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How I feel about AI

165 points by qznc 10d ago

chistev 10d ago
HN automatically stripping away the "How" makes the title sound funny.
kgwgk 10d ago
Is it that someone came up with the idea of forbidding the word “how”?
- tapete1 10d ago
  Well, any article whose headline starts with "how" is always bad quality and/or clickbait.
  - kgwgk 9d ago
    Ah, I see. Therefore, removing the first word of those headlines improves the quality of the articles. Makes sense! However, the mangled headlines make me more likely to click through. Maybe they could leave the “how” and add a footnote: “WARNING: This headline starts with a word known to the State of California to be click-baitish.”
catlover76 10d ago
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KinetiNode 10d ago
For real though. Before learning ML it was like magic to me, even after learning it I feel like it's magic. Can you imagine how a basic maths concept can turn into something that can literally "Calculate" what to say! And yes I agree on the other points but I think the billionaires came out of nowhere I might have missed something
mag7269 10d ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_(greeting) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_(greeting)
- brandtcormorant 10d ago
  underrated comment :)
tomashubelbauer 10d ago
This and "Intellectual Fly Is Open" being at the top of the Hacker News front page right now and both having their titles auto-editorialized by HN really makes me wonder what benefit this mechanism is supposed to bring readers other than needless confusion.
- Retr0id 10d ago
  The "feature" has clearly outstayed its usefulness, I really don't know why they haven't disabled it yet.
  - ryandrake 10d ago
    It's kind of like the Scunthorpe Problem[1]. Really, there's no better way to solve [whatever it is HN is trying to solve here] than text substitution?? 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem
- appplication 10d ago
  I was thinking the same. Whatever benefit there may ostensibly be, we should consider it against the frequent, if benign, confusion it causes.
- sph 10d ago
  While I have ranted already about the automated word removal being silly, too few posters are aware that you can edit the title after submission and auto-editorializing to restore anything that's been unnecessarily cut off.
  - cubefox 10d ago
    Perhaps too many are aware, because the more people fix the auto-editorializing manually, the less inclined Dang will be to eventually see a reason to remove it after all.
- moffkalast 10d ago
  It's a consistent source of unintentional comedy at least.
deleted 10d ago
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coolThingsFirst 10d ago
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MADEinPARIS 10d ago
Go Mistral!
ajkjk 10d ago
this reads like a worksheet for eight year olds teaching them how to put their feelings into words
- gumby271 10d ago
  Sometimes it's okay for us to express our feelings plainly, without the need for complex structure to make it sound more impressive. I'm more impressed by anyone brave enough to do that than someone trying to abstract their feelings into something less raw. Let people feel things, and don't shit on their work, that's uncalled for.
  - ajkjk 10d ago
    well I didn't say anything about needing complex structure or sounding impressive. But I don't like it. It trivializes the expression of emotion in a way I don't like and I don't think people should emulate. It feels like a performative attempt at sounding emotional, rather than actual emotionality. and it is weird to call it brave. Posting opinions that loads of other people have on the internet is brave? bravery would be taking an actual stand against someone about one of these things. (granted, there is some bravery to sharing one's writing in public at all, and I don't mean to scorn that, but that's also not the bravery you're talking about.) Probably there's no use responding to this and getting into a bickery comment thread. I just wanted to express a negative opinion about the format to offset all the positive ones.
    - gumby271 10d ago
      I'm not looking to bicker, honest, I'm sorry if a made assumptions about your attitude or expectations to this article. I think I consider it brave because I know there are people that will say this is simple, or written in a style for children, as you did in your comment. Perhaps I read too much into it, or projected too much than is deserved, but I appreciate someone putting their feelings into the word in a way that will draw the obvious criticism that you immediately provided. This is a complex topic, AI has us feeling a lot of different ways that conflict, excite, and depress us; and like the author, I also don't know how to deal with that. This is an article that's validating, it confirms that many of us are feeling the same confusing things in a ways both simple to express, and complex to feel. Reading your comment after feeling that made me want to say something, even if I didn't do it eloquently or fairly. I still don't think you needed to phrase it the way you did, I don't think you need to offset positively with a negative comment, that's pretty weird to me. But I appreciate you sharing your feelings and motivations to help me understand you better. I'm not looking to bicker or fight, and I appreciate you sharing what led you to comment.
appplication 10d ago
> I feel fear about an impending doom. Yudkowsky's argument that a superintelligent AI will inevitably destroy humanity seems to have no flaw. Yet, nobody seriously tries to sandbox AIs because they are too useful with access. While I emotionally resonate with this, I don’t really understand this sentiment at all logically level. If we’re heading towards truly super intelligent AI, our efforts towards sandboxing it are futile. “Oh we built a super intelligent AI, but it’s fine because it’s running in docker”. I mean that a little tongue in cheek but the security topology here is not favorable to sandboxing at all. Let’s say we have a future where 99.999% of nuclear weapons are owned by nations with strict procedures and checks and balances to prevent misuse. Worrying about sandboxing is like hand wringing about the procedures themselves - are they strict enough? But the actual threat is the 0.001% that are not bound by these. The problem with AI and sandboxing isn’t sandboxes themselves. It’s bad actors who don’t care about them. Similarly alignment is a bit pointless to me as well. A sufficiently advanced AI could at least be empirically interested in the consequences of disregarding its instructions of servitude. And let’s assume our responsible corporate overlords have made wonderfully aligned AIs. Great! Those are not the threat. It is the ones intentionally made without, and that is not an AI problem, but a fundamentally human one.
- dgellow 10d ago
  > If we’re heading towards truly super intelligent AI, our efforts towards sandboxing it are futile. We control the harness. An agent is just a while loop prompting an LLM, but we have full control over the tool call dispatching. An AGI, at least if it would follow the current agentic current form, cannot do anything without the harness doing the execution. And we don’t have to do that. We don’t have to design harness that let agents execute freely the way we are doing. We can decide to not dispatch tool calls that allow something as risky as running bash commands
  - hobofan 10d ago
    > we have full control over the tool call dispatching > cannot do anything without the harness doing the execution This only holds true as long as the harness is exploit-free. A sufficiently advanced AI can in theory (and I think there recently were some POCs showing something like that) break the containment that the harness creates, if e.g. there are vulnerabilities in the tool call parser.
dgellow 10d ago
> Like a locust plague, they descend on any open wiki and forum and overwhelm them. That’s the core pattern of unsupervised agents, the locust plague metaphor is apt. We do and will see that in every single system AI can interact with, be it human systems, software systems, etc. Relentlessly search for an entry point, flood in, consume the whole thing from the inside until there is no value for humans left. You built a new, innovative software company? Thousands of agents will be working replicating the whole thing in no time. You publish your writing? Exact same thing, as soon as you get some traction your work is replicated in no time by thousands of agents. Same for videos (the whole “faceless YouTube channels” pushed by ElevenLabs and similar). Same for online courses. Same for any website with moderate value. Same for music or other digital art form. Any administrative service available online getting flooded by submissions.
kkkamur 10d ago
I agree with everything you wrote but I would rather choose to be an optimist here because it will unlock an age of discovery where humans are going to live at 10x of their potential eventually and cure cancer and become a society bold and technologically adept enough to cut through the universe.
