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Comment by MattHeard | Hacker News Reader

Hello, thank you for sharing your thoughts on this topic. I'm currently writing a blog post where the thesis is that the root disagreement between "AI doomers" and others is actually primarily a disagreement about materialism, and I've been looking for evidence of this disagreement in the wild. Thanks for sharing your opinion.

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If you look at the backgrounds of the list of people who have signed the "AI Doomer" manifesto (the one urging what I'd call an overly extreme level of caution), such at Geoffrey Hinton, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Elon Musk etc... you will find that they're all rational materialists.

I don't think the correlation is accidental.

So you're on to something, here. And I've felt the exact same way as you, here. I'd love to see your blog post when it's done.

Really? You sound serious. I would recommend rethinking such a claim. There are simpler and more plausible explanations for why people view existential risk differently.

What are those? Because the risk is far higher if you believe that "will" is fundamentally materialist in nature. Those of us who do not (for whatever reason), do not evaluate this risk remotely as highly.

It is difficult to prove an irrational thing with rationality. How do we know that you and I see the same color orange (this is the concept of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia)? Measuring the wavelength entering our eyes is insufficient.

This is going to end up being an infinitely long