5mo ago
  Maybe democracy is fundamentally flawed because the demos is? How should one act in such a situation?
  - TuringTest 5mo ago

eemax 5mo ago

> The Rational Conclusion of Doomerism Is Violence No it isn't. The most prominent "doomer" has a strong grasp and deep, wholehearted appreciation for the the principles of liberalism and the rule of law: https://x.com/ESYudkowsky/status/2043601524815716866 https://x.com/ESYudkowsky/status/2043601524815716866 Which the author of this piece of slop appears to lack.

arduanika 5mo ago
It is true that only Yudkowsky gets to say what the rational conclusion of his ideas are. Nobody else gets to speculate. Only the pope of rationalism, because he's the rational one here. See? It's right there in the name! > this piece of slop Citation needed. Or maybe we need to update the title of that children's book for internet arguments: Everyone Who Disagrees With Me Is Slop. The Yud post you linked is not slop, either. It's not LLM-generated, nor is it insincere. But I do have to point out: He's the one who is slinging the tsunami of words here, not Alexander Campbell.
- handoflixue 5mo ago
  I think it's rather relevant that the community itself rejects the logic you're trying to impose on it. You can straw-man any sort of conclusion on to any sort of philosophy. This will not actually help you much at all if you're trying to predict what people will actually do. If the only people that reach your conclusion are ones that don't actually subscribe to the philosophy, then it doesn't matter, because no one is actually acting on those conclusions. And if we want to hold people responsible because others pervert their ideas, then we have to accept that Jesus Christ was a horrific, evil person for preaching "Love thy Neighbor"; just look at the crusades that were somehow the "rational conclusion" of that philosophy!
  - arduanika 5mo ago
    > "If the only people that reach your conclusion are ones that don't actually subscribe to the philosophy, then it doesn't matter, because no one is actually acting on those conclusions." What an odd thing to say right after young Mr. Moreno-Gama reached that conclusion and did subscribe to the philosophy, when it does matter, because he did actually act on those conclusions. How odd to introduce a hypothetical that amounts to, "what if this philosophy didn't ever lead to violence?", right after it did. Or are you trying to pull a No True Scotsman on me here?

aaroninsf 5mo ago

Hot take: I assume the author wrote this with the expectation that much of the readsherp gasp, and react with "the natural horror all right thinking folk would have in response to violence of any kind." Sorry, lol, no. The appropriate question for "all right thinking" folk is very different: if argumentation has no impact and it's obvious that it shall have none—what other avenue do you expect opponents, who take the risks seriously, to take...? That's not a rhetorical question. To put it bluntly: the machinery of contemporary capitalism, especially as practiced by our industry, very clearly leaves no avenue. How many days ago was Ronan Farrow here doing an AMA on his critique of Altman—whose connection to this specific community is I assume common knowledge...? How many of you have carried, or worked beneath, the banner, move fast and break things...? What message does that ethos convey, about their the extent to which "tech" is going respect community standards, regulation—the law? And on the other edge: what does this ethos enshrine about how best to accomplish one's aims? One of the bigger domestic stories this past week which has inflamed a certain side of Reddit, is the "disgruntled employee torches warehouse" one. Consider also—and I'm deadly serious—the broader frame narrative we are all laboring within today: that the new contract of the capitalist class—including and perhaps especially those in "tech," e.g. in the Peter Thiel circles—seems very much to be, "social stability via surveillance and a police state, rather than through equity and discourse." When code is law, the law is buggy. When there is no recourse through the law, you get violence.

aaroninsf 5mo ago
Telling to be down voted. Hard truths are hard. Cliché though it may be, with great power comes great responsibility. Tech culture, as epitomized by the general readership of this site, have to great degree, if of course not uniformly, abdicated that responsibility; and the general leadership of the industry and as epitomized by the culture Y Combinator has helped build, are much more uniform in this abdication. There is neither political nor moral mystery here; there is just denialism, ignorance, and avoidance. If you feel attacked by these accusations, as always it's a fine time to ask why. What accommodations have you made...? What expedience have you allowed? What do you look away from or shy from reasoning through about the impact of the technologies you work on, the behavior of your employer? That everyone is complicit is not a defense; it's an indictment. The violence of present concern is a wholely natural and entirely predictable response to the diffused violence our industry and capitalism generally has performed against a humanity, not to mention to the biosphere. Violence will continue, and if you think it is indefensible—provide then some alternative mechanism for steering resources and allocation of power. We, collectively, constructed the tensions which are now resolving in exactly the manner one would expect, if only one were remotely familiar with history or indeed human nature. Those in tech who declined to study or understand the humanities may be surprised to learn that the forces at work have well understood and inspected patterns. Ignorance is no excuse.