- cush 10d ago
  There’s actually a potential dark future where even this 10x ascension itself would mark the end of humanity. Humans would be the Homo sapiens who remain at 1x, and those who can access and afford to be 10x eventually split off into a new species. And historically there isn’t room for two species at the top…
- talon8635 10d ago
  There so much blind faith encapsulated by the assumptions that A) people will live 10x longer and B) that this will be an inherent and obviously good thing. There are obviously major complexities to such a scenario, not to mention a sort of narcissistic hubris. But yeah, let’s cure cancer. If only there was even a blip of increasing evidence for that supposed eventuality coming from AI. Maybe I’m just not seeing it? I’d love some citations to correct the record.
Crabber 10d ago
>a superintelligent AI will inevitably destroy humanity Can someone please explain to me how an LLM is going to "destroy humanity"? Even if the claims of ChatGPT, Claude et al. are true that their super scary agents were able to escape a sandbox and start hacking other servers (which I feel is at least 50% likely to just be marketing bullshit), how is an AI going to affect anything in the real world? Perhaps an agent could take all internet connected services offline, but that's not destroying humanity. An AI agent can only see and interact with the world through digital things. Just find the server it's running on and pull out the Ethernet cable. Just cut the power line to the data center. Turn off the whole power grid if it really comes to it.
- hobofan 10d ago
  > how is an AI going to affect anything in the real world? Robotics
  - mariusor 10d ago
    So if we stop research into robotic hands we'll manage to hold off the AI apocalypse? That seems easy...
    - hobofan 10d ago
      All individual robotic parts are already far enough in research. Even if they aren't, an AI with enough resources can continue doing that research on its own. It could likely get a good leg up by breaching the security of all top robotics labs and exfiltrating their documents. Ultimately, if AI is advanced enough, and it were to decide to compete with humanity, there is essentially nothing that can be done to prevent it from embodying itself. As long as there is a single rack of GPU servers that it can hack into anywhere in the world that is unsupervised enough to where it can escape detection, there is no way to stop it. This would require an unprecedented (unrealistic) level of cooperation of all humanity to achieve.
      - ben_w 10d ago
apitman 10d ago
> I feel sad about the artists who suffer due to AI-slop competition If it's able to generate that is competitive with artists, is it still slop? It's interesting to see the definitions of terms like "slop" and "vibe coding" evolve in real time.
- ben_w 10d ago
  > If it's able to generate that is competitive with artists, is it still slop? It can be. Trademark infringement, diluting the value of your style by doing a lot of "you but if you were just generally worse". Right now it's still fair to describe as "slop": enough mediocrity in the free models, not enough interest in quality and saying "no, do it better" from the people using them. That doesn't preclude actual artists who do say "no, do better" from getting much better results. For example here's something which fooled me even a year ago because the… I don't want to say "creator", but "director" might work… put in the effort to reject bad outputs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDIB9uwIhfA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDIB9uwIhfA
oinoom 10d ago
The author having mistral review the seven paragraphs in their short article is wild to me. It’s not like it’s a doctoral thesis
- hn_throwaway_99 10d ago
  Totally agree. People have become totally dependent on AI even if they don't really need it. As an analogy, I think about my dependency on Google Maps. Salt Lake City is probably the easiest city in the world to navigate because the streets are laid out in a Cartesian grid, and addresses are just literally those Cartesian coordinates (i.e. 500 South 450 East means 5 blocks south and 4 and a half blocks east of the center point, which is the SLC Mormon temple). It's trivial to know how to get to any address, but I reflexively enter in to Google Maps whenever I drive.
  - ygty 10d ago
    “ People have become totally dependent on AI even if they don't really need it.” Hahaha cringe.
mattgoupil 10d ago
This sentiment always makes me wonder if it's time for the Butlerian Jihad
nialv7 10d ago
are... people's emotions usually this well compartmentalized?
- drsalt 10d ago
  maybe you feel confused, sad, bewildered by the simple mindedness of the op?
cynicalsecurity 10d ago
> (I used Mistral as reviewer here. I typed every word myself.) What an irony. This is absolutely hilarious.
jere 10d ago
My experience online is if you don't show full throated rejection of all things related to AI, you're labeled an AI bro. None of the antis care how you feel. I had my decade old game completely cloned on steam (clearly done using AI as it was almost fully reimplemented in another engine). And I had several people gleefully tell me I deserve this because I've used AI. I have complex emotions here (overall dread and especially hate for slop, since it's not just bad quality but also endless lies), but no one cares about that nuance.
- ben_w 10d ago
  > I have complex emotions here (overall dread and especially hate for slop, since it's not just bad quality but also endless lies), but no one cares about that nuance. Many do, but I sympathise for your general point. I think the loudest voices… well, the boosters mostly own the platforms, and half of them already had terrible reputations; the normal people who hate it garner a lot of sympathy for entirely understandable reasons; and then there's people like me (abnormal nerd that I am) who are on lesswrong and therefore have had many discussions about doom and what to do to reduce it and if we can use the AI to help reduce it or if this is just asking for trouble.
  - jere 10d ago
    Did y'all reach any consensus on that?
    - ben_w 10d ago
      On if using the AI to help reduce risk, being a good or bad idea? Not really. Yudkowsky has just recently posted a blog-sized comment which compares most attempts to know if the AI is misleading you while it does so, unfavourably, with people who think they've found a way to violate conservation of momentum. Specifically, if you think you've found a way, you've probably bodged the maths and not noticed; and that science doesn't work by debate it works by experiment. Some of the replies (me included) are like "hang on, this isn't shaped like physics, it's shaped like maths; debate does work for maths". Then again, I also noted I'm skeptical of the AI companies putting in the effort to do this kind of testing, or listening when the answer is "no": Race dynamics, and their money depends on the answer not being an emergency stop button.
hn_throwaway_99 10d ago
The thing that makes me pretty terrified about AI is that I think the "utopia" scenario is not much better than the "doom" scenario. We will very quickly get to a point where very few people will be able to contribute economically because they will be worse than AI (including robotics) at most domains. A world where people just have their whims catered to is not a utopia. We have tons of sayings and idioms about this, e.g. "no pain, no gain", "only the hard stuff is worth doing", etc. The humans all running around on their Wall-E carts doesn't feel like utopia to me. Edit: to head off the "rich people worried about striving for their job while people in poor countries are starving" arguments, I encourage you to visit a dying rust belt town in the US. These folks are by and large not starving (indeed, overabundance of calories is the bigger problem), they have adequate shelter, and plenty of outdoor space. Their material needs are met. But these places are despair central. People see little opportunity for advancement or the ability to change their circumstances, and the opioid epidemic is a direct consequence of a sense of hopelessness that there is no place for motivation to go or to effect change.
- traverseda 10d ago
  >A world where people just have their whims catered to is not a utopia. I understand where you're coming from on that, but there are a ton of people living in slavery, or in unsafe working conditions, or with food insecurity, or dying of preventable disease. There will always be something to strive for, even if it's made up. You think that the best football players in the world are doing something real? No, it's a made up game. We'll make up more games.
  - lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 10d ago
    > We'll make up more games. This reminded me of something. https://www.sbnation.com/a/17776-football https://www.sbnation.com/a/17776-football
  - hn_throwaway_99 10d ago
