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Comment by throwaway72762 | Hacker News Reader

This strikes me as the best outcome as long as it stops here. This lets the White House move on from the nonsense AI x-risk discussion without being attacked for not doing anything about it, and also doesn't let the companies use fake x-risk to kill off open source models.

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Yes, let's hope it stops here. I have full faith in billionaires looking out for our best interests as a society

I'm a cynic but even so I've been surprised by how the tone of confident dismissal of x-risk as "nonsense" has been completely unaffected by the change in messenger from LW weirdos to Turning Award winners. Like people don't even feel the need to gesture at an argument, it's just supposed to be obvious. What's really going on is good open source vs evil corporate control, a lot of commenters are sure, and the government is just out-of-touch geriatric puppets—even as the "open source vs Micro$oft" narrative has been ported straight from the 90s to a world where the concrete policy question is "should Meta bear any responsibility for the consequences of their software releases."

Why should the tone have changed? The billionaires and AI godfathers talking about it now all were inspired by LW and scifi, and it's the same narrative: no need to care about people living today or real problems in the world when there's a scifi story about trillions of people in the future for whom we must sacrifice anything (except the billionaires and AI godfathers comfort, status, or money) in the present to protect.

> "all were inspired by LW"

Evidence?

> "no need to care about people living today or real problems in the world"

Nobody says this.

> "trillions of people in the future"

Weird longtermists who talk about this are a small minority even among AI doomers.

> "AI godfathers comfort, status, or money"

I'm not suggesting anyone feel sorry for Geoff Hinton but quitting your Google job does seem like a pretty obvious sacrifice of money.

But I dunno you packed so much confusion into two sentences that I doubt you're going to let any messy details get in the way of picking a side based on an attempt at populism (including the fact that you're aligning yourself with Marc Andreesen and Zuckerberg).

Eh, one can dislike the longtermists and the non-longtermist plutocrats. I'd say there's good reason to dislike both, but for different reasons.

But it doesn't address the actual, real risks. It looks to me like they're just talking about the fake ones.

I agree with you, but it isn't going to stop here:

> Biden-Harris Administration will continue to take decisive action by developing an Executive Order and pursuing bipartisan legislation to keep Americans safe

Ah the lengths they will go for our safety.

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