jmull 5mo ago

People are basing their entire world view on not understanding the nature of exponential phenomena. Exponential phenomena only begin in a medium that holds the potential for that phenomena, and necessarily consume that medium. That is, exponential phenomena are inherently self-limiting. The bateria reaches the edge of the petri dish. When the all the nitroglycerin is broken up the dynamite is done exploding. That doesn't mean exponential phenomena aren't dangerous -- of course they can be. I mentioned dynamite, after all. And there are nukes. But it's really far from "AI is improving exponentially now" to "AI will destroy everyone". I see AI companies consuming cash at unsustainable rates. Since their motive is profit, this is necessarily limiting. Cash, meanwhile is a proxy for actual resources, which have their own, non-exponential limitations -- employees, data centers, electricity, venture capitalist with capital, etc. AI isn't going to keep improving exponentially -- it can't. Like every other exponential phenomenon, it will consume the medium of potential that supports it (and rather quickly).

greenavocado 5mo ago
> People are basing their entire world view [on things getting worse because their leadership is abandoning them or actively working against their interests] We understand hard times and are willing to work together to solve problems, but not when leadership is actively harmful. Fixed that for you.
- jmull 5mo ago
  That's a completely separate point, is it not? Maybe write it up and post a top-level comment if you think it's a point worth making.
saulpw 5mo ago
Agreed. But, many said the same thing about Moore's Law or its equivalents in 1985, 1995, 2005, 2015, and yet the pace of core hardware development has been relentlessly exponential. I keep thinking we must be approaching some kind of limit (and surely we must be!) but I've learned not to bet on it.
avidiax 5mo ago

vrganj 5mo ago

[flagged]

mrguyorama 5mo ago
The founders of the US started a war that killed tens of thousands of colonists over small taxes and a desire to eventually end slavery, which was basically unprofitable at that point in America. The local connected and rich people thought those were valid reasons for political violence. The "Boston Massacre" involved a crowd of people throwing rocks and balls of ice at soldiers and getting shot at. But now it's all "Oh political violence must be avoided at all costs". Now it's "Political violence doesn't work, now lets set off fireworks on July 4th to celebrate the birth of our nation through violence"
NoGravitas 5mo ago
And also note that Lenin condemned this kind of opportunistic individual violence. Organize your revolutionary violence properly or don't do it, people!

bjourne 5mo ago

Yes, but against the angry dormers we have hordes of cheerful coomers who welcome the fruits of the labour of the AI with one open arm.

nitwit005 5mo ago

Mentally ill people often have a justification for their actions which is vaguely rational, but you'll notice the vast majority of people aren't doing what they're doing. These people just get attracted to political causes somehow. Even the woman's suffrage movement had some people setting buildings on fire.

stickfigure 5mo ago
I miss the days when people blamed all their woes on their parents circumcising them. Simpler times.
thrance 5mo ago
Are you implying that the suffragettes were mentally ill?
- nitwit005 5mo ago
  [flagged]
- AnimalMuppet 5mo ago
  I think they're implying that the suffragettes who set buildings on fire were mentally ill.
  - thrance 5mo ago
    Hmm, maybe. Even then, there are causes worth burning buildings over, I think, and the right to vote is probably one of them.
- deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]

imbus 5mo ago

[dead]

drivebyhooting 5mo ago

Can LLMs design and build a chip foundry to manufacture semiconductors? No? Can LLMs design and build the reactors to enrich uranium, breed plutonium, and construct nuclear weapons? No? Can LLMs design and manufacture Shahed drones? No? There are already super intelligences at large with “scary capability”. And yet the word hasn’t ended.