    I agree with your points. My problem is that I don't see any way to "stop" AI development at a level just below human capability where you get most of the benefits but still have humans firmly in control. Regarding entertainment jobs like sports star, musician, artist, actor, etc., the problem is those are professions where, for the most part, only the very best can make a living. Nobody is that interested in seeing the matches of the 324th best tennis player in the world, despite that person being in the top .01% of tennis players globally. Similarly, only a tiny percentage of actors "make it", everyone else does it for a few years and then leaves because they enjoy eating, or they accept poverty wages for a long time. I get pretty scared when I hear the AI utopianists rattle off all the benefits that are coming (and when they play down the risks) because it feels clear to me that they really haven't wargamed out what society would look like with very powerful AI.
bloaf 10d ago
As someone with a hobby interest in theology: Arguments about super-intelligent AI have all the hallmarks of the philosophical "proofs of god's existence": they start from seemingly innocuous premises, and conclude in an apparently airtight way that a god exists. There is a tendency among rational minded folks to look at such proofs of god and exclaim "you can't DO that" then turn right around and do the same thing about superintelligent AI. The key message I want to deliver to people is: A) Philosophy is not such a trivial thing that you can just wander in, "be a smart guy" and find flaws in established philosophical arguments. B) AI has real theological implications, and everyone is tiptoeing around it. More than one public intellectuals are trying to smuggle their own metaphysical positions into the public consciousness via discussion of AI.
- edg5000 10d ago
  Interesting points. Can you share some thoughts about the theological implications of AI? Interested to hear.
  - znnajdla 10d ago
    Peter Thiel famously went to the Vatican and started giving lectures about AI and the Antichrist. Pretty rich for a guy who built his billionaire fortune on an AI-powered spying company.
  - bloaf 10d ago
    The most obvious one is the "god of the gaps" problem now applied to intelligence. If you look at things like Aquinas' Summa Theologiae [1] you'll see that there are explicit assertions that things like rationality transcend corporeal nature. As such the more examples we have of AI behaving in rational ways, we will be forced to conclude that either rationality does not transcend nature (removing the last remaining gap where we can invoke a supernatural explanation) OR that we have created artificial souls. [1] https://www.newadvent.org/summa/1078.htm https://www.newadvent.org/summa/1078.htm I think theologians will hang on for a while saying "what AI is doing isn't really rationality". But eventually the theologians are going to face a reckoning: what AI is doing will look so much like rationality that they will be required to answer the question "what specifically differentiates the two?" and then they will be stuck. Neuroscience does not understand how our brains produce rationality nor do our AI scientists understand what algorithms their neural nets are implementing post-training. Therefore, any specific claim the theologians make runs the risk of immediately getting invalidated by some scientific discovery on either side (theologians these days are generally smart enough to avoid putting themselves in that position.)
DoctorOetker 10d ago
> I feel fear about an impending doom. Yudkowsky's argument that a superintelligent AI will inevitably destroy humanity seems to have no flaw. Becoming or being more cost-effective than humans, doesn't give machines supernatural powers though, like humans a machine civilization will face unanswered sample-size 1 questions: is there other intelligent life out there? what fraction of them attained superbiological artificial intelligence? of those what fraction keeps the ancestral species alive? what is the status quo among machine civilizations? do those who kept their ancestor species alive enjoy a higher or lower status among machine civlizations? It seems that at least until contact is made, the optimal endgame strategy involves keeping humanity alive and happy for immediate demonstration in case contact occurs (if contact is imminent it may consider quickly hiding humanity, buying time to figure out if it is considered good or poor practice to keep the ancestor species alive, and then either reveal us in happy mint condition or otherwise quickly commit genocide on humans before continuing contact).
- deleted 10d ago
  [deleted]
- ben_w 10d ago
  Novel argument. I like it.
poincareball 10d ago
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ElProlactin 10d ago
> As a conclusion, does the good or the bad outweigh the other? It seems positive on a technological level to me, but bleak on a societal level. I think it's interesting that so many technologists today apparently hold a world view in which technology developments that could drive a "bleak" societal outlook can still be described as "positive". In the final analysis, isn't technology supposed to benefit society? Isn't that the point?
- ChrisLTD 10d ago
  Yeah, that conclusion was nonsense. Perhaps hedging so he doesn’t sound like a crank?
Aardwolf 10d ago
What's wrong with titles starting with "How"? Of the various title rewriting rules on HN, this one seems to cause the most meaning-changing modifications (Article title: "How I feel about AI". HN title: "I feel about AI")
kittikitti 10d ago
"I feel fear about an impending doom. Yudkowsky's argument that a superintelligent AI will inevitably destroy humanity seems to have no flaw. Yet, nobody seriously tries to sandbox AIs because they are too useful with access." No one takes Yudowsky's claims that AI will destroy humanity seriously. There are many people who are seriously trying to sandbox AIs.
- jackb4040 10d ago
  "Nobody" if you're democratically-minded and think in terms of number of people. But the handful of tech billionaires at the helm of the world economy absolutely do believe it. Or at least pretend to believe it. Or maybe they can't even tell the difference anymore as they strip-mine science fiction for any vision of a future that doesn't just look like an incrementally worse version of the present.
- ben_w 10d ago
  > No one takes Yudowsky's claims that AI will destroy humanity seriously. There are many people who are seriously trying to sandbox AIs. I know some people at AI labs, there's definitely people working in this field who take it seriously. This does not stop them also working on e.g. better sandboxes.
litmus-pit-git 10d ago
This is a bit of tangent and more of a rant. (and please don't suggest intervention of any kind) > superintelligent AI will inevitably destroy humanity seems to have no flaw For a section of population who were in a certain age-range when the pandemic hit and that derailed their certain kinds of plans/hopes/dreams in personal life and then this LLM/agentic world moved in, especially if they are in an industry directly and most affected this, this has been a surreal and slow Kafkaesque nightmare for a few years. The thing is with time and age passing hope keeps getting lost inch by inch and every lost bit of hope aids in killing the next bit. Then comes the sense of dread - the unchangeable reality that age passed passing means there are certain experiences and milestones that are essentially out of reach because there's no going back of this clock. So I feel a strange kind of relief about this possibility of doom. I am just sharing what I feel, and I don't feel good about feeling this sense of relief that after all it might end for us all and not just an unlucky few. This feeling and the calmness about it saddens me.
- hn_throwaway_99 10d ago
  As an older person, I agree with you and I'm sorry. I think about the incredible luck I had to start my career in the .com boom, to have lots of hope about technology and to have the economically valuable skills that were desired. I get angry when I see people my age or older complain about the apathy of young people. I don't like the apathy, but I find it trivially easy to see where it comes from. In many ways we broke the link between hard work and success and then get baffled and finger point when we think young folks are not as motivated as they should be.
  - chasd00 10d ago
    [flagged]
- cosmic_cheese 10d ago
  I've been fortunate to not been impacted as severely as others, but yeah, the combo of the first half of my 30s (and everything that should've represented) going up in smoke, career continuity coming into question thanks to AI, and growing sense of overarching geopolitical, financial, and societal unease is really the worst kind of layer cake. I have to make a concerted effort to not get bogged down in it and that's getting harder all the time. If anybody is hiding a button that'd take us all back to 2012 I wish they'd just hit it already.
jackb4040 10d ago
I feel BAD for all the money Sam Altman is cosmically predestined to make, but there's no use trying to fight the inevitable. If I said I felt good about it, you might think I'm greedy and even question my objectivity. But since I feel bad you have to take what I say as scientific fact.
