Comment by halflings | Hacker News Reader

Comment by halflings | Hacker News Reader

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Your comment (+ username) reads like what I would have written once upon a time when I was fully in the EA bubble.

Truly no offense meant, as I was deeply into the EA movement myself, and still consider myself one (in the original "donate money effectively" sense), but the movement has now morphed into a death cult obsessed by things like:

* OMG we're all going to die any time now (repeated every year since circa 2018)

* What is your pDoom? What are your timelines? (aka: what is your totally made up number that makes you feel like you're doing something rational/scientific)

I'm deep in the weeds w/ LLMs, e.g. I probably finetune an average of 1 model a day, and working with bleeding edge models... and AI safety just sounds so silly. Wanting to take drastic measures today to prevent an upcoming apocalypse makes as much sense as taking the same drastic measures when gradient descent was invented.

My username was created before I knew anything about EA or adjacent. I'm not in any EA movement, though I am sympathetic. I've spent 100x the time on HN, with people mostly in denial, than I do in EA or adjacent forums, nor have I met any of them.

It's sadly twisted how mentioning that -- the majority of leaders doing the cutting edge research on AGI think it has a significant chance that it kills humanity -- is considered being part of a "cult" movement.

Your analogy is the same as early Intel engineers completely unaware that those chips would bring on the ramifications of social media. "In the weeds" and yet unable to foresee the trajectory and wider impact. Same with the physics that led to nuclear weapons.

> Wanting to take drastic measures today to prevent an upcoming apocalypse makes as much sense as taking the same drastic measures when [nuclear fission] was invented.

> Your analogy is the same as early Intel engineers completely unaware that those chips would bring on the ramifications of social media

Exactly! As they should be. (for both Intel engineers developing chips, and physicists developing nuclear research)

There were a billion more potential dangers from those technologies that never materialized, and never will.

I'm glad we didn't stop them in their track because a poll of 10 leaders in the field thought they were too dangerous and progress should stop. (note that no one is against regulating dangerous uses of AI, e.g. autonomous weapons, chemical warfare; the problem is regulating AI research and development in the first place)

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