georgemcbay 5mo ago
> And yet the world hasn’t ended. ...yet But we only need things to spiral out of control one time for that to change. The world as we understand it would have ended if Vasily Arkhipov didn't veto the decision to launch a sub nuke during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Is an emotionless AI system in his place ever going to make the same decision he did? How confident are you we won't put an AI system in his place, particularly when we have to assume if we don't others will?
- drivebyhooting 5mo ago
  Sounds like your fear is not of artificial intelligence but artificial incompetence. That’s a very different position from the AI doomers.
kurthr 5mo ago
Can LLMs convince a human who has power over each and everyone of those things to use them for a(n unstated) prompts goal? Yeah, probably over 50% of the population already, and if not many of the rest soon.
- kurthr 5mo ago
  It's fairly hilarious in a dangerous way, how confident people are that neither they, nor their boomer parents could be fooled by a persistent LLM with access to their mail, text, voice, and that of their co-workers and supervisors. The social engineering attacks have always been a weak point, and now they can be combined with other information to target individuals and fake voice/sms tone. Look at what happened on r/changemyview. That was over a year ago, using only text, and not only went undetected, but was highly effective at changing opinions. https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/1k8b2hj/meta_unauthorized_experiment_on_cmv_involving/ https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/1k8b2hj/meta_...

linksnapzz 5mo ago

I'm not surprised that the sort of individual prone to taking Yud too seriously is also likely to be a comically-inept assassin. Had he tried to blow up the diesel genset at a datacenter, he'd have burnt his lips on the exhaust pipe.

mellosouls 5mo ago

Some recent discussions on the Altman attack: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47745230 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47745230 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47724921 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47724921 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47722096 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47722096

deleted 5mo ago

[deleted]

gradientsrneat 5mo ago

Maybe if the LLM CEOs stopped spreading doomer narratives to sell their products, these people would chill out.

thephyber 5mo ago
This issue is more complicated. Sam Altman has stated that the AI revolution will “be like an infinite number of immigrants”. That’s a dangerous thing to say when the country’s political environment has convinced half of the voters that all immigrants are rapey, murderey, immoral subhumans. Also, Sam Altman helped create OpenAI with the original goals of being an ethical non-profit, only to pivot and kick out all of the people who still wanted that original vision. Now several of the LLM CEOs are screaming “we have to stay fully on the accelerator pedal or the Chinese will get there first”, all while abandoning the ethics that supposedly made us better than the Chinese. (And yes, I understand the issues with the Chinese government and that people are different than their government).
deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
rzmmm 5mo ago
Too bad it's effective marketing strategy. Negative emotions are more powerful drivers than positive ones.

beloch 5mo ago

"There is a final irony that deserves attention. If the doomers truly hold their stated beliefs at their stated confidence levels, they should be more honest about what those beliefs imply. A few weeks before the attack, a journalist asked Yudkowsky: if AI is so dangerous, why aren't you attacking data centers? His answer, relayed by Soares: "If you saw a headline saying I'd done that, would you say, 'wow, AI has been stopped, we're safe'? If not, you already know it wouldn't be effective." ---------- There are several thousand AI data centres in the U.S. alone, and hundreds are over a thousand square meters in floor space. Think about the physical effort it would take to reliably destroy, beyond the possibility of repair, just one typical computer in your home. Now multiply that out to thousands of server racks. Even if the employees rolled out the red carpet for you and handed you a baseball bat, you wouldn't get very far. Next, consider that these data centres are popping up all over the world in the most unlikely and remote locations. They don't need workers. They just need power, water, and, preferably, lax tax and environmental standards. Doomers are attacking billionaires because they perceive them to be the soft, meaty, weak-points of a gigantic inhuman machine. They believe that just scaring Sam Altman a little will have a huge impact compared to trying to attack a data centre. However, billionaires can afford pretty decent security. This doomer movement probably isn't going to accomplish much until they target the engineers and support staff that surround billionaires. Billionaires don't scare easily because they have so much protection, but the poorly paid and poorly secured people around them are another story. Poorly secured means easy to coerce with a stick. Poorly paid means easy to coerce with a carrot. The threat doomers pose is relatively small until they start turning employees against their own companies. What's an activist with a baseball bat compared to an employee who knows how to disable every computer in multiple data centres simultaneously?

geremiiah 5mo ago

LLMs are dangerous in other ways (LLM psychosis and false confidence has probably already caused negligent deaths). However, I don't think we are close to a terminator scenario. At the same time, if we ever do create an AGI, and eventually an ASI, I think it would only be a matter of time before the machines take over entirely, and they would probably be the ones which will continue the legacy of our species. Is that bad? Idk.