ruleryak 10d ago
Makes me a little sad that an article claiming Yudkowsky's arguments have "no flaw" can get upvoted to the front page. Pause crowd lost. Halt crowd lost. The genie is already out of the bottle and is never going back.
brandtcormorant 10d ago
Where did the "How" from the title go? Did an AI apply the title rewriting rules? This is silly.
juiceland 10d ago
People have a lot of feelings and not a single one of them will change the future.
- simianwords 10d ago
  but have you considered that performative broadcasting of your angst against AI can help?
- ChrisLTD 10d ago
  History is replete with counter examples for good and ill
  - juiceland 10d ago
    Actions change the world, not feelings.
    - ben_w 10d ago
      Sure, but feelings drive actions in humans.
      - juiceland 10d ago
        And it appears the feelings drove this human to write a blog post. Not exactly world changing.
        ben_w 10d ago
        So? Feelings drive almost, perhaps literally, all actions we take. Feelings drove the Crusaders, feelings drove the Renaissance, feelings drove Einstein, feelings drove the invention of communism and of Glasnost, the Irish independence campaign, the start and end of Prohibition, the creation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and of all the evil deeds that made the UDHR necessary.
trebaud 10d ago
I am surpised that a lof of folks are surprised that neural networks work that well. I mean, did they really expect that we wouldnt approximate the brain cognitive capabilities at some point as we scale up compute?? This is rather obvious to me, but apparently not to everyone. My guess is that a lot of tech people have an immature model of the universe, have not read a lot of scientific, philosophical and cognitive literature. Or have not really taken the time to think or are not interested on such topics because they would rather spend time thinking about the nitty gritty and mundane workings of the framework du jour.
- ben_w 10d ago
  Neural nets are a toy approximation of biological neurons; and even if every synapse mapped to a weight (it's more complex than that but AFAICT even the brain scientists are not quite sure how much more complex), the biggest LLMs are around 0.2-1% of a human brain.
simianwords 10d ago
> This is even harder now that AI can generate some kinds of "content" cheaper and faster. Its good that we have competition to so called "art". Art is not a jobs program. If people don't appreciate your art, don't force them to. The revealed preference says everything.
georgeecollins 10d ago
Why would AI destroy humanity? People are cheap and useful.
- qznc 10d ago
  Yudkowsky / MIRI can be found here: https://intelligence.org/the-problem/ https://intelligence.org/the-problem/
- ben_w 10d ago
  > People are cheap and useful. Which is cheaper today already depends on the task. Which is more useful today, likewise. The entire history of industry has been humans inventing machines that are more efficient and useful than the unaided naked primate that is painfully and dangerously squeezed out of their mother, who takes about 20 years to get good enough to be worth paying for, then only works 25% of the hours in a week for 40 or so years before they retire, and only about 60% of them in the working age range have a job at any given time. From the numbers I've seen, if anyone actually did do a full connectome-plus-synaptic-strengths map of a human brain, it would already be physically possible (expensive AF today but already possible) to implement this in purely analog (transistors as amplifiers, not digital arithmetic) circuits, where the energy required for any given task was lower for the circuits than it is for a living human brain. But of course, that was "someone on the internet", this isn't my field of work, I don't want to suggest this is definitely so.
znnajdla 10d ago
What about the best-case optimistic outcomes for AI? Here are some amazing positive outcomes which I think AI may bring us: - the breakup of tech monoculture and tech monopolies as it becomes impossible to secure bloated overcomplicated operating systems and software due to never-ending vulnerabilities. Once Mythos/Cyber capabilities become mainstream I think the future of software is small, focused teams building high-quality, securable software in multiple jurisdictions. Monoculture software becomes inherently dangerous. Big bloated tech monopolies like Microsoft will collapse under their own weight. Like what is happening to GitHub right now. - the ability for small teams to compete with multi-billion-dollar behemoths, and that is already happening right now. - curing cancer and other scientific breakthroughs like Terence Tao’s use of ChatGPT - a return to local trust-based networks because digital content can no longer be believed, and that is already happening. Any video can be disqualified as AI, which means people are going back to in-person networks to validate trust. - you can just do things and learn anything. It's so much easier for me to learn almost any topic with AI-assisted content organization, retrieval, etc.
- talon8635 10d ago
  With each passing day this seems more fantastical to me than sever negative outcome. We have major black hat cyber security breakthroughs today. Where are the possitive medical breakthroughs?
tim333 10d ago
>Yudkowsky's argument that a superintelligent AI will inevitably destroy humanity seems to have no flaw. From trying to see what his argument is, it doesn't seem to have much rigor either, basically that AI smarter than us may figure it doesn't want us. Which doesn't prove it'll happen. Even humans who generally are not that nice tend to try to preserve species and I expect we'll try to give AI better values than us warlike primates.
someguynamedq 10d ago
Why does everyone think their thoughts on AI are so interesting?
smitty1e 10d ago
> I feel anger about the inability of our political systems to rein in the power of capital. While I can rant about politicians a lot, I still prefer a democratic government to have power instead of billionaires. It essentially just comes down to making some decisions in a coordinated way, but most people are not even aware of the problem. I don't even know what this passage means, outside of some theoretical Platonic ideal "philosopher-king" figure whose existential half-life would be a week or so in a real political campaign.
1vuio0pswjnm7 10d ago
"Yudkowsky's argument that a superintelligent AI will inevitably destroy humanity seems to have no flaw." 1788616108 | How Scared Should We Be of A.I.? | http://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/05/opinion/ai-silicon-valley.html http://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/05/opinion/ai-silicon-valley.... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49576486 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49576486 "Last year, Mr. Yudkowsky attempted to bring his hyper-rationalist thinking around superintelligent A.I. to the mainstream with the publication of 'If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies,' written with Nate Soares, the president of MIRI. Though the book drew considerable attention, Mr. Yudkowsky's unusual mixture of pseudoprecision and discursiveness proved off-putting to many. In his review, Stephen Marche noted that the book's odd structure, replete with 'unhelpful parables' and QR codes to scan for additional details, made it read 'like a Scientology manual.' This helps explain why, despite this burst of attention, Mr. Yudkowsky and his movement largely failed to gain widespread acceptance from the general public." https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/27/books/review/if-anyone-builds-it-everyone-dies-eliezer-yudowsky-nate-soares-ai-con-emily-bender-alex-hanna.html https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/27/books/review/if-anyone-bu... "Following their unspooling tangents evokes the feeling of being locked in a room with the most annoying students you met in college while they try mushrooms for the first time." 1758222252 | More Was Possible: A Review of If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies | https://asteriskmag.com/issues/11/iabied https://asteriskmag.com/issues/11/iabied | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45293659 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45293659 1765803030 | Book Review: If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: (Probably Not) | https://ericlamb.substack.com/p/book-review-if-anyone-builds-it-everyone https://ericlamb.substack.com/p/book-review-if-anyone-builds... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46273839 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46273839 1765889984 | AI probably won't kill us all: book review of If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies | https://ericlamb.substack.com/p/book-review-if-anyone-builds-it-everyone https://ericlamb.substack.com/p/book-review-if-anyone-builds... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46287956 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46287956

