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Comment by lappet | Hacker News Reader

Is there anyone prominent in the tech world who is pessimistic? I am tired of this relentless optimism regarding new technologies.

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When's the last time you saw a pessimistic car salesman? Same thing.

Now, a mechanic....

A lot of the worst x-risk AI doomers are... selling AI (Altman at OpenAI being the most visible).

X-risk, of course, is leveraged as a powerful argument for regulation which narrows the field to a small number of favored firms which have privileged mutual relations with government, with a difficult on-ramp for anyone else, and minimum public transparency.

Both Altman (OpenAI) and Hassabis (DeepMind) have said existential risk from AI is real.

But their actions say that they don't really believe it. Or that they're sociopathic. Pick your poison.

I don't think they do. You might disagree but I think Altman's stance is that this will happen no matter what, so it's better for "good guys" (for some definition of that word) to take the lead to minimize the threat.

Yes, I understand his stance. I think that stance is, at best, misguided. But given how the worldcoin thing shook out, it seems to me that he doesn't have a great deal of concern over how his actions impact others, and I question his ability to judge who are the "good guys" and "bad guys". I am trying to view him in the most positive possible light here.

Musk is pessimist about AI.

Two of the three so-called "Godfathers of AI," Yoshua Bengio and Geoffrey Hinton, as well as Sam Altman and Bill Gates, have signed the Statement on AI Risk.

https://www.safe.ai/statement-on-ai-risk#open-letter

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