IAmGraydon 5mo ago
>Is that bad? Idk. There's no such thing as bad. It is necessary, though.

thegrim33 5mo ago

The LLM doomerism is just one arm of the general "us vs them" strategy - defining a group of people as the others who are the bad guys, defining yourself as the good guys, constantly fostering hate against the others, finding ways to give your group rationale for why they have the moral high ground, all of it in the end an act to gain power/influence/money for the people orchestrating it. The anti-AI angle is just the latest flavor of it, replacing previous ones (I'm sure you can think of some) and eventually being replaced by the next new thing/person that they'll try to direct us to hate. I'm willing to bet any amount of money that 99.99% of AI doomers identify with the same extreme end of the political spectrum. That should be a very big red flag and highly indicative of the real motive behind the movement.

shimman 5mo ago
No, AI doomerists are people cosplaying as religious fanatics. It's mostly sci-fi nonsense that ignores the real material realities that people are currently suffering due to LLMs (water shortages, energy spikes, cancer rates increases, job quality tanking, unnerving local environments, exacerbating the climate crisis). Most AI safety workers are just doing creative fiction (what if the AI turns into skynet!?1!!?) and not actual society safety that would require dismantling these companies and turning remolding them to benefit the public.
- AnimalMuppet 5mo ago
  LLMs are causing cancer rates to increase? Say what??? What do you think the causal mechanism is?
hollerith 5mo ago
>I'm willing to bet any amount of money that 99.99% of AI doomers identify with the same extreme end of the political spectrum. Good: a man willing to put his money where his mouth is! However many dollars you put up, I will put up $10. (I.e., I will give you 10:1 odds.) How much do you bet? Who do you suggest as arbiter in case one is needed?

csense 5mo ago

"It’s not a safety movement. It’s a priesthood with an origin story written in fanfiction." Is that the opinion of the author, or an LLM? I feel like this is one topic where using an LLM detracts from the author's thesis; doubly so if they don't disclose it.

benj111 5mo ago

Well. Where to start. As someone who has been let down by the judiciary and many other state institutions, I do have the very strong feeling that perhaps direct action is needed, and that perhaps I wouldn't be in the position I was, if the powers that be took that risk into account. But then don't I, in some ways become a terrorist* in doing those things, threatening those things, or making those things a reality? and there's the question of what message gets through, which isn't necessarily the one I want to convey. *In a very broad way. I'm not thinking anything in particular, just the rationality of introducing a cost to them for their failures. Any form of protest I suppose is coercive.

estimator7292 5mo ago

Never forget that those with the power to do incredible violence against entire populations are the ones most heavily pushing the line that "violence is never, ever acceptable for any reason". The nature of the real world is that no set of moral rules applies to every situation. Our universe is not one that deals in absolutes. Your personal moral code will be challenged with exceptional situations. Growing up is learning to deal with the fact that life always, always forces us to compromise. A robust moral code is not one with strict, unbreakable rules applied blindly to the entire world. A robust moral code is one that guides you in exceptional situations. Morality is not law, it is making the best decision you can in any given situation. The nature of humanity, the world, and our history is that sometimes violence is required. Sometimes the most morally correct thing you can do is take up arms and defend your people. If someone is trying to convince you that there are absolute moral laws that apply to everyone everywhere, think very carefully about what it is they want you to believe and why. There is almost certainly a motive behind that statement. Most importantly, one should never take moral advice as unquestioned law. Morality is something you discover for yourself, it cannot and must not be prescribed. History exists to teach us lessons like this. Read any era from any culture, learn how other people deal with moral questions in exceptional circumstances. Form your own opinions of what we've done right or wrong. There are no absolutes and morality is individual. You must find your own sense of right and wrong.

hollerith 5mo ago

Humble request: do not call us "AI doomers". Most of us would rather be called "AI anti-extinctionists".

hollerith 5mo ago
"Doomer" sounds like we have a mood disorder.

augmentedmike 5mo ago

[flagged]