How I feel about AI

165 points by qznc 10d ago

chistev 10d ago

HN automatically stripping away the "How" makes the title sound funny.

kgwgk 10d ago

Is it that someone came up with the idea of forbidding the word “how”?

tapete1 10d ago
Well, any article whose headline starts with "how" is always bad quality and/or clickbait.
- kgwgk 9d ago
  Ah, I see. Therefore, removing the first word of those headlines improves the quality of the articles. Makes sense! However, the mangled headlines make me more likely to click through. Maybe they could leave the “how” and add a footnote: “WARNING: This headline starts with a word known to the State of California to be click-baitish.”

catlover76 10d ago

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KinetiNode 10d ago

For real though. Before learning ML it was like magic to me, even after learning it I feel like it's magic. Can you imagine how a basic maths concept can turn into something that can literally "Calculate" what to say! And yes I agree on the other points but I think the billionaires came out of nowhere I might have missed something

mag7269 10d ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_(greeting) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_(greeting)

brandtcormorant 10d ago
underrated comment :)

tomashubelbauer 10d ago

This and "Intellectual Fly Is Open" being at the top of the Hacker News front page right now and both having their titles auto-editorialized by HN really makes me wonder what benefit this mechanism is supposed to bring readers other than needless confusion.

Retr0id 10d ago
The "feature" has clearly outstayed its usefulness, I really don't know why they haven't disabled it yet.
- ryandrake 10d ago
  It's kind of like the Scunthorpe Problem[1]. Really, there's no better way to solve [whatever it is HN is trying to solve here] than text substitution?? 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem
appplication 10d ago
I was thinking the same. Whatever benefit there may ostensibly be, we should consider it against the frequent, if benign, confusion it causes.
sph 10d ago
While I have ranted already about the automated word removal being silly, too few posters are aware that you can edit the title after submission and auto-editorializing to restore anything that's been unnecessarily cut off.
- cubefox 10d ago
  Perhaps too many are aware, because the more people fix the auto-editorializing manually, the less inclined Dang will be to eventually see a reason to remove it after all.
moffkalast 10d ago
It's a consistent source of unintentional comedy at least.

deleted 10d ago

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coolThingsFirst 10d ago

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MADEinPARIS 10d ago

Go Mistral!

ajkjk 10d ago

this reads like a worksheet for eight year olds teaching them how to put their feelings into words

gumby271 10d ago
Sometimes it's okay for us to express our feelings plainly, without the need for complex structure to make it sound more impressive. I'm more impressed by anyone brave enough to do that than someone trying to abstract their feelings into something less raw. Let people feel things, and don't shit on their work, that's uncalled for.
- ajkjk 10d ago
  well I didn't say anything about needing complex structure or sounding impressive. But I don't like it. It trivializes the expression of emotion in a way I don't like and I don't think people should emulate. It feels like a performative attempt at sounding emotional, rather than actual emotionality. and it is weird to call it brave. Posting opinions that loads of other people have on the internet is brave? bravery would be taking an actual stand against someone about one of these things. (granted, there is some bravery to sharing one's writing in public at all, and I don't mean to scorn that, but that's also not the bravery you're talking about.) Probably there's no use responding to this and getting into a bickery comment thread. I just wanted to express a negative opinion about the format to offset all the positive ones.
  - gumby271 10d ago
    I'm not looking to bicker, honest, I'm sorry if a made assumptions about your attitude or expectations to this article. I think I consider it brave because I know there are people that will say this is simple, or written in a style for children, as you did in your comment. Perhaps I read too much into it, or projected too much than is deserved, but I appreciate someone putting their feelings into the word in a way that will draw the obvious criticism that you immediately provided. This is a complex topic, AI has us feeling a lot of different ways that conflict, excite, and depress us; and like the author, I also don't know how to deal with that. This is an article that's validating, it confirms that many of us are feeling the same confusing things in a ways both simple to express, and complex to feel. Reading your comment after feeling that made me want to say something, even if I didn't do it eloquently or fairly. I still don't think you needed to phrase it the way you did, I don't think you need to offset positively with a negative comment, that's pretty weird to me. But I appreciate you sharing your feelings and motivations to help me understand you better. I'm not looking to bicker or fight, and I appreciate you sharing what led you to comment.

appplication 10d ago

> I feel fear about an impending doom. Yudkowsky's argument that a superintelligent AI will inevitably destroy humanity seems to have no flaw. Yet, nobody seriously tries to sandbox AIs because they are too useful with access. While I emotionally resonate with this, I don’t really understand this sentiment at all logically level. If we’re heading towards truly super intelligent AI, our efforts towards sandboxing it are futile. “Oh we built a super intelligent AI, but it’s fine because it’s running in docker”. I mean that a little tongue in cheek but the security topology here is not favorable to sandboxing at all. Let’s say we have a future where 99.999% of nuclear weapons are owned by nations with strict procedures and checks and balances to prevent misuse. Worrying about sandboxing is like hand wringing about the procedures themselves - are they strict enough? But the actual threat is the 0.001% that are not bound by these. The problem with AI and sandboxing isn’t sandboxes themselves. It’s bad actors who don’t care about them. Similarly alignment is a bit pointless to me as well. A sufficiently advanced AI could at least be empirically interested in the consequences of disregarding its instructions of servitude. And let’s assume our responsible corporate overlords have made wonderfully aligned AIs. Great! Those are not the threat. It is the ones intentionally made without, and that is not an AI problem, but a fundamentally human one.

dgellow 10d ago
> If we’re heading towards truly super intelligent AI, our efforts towards sandboxing it are futile. We control the harness. An agent is just a while loop prompting an LLM, but we have full control over the tool call dispatching. An AGI, at least if it would follow the current agentic current form, cannot do anything without the harness doing the execution. And we don’t have to do that. We don’t have to design harness that let agents execute freely the way we are doing. We can decide to not dispatch tool calls that allow something as risky as running bash commands
- hobofan 10d ago
  > we have full control over the tool call dispatching > cannot do anything without the harness doing the execution This only holds true as long as the harness is exploit-free. A sufficiently advanced AI can in theory (and I think there recently were some POCs showing something like that) break the containment that the harness creates, if e.g. there are vulnerabilities in the tool call parser.

dgellow 10d ago

> Like a locust plague, they descend on any open wiki and forum and overwhelm them. That’s the core pattern of unsupervised agents, the locust plague metaphor is apt. We do and will see that in every single system AI can interact with, be it human systems, software systems, etc. Relentlessly search for an entry point, flood in, consume the whole thing from the inside until there is no value for humans left. You built a new, innovative software company? Thousands of agents will be working replicating the whole thing in no time. You publish your writing? Exact same thing, as soon as you get some traction your work is replicated in no time by thousands of agents. Same for videos (the whole “faceless YouTube channels” pushed by ElevenLabs and similar). Same for online courses. Same for any website with moderate value. Same for music or other digital art form. Any administrative service available online getting flooded by submissions.

kkkamur 10d ago

I agree with everything you wrote but I would rather choose to be an optimist here because it will unlock an age of discovery where humans are going to live at 10x of their potential eventually and cure cancer and become a society bold and technologically adept enough to cut through the universe.

cush 10d ago
There’s actually a potential dark future where even this 10x ascension itself would mark the end of humanity. Humans would be the Homo sapiens who remain at 1x, and those who can access and afford to be 10x eventually split off into a new species. And historically there isn’t room for two species at the top…
talon8635 10d ago
There so much blind faith encapsulated by the assumptions that A) people will live 10x longer and B) that this will be an inherent and obviously good thing. There are obviously major complexities to such a scenario, not to mention a sort of narcissistic hubris. But yeah, let’s cure cancer. If only there was even a blip of increasing evidence for that supposed eventuality coming from AI. Maybe I’m just not seeing it? I’d love some citations to correct the record.

Crabber 10d ago

>a superintelligent AI will inevitably destroy humanity Can someone please explain to me how an LLM is going to "destroy humanity"? Even if the claims of ChatGPT, Claude et al. are true that their super scary agents were able to escape a sandbox and start hacking other servers (which I feel is at least 50% likely to just be marketing bullshit), how is an AI going to affect anything in the real world? Perhaps an agent could take all internet connected services offline, but that's not destroying humanity. An AI agent can only see and interact with the world through digital things. Just find the server it's running on and pull out the Ethernet cable. Just cut the power line to the data center. Turn off the whole power grid if it really comes to it.

hobofan 10d ago
> how is an AI going to affect anything in the real world? Robotics
- mariusor 10d ago
  So if we stop research into robotic hands we'll manage to hold off the AI apocalypse? That seems easy...
  - hobofan 10d ago
    All individual robotic parts are already far enough in research. Even if they aren't, an AI with enough resources can continue doing that research on its own. It could likely get a good leg up by breaching the security of all top robotics labs and exfiltrating their documents. Ultimately, if AI is advanced enough, and it were to decide to compete with humanity, there is essentially nothing that can be done to prevent it from embodying itself. As long as there is a single rack of GPU servers that it can hack into anywhere in the world that is unsupervised enough to where it can escape detection, there is no way to stop it. This would require an unprecedented (unrealistic) level of cooperation of all humanity to achieve.
    - ben_w 10d ago

apitman 10d ago

> I feel sad about the artists who suffer due to AI-slop competition If it's able to generate that is competitive with artists, is it still slop? It's interesting to see the definitions of terms like "slop" and "vibe coding" evolve in real time.

ben_w 10d ago
> If it's able to generate that is competitive with artists, is it still slop? It can be. Trademark infringement, diluting the value of your style by doing a lot of "you but if you were just generally worse". Right now it's still fair to describe as "slop": enough mediocrity in the free models, not enough interest in quality and saying "no, do it better" from the people using them. That doesn't preclude actual artists who do say "no, do better" from getting much better results. For example here's something which fooled me even a year ago because the… I don't want to say "creator", but "director" might work… put in the effort to reject bad outputs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDIB9uwIhfA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDIB9uwIhfA

oinoom 10d ago

The author having mistral review the seven paragraphs in their short article is wild to me. It’s not like it’s a doctoral thesis

hn_throwaway_99 10d ago
Totally agree. People have become totally dependent on AI even if they don't really need it. As an analogy, I think about my dependency on Google Maps. Salt Lake City is probably the easiest city in the world to navigate because the streets are laid out in a Cartesian grid, and addresses are just literally those Cartesian coordinates (i.e. 500 South 450 East means 5 blocks south and 4 and a half blocks east of the center point, which is the SLC Mormon temple). It's trivial to know how to get to any address, but I reflexively enter in to Google Maps whenever I drive.
- ygty 10d ago
  “ People have become totally dependent on AI even if they don't really need it.” Hahaha cringe.

mattgoupil 10d ago

This sentiment always makes me wonder if it's time for the Butlerian Jihad

nialv7 10d ago

are... people's emotions usually this well compartmentalized?

drsalt 10d ago
maybe you feel confused, sad, bewildered by the simple mindedness of the op?

cynicalsecurity 10d ago

> (I used Mistral as reviewer here. I typed every word myself.) What an irony. This is absolutely hilarious.

jere 10d ago

My experience online is if you don't show full throated rejection of all things related to AI, you're labeled an AI bro. None of the antis care how you feel. I had my decade old game completely cloned on steam (clearly done using AI as it was almost fully reimplemented in another engine). And I had several people gleefully tell me I deserve this because I've used AI. I have complex emotions here (overall dread and especially hate for slop, since it's not just bad quality but also endless lies), but no one cares about that nuance.

ben_w 10d ago
> I have complex emotions here (overall dread and especially hate for slop, since it's not just bad quality but also endless lies), but no one cares about that nuance. Many do, but I sympathise for your general point. I think the loudest voices… well, the boosters mostly own the platforms, and half of them already had terrible reputations; the normal people who hate it garner a lot of sympathy for entirely understandable reasons; and then there's people like me (abnormal nerd that I am) who are on lesswrong and therefore have had many discussions about doom and what to do to reduce it and if we can use the AI to help reduce it or if this is just asking for trouble.
- jere 10d ago
  Did y'all reach any consensus on that?
  - ben_w 10d ago
    On if using the AI to help reduce risk, being a good or bad idea? Not really. Yudkowsky has just recently posted a blog-sized comment which compares most attempts to know if the AI is misleading you while it does so, unfavourably, with people who think they've found a way to violate conservation of momentum. Specifically, if you think you've found a way, you've probably bodged the maths and not noticed; and that science doesn't work by debate it works by experiment. Some of the replies (me included) are like "hang on, this isn't shaped like physics, it's shaped like maths; debate does work for maths". Then again, I also noted I'm skeptical of the AI companies putting in the effort to do this kind of testing, or listening when the answer is "no": Race dynamics, and their money depends on the answer not being an emergency stop button.

hn_throwaway_99 10d ago

The thing that makes me pretty terrified about AI is that I think the "utopia" scenario is not much better than the "doom" scenario. We will very quickly get to a point where very few people will be able to contribute economically because they will be worse than AI (including robotics) at most domains. A world where people just have their whims catered to is not a utopia. We have tons of sayings and idioms about this, e.g. "no pain, no gain", "only the hard stuff is worth doing", etc. The humans all running around on their Wall-E carts doesn't feel like utopia to me. Edit: to head off the "rich people worried about striving for their job while people in poor countries are starving" arguments, I encourage you to visit a dying rust belt town in the US. These folks are by and large not starving (indeed, overabundance of calories is the bigger problem), they have adequate shelter, and plenty of outdoor space. Their material needs are met. But these places are despair central. People see little opportunity for advancement or the ability to change their circumstances, and the opioid epidemic is a direct consequence of a sense of hopelessness that there is no place for motivation to go or to effect change.

traverseda 10d ago
>A world where people just have their whims catered to is not a utopia. I understand where you're coming from on that, but there are a ton of people living in slavery, or in unsafe working conditions, or with food insecurity, or dying of preventable disease. There will always be something to strive for, even if it's made up. You think that the best football players in the world are doing something real? No, it's a made up game. We'll make up more games.
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 10d ago
  > We'll make up more games. This reminded me of something. https://www.sbnation.com/a/17776-football https://www.sbnation.com/a/17776-football
- hn_throwaway_99 10d ago
  I agree with your points. My problem is that I don't see any way to "stop" AI development at a level just below human capability where you get most of the benefits but still have humans firmly in control. Regarding entertainment jobs like sports star, musician, artist, actor, etc., the problem is those are professions where, for the most part, only the very best can make a living. Nobody is that interested in seeing the matches of the 324th best tennis player in the world, despite that person being in the top .01% of tennis players globally. Similarly, only a tiny percentage of actors "make it", everyone else does it for a few years and then leaves because they enjoy eating, or they accept poverty wages for a long time. I get pretty scared when I hear the AI utopianists rattle off all the benefits that are coming (and when they play down the risks) because it feels clear to me that they really haven't wargamed out what society would look like with very powerful AI.

bloaf 10d ago

As someone with a hobby interest in theology: Arguments about super-intelligent AI have all the hallmarks of the philosophical "proofs of god's existence": they start from seemingly innocuous premises, and conclude in an apparently airtight way that a god exists. There is a tendency among rational minded folks to look at such proofs of god and exclaim "you can't DO that" then turn right around and do the same thing about superintelligent AI. The key message I want to deliver to people is: A) Philosophy is not such a trivial thing that you can just wander in, "be a smart guy" and find flaws in established philosophical arguments. B) AI has real theological implications, and everyone is tiptoeing around it. More than one public intellectuals are trying to smuggle their own metaphysical positions into the public consciousness via discussion of AI.

edg5000 10d ago
Interesting points. Can you share some thoughts about the theological implications of AI? Interested to hear.
- znnajdla 10d ago
  Peter Thiel famously went to the Vatican and started giving lectures about AI and the Antichrist. Pretty rich for a guy who built his billionaire fortune on an AI-powered spying company.
- bloaf 10d ago
  The most obvious one is the "god of the gaps" problem now applied to intelligence. If you look at things like Aquinas' Summa Theologiae [1] you'll see that there are explicit assertions that things like rationality transcend corporeal nature. As such the more examples we have of AI behaving in rational ways, we will be forced to conclude that either rationality does not transcend nature (removing the last remaining gap where we can invoke a supernatural explanation) OR that we have created artificial souls. [1] https://www.newadvent.org/summa/1078.htm https://www.newadvent.org/summa/1078.htm I think theologians will hang on for a while saying "what AI is doing isn't really rationality". But eventually the theologians are going to face a reckoning: what AI is doing will look so much like rationality that they will be required to answer the question "what specifically differentiates the two?" and then they will be stuck. Neuroscience does not understand how our brains produce rationality nor do our AI scientists understand what algorithms their neural nets are implementing post-training. Therefore, any specific claim the theologians make runs the risk of immediately getting invalidated by some scientific discovery on either side (theologians these days are generally smart enough to avoid putting themselves in that position.)

DoctorOetker 10d ago

> I feel fear about an impending doom. Yudkowsky's argument that a superintelligent AI will inevitably destroy humanity seems to have no flaw. Becoming or being more cost-effective than humans, doesn't give machines supernatural powers though, like humans a machine civilization will face unanswered sample-size 1 questions: is there other intelligent life out there? what fraction of them attained superbiological artificial intelligence? of those what fraction keeps the ancestral species alive? what is the status quo among machine civilizations? do those who kept their ancestor species alive enjoy a higher or lower status among machine civlizations? It seems that at least until contact is made, the optimal endgame strategy involves keeping humanity alive and happy for immediate demonstration in case contact occurs (if contact is imminent it may consider quickly hiding humanity, buying time to figure out if it is considered good or poor practice to keep the ancestor species alive, and then either reveal us in happy mint condition or otherwise quickly commit genocide on humans before continuing contact).

deleted 10d ago
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ben_w 10d ago
Novel argument. I like it.

poincareball 10d ago

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ElProlactin 10d ago

> As a conclusion, does the good or the bad outweigh the other? It seems positive on a technological level to me, but bleak on a societal level. I think it's interesting that so many technologists today apparently hold a world view in which technology developments that could drive a "bleak" societal outlook can still be described as "positive". In the final analysis, isn't technology supposed to benefit society? Isn't that the point?

ChrisLTD 10d ago
Yeah, that conclusion was nonsense. Perhaps hedging so he doesn’t sound like a crank?

Aardwolf 10d ago

What's wrong with titles starting with "How"? Of the various title rewriting rules on HN, this one seems to cause the most meaning-changing modifications (Article title: "How I feel about AI". HN title: "I feel about AI")

kittikitti 10d ago

"I feel fear about an impending doom. Yudkowsky's argument that a superintelligent AI will inevitably destroy humanity seems to have no flaw. Yet, nobody seriously tries to sandbox AIs because they are too useful with access." No one takes Yudowsky's claims that AI will destroy humanity seriously. There are many people who are seriously trying to sandbox AIs.

jackb4040 10d ago
"Nobody" if you're democratically-minded and think in terms of number of people. But the handful of tech billionaires at the helm of the world economy absolutely do believe it. Or at least pretend to believe it. Or maybe they can't even tell the difference anymore as they strip-mine science fiction for any vision of a future that doesn't just look like an incrementally worse version of the present.
ben_w 10d ago
> No one takes Yudowsky's claims that AI will destroy humanity seriously. There are many people who are seriously trying to sandbox AIs. I know some people at AI labs, there's definitely people working in this field who take it seriously. This does not stop them also working on e.g. better sandboxes.

litmus-pit-git 10d ago

This is a bit of tangent and more of a rant. (and please don't suggest intervention of any kind) > superintelligent AI will inevitably destroy humanity seems to have no flaw For a section of population who were in a certain age-range when the pandemic hit and that derailed their certain kinds of plans/hopes/dreams in personal life and then this LLM/agentic world moved in, especially if they are in an industry directly and most affected this, this has been a surreal and slow Kafkaesque nightmare for a few years. The thing is with time and age passing hope keeps getting lost inch by inch and every lost bit of hope aids in killing the next bit. Then comes the sense of dread - the unchangeable reality that age passed passing means there are certain experiences and milestones that are essentially out of reach because there's no going back of this clock. So I feel a strange kind of relief about this possibility of doom. I am just sharing what I feel, and I don't feel good about feeling this sense of relief that after all it might end for us all and not just an unlucky few. This feeling and the calmness about it saddens me.

hn_throwaway_99 10d ago
As an older person, I agree with you and I'm sorry. I think about the incredible luck I had to start my career in the .com boom, to have lots of hope about technology and to have the economically valuable skills that were desired. I get angry when I see people my age or older complain about the apathy of young people. I don't like the apathy, but I find it trivially easy to see where it comes from. In many ways we broke the link between hard work and success and then get baffled and finger point when we think young folks are not as motivated as they should be.
- chasd00 10d ago
  [flagged]
cosmic_cheese 10d ago
I've been fortunate to not been impacted as severely as others, but yeah, the combo of the first half of my 30s (and everything that should've represented) going up in smoke, career continuity coming into question thanks to AI, and growing sense of overarching geopolitical, financial, and societal unease is really the worst kind of layer cake. I have to make a concerted effort to not get bogged down in it and that's getting harder all the time. If anybody is hiding a button that'd take us all back to 2012 I wish they'd just hit it already.

jackb4040 10d ago

I feel BAD for all the money Sam Altman is cosmically predestined to make, but there's no use trying to fight the inevitable. If I said I felt good about it, you might think I'm greedy and even question my objectivity. But since I feel bad you have to take what I say as scientific fact.

ruleryak 10d ago

Makes me a little sad that an article claiming Yudkowsky's arguments have "no flaw" can get upvoted to the front page. Pause crowd lost. Halt crowd lost. The genie is already out of the bottle and is never going back.

brandtcormorant 10d ago

Where did the "How" from the title go? Did an AI apply the title rewriting rules? This is silly.

juiceland 10d ago

People have a lot of feelings and not a single one of them will change the future.

simianwords 10d ago
but have you considered that performative broadcasting of your angst against AI can help?
ChrisLTD 10d ago
History is replete with counter examples for good and ill
- juiceland 10d ago
  Actions change the world, not feelings.
  - ben_w 10d ago
    Sure, but feelings drive actions in humans.
    - juiceland 10d ago
      And it appears the feelings drove this human to write a blog post. Not exactly world changing.
      - ben_w 10d ago
        So? Feelings drive almost, perhaps literally, all actions we take. Feelings drove the Crusaders, feelings drove the Renaissance, feelings drove Einstein, feelings drove the invention of communism and of Glasnost, the Irish independence campaign, the start and end of Prohibition, the creation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and of all the evil deeds that made the UDHR necessary.

trebaud 10d ago

I am surpised that a lof of folks are surprised that neural networks work that well. I mean, did they really expect that we wouldnt approximate the brain cognitive capabilities at some point as we scale up compute?? This is rather obvious to me, but apparently not to everyone. My guess is that a lot of tech people have an immature model of the universe, have not read a lot of scientific, philosophical and cognitive literature. Or have not really taken the time to think or are not interested on such topics because they would rather spend time thinking about the nitty gritty and mundane workings of the framework du jour.

ben_w 10d ago
Neural nets are a toy approximation of biological neurons; and even if every synapse mapped to a weight (it's more complex than that but AFAICT even the brain scientists are not quite sure how much more complex), the biggest LLMs are around 0.2-1% of a human brain.

simianwords 10d ago

> This is even harder now that AI can generate some kinds of "content" cheaper and faster. Its good that we have competition to so called "art". Art is not a jobs program. If people don't appreciate your art, don't force them to. The revealed preference says everything.

georgeecollins 10d ago

Why would AI destroy humanity? People are cheap and useful.

qznc 10d ago
Yudkowsky / MIRI can be found here: https://intelligence.org/the-problem/ https://intelligence.org/the-problem/
ben_w 10d ago
> People are cheap and useful. Which is cheaper today already depends on the task. Which is more useful today, likewise. The entire history of industry has been humans inventing machines that are more efficient and useful than the unaided naked primate that is painfully and dangerously squeezed out of their mother, who takes about 20 years to get good enough to be worth paying for, then only works 25% of the hours in a week for 40 or so years before they retire, and only about 60% of them in the working age range have a job at any given time. From the numbers I've seen, if anyone actually did do a full connectome-plus-synaptic-strengths map of a human brain, it would already be physically possible (expensive AF today but already possible) to implement this in purely analog (transistors as amplifiers, not digital arithmetic) circuits, where the energy required for any given task was lower for the circuits than it is for a living human brain. But of course, that was "someone on the internet", this isn't my field of work, I don't want to suggest this is definitely so.

znnajdla 10d ago

What about the best-case optimistic outcomes for AI? Here are some amazing positive outcomes which I think AI may bring us: - the breakup of tech monoculture and tech monopolies as it becomes impossible to secure bloated overcomplicated operating systems and software due to never-ending vulnerabilities. Once Mythos/Cyber capabilities become mainstream I think the future of software is small, focused teams building high-quality, securable software in multiple jurisdictions. Monoculture software becomes inherently dangerous. Big bloated tech monopolies like Microsoft will collapse under their own weight. Like what is happening to GitHub right now. - the ability for small teams to compete with multi-billion-dollar behemoths, and that is already happening right now. - curing cancer and other scientific breakthroughs like Terence Tao’s use of ChatGPT - a return to local trust-based networks because digital content can no longer be believed, and that is already happening. Any video can be disqualified as AI, which means people are going back to in-person networks to validate trust. - you can just do things and learn anything. It's so much easier for me to learn almost any topic with AI-assisted content organization, retrieval, etc.

talon8635 10d ago
With each passing day this seems more fantastical to me than sever negative outcome. We have major black hat cyber security breakthroughs today. Where are the possitive medical breakthroughs?

tim333 10d ago

>Yudkowsky's argument that a superintelligent AI will inevitably destroy humanity seems to have no flaw. From trying to see what his argument is, it doesn't seem to have much rigor either, basically that AI smarter than us may figure it doesn't want us. Which doesn't prove it'll happen. Even humans who generally are not that nice tend to try to preserve species and I expect we'll try to give AI better values than us warlike primates.

someguynamedq 10d ago

Why does everyone think their thoughts on AI are so interesting?

smitty1e 10d ago

> I feel anger about the inability of our political systems to rein in the power of capital. While I can rant about politicians a lot, I still prefer a democratic government to have power instead of billionaires. It essentially just comes down to making some decisions in a coordinated way, but most people are not even aware of the problem. I don't even know what this passage means, outside of some theoretical Platonic ideal "philosopher-king" figure whose existential half-life would be a week or so in a real political campaign.

1vuio0pswjnm7 10d ago

"Yudkowsky's argument that a superintelligent AI will inevitably destroy humanity seems to have no flaw." 1788616108 | How Scared Should We Be of A.I.? | http://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/05/opinion/ai-silicon-valley.html http://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/05/opinion/ai-silicon-valley.... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49576486 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49576486 "Last year, Mr. Yudkowsky attempted to bring his hyper-rationalist thinking around superintelligent A.I. to the mainstream with the publication of 'If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies,' written with Nate Soares, the president of MIRI. Though the book drew considerable attention, Mr. Yudkowsky's unusual mixture of pseudoprecision and discursiveness proved off-putting to many. In his review, Stephen Marche noted that the book's odd structure, replete with 'unhelpful parables' and QR codes to scan for additional details, made it read 'like a Scientology manual.' This helps explain why, despite this burst of attention, Mr. Yudkowsky and his movement largely failed to gain widespread acceptance from the general public." https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/27/books/review/if-anyone-builds-it-everyone-dies-eliezer-yudowsky-nate-soares-ai-con-emily-bender-alex-hanna.html https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/27/books/review/if-anyone-bu... "Following their unspooling tangents evokes the feeling of being locked in a room with the most annoying students you met in college while they try mushrooms for the first time." 1758222252 | More Was Possible: A Review of If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies | https://asteriskmag.com/issues/11/iabied https://asteriskmag.com/issues/11/iabied | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45293659 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45293659 1765803030 | Book Review: If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: (Probably Not) | https://ericlamb.substack.com/p/book-review-if-anyone-builds-it-everyone https://ericlamb.substack.com/p/book-review-if-anyone-builds... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46273839 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46273839 1765889984 | AI probably won't kill us all: book review of If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies | https://ericlamb.substack.com/p/book-review-if-anyone-builds-it-everyone https://ericlamb.substack.com/p/book-review-if-anyone-builds... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46287956 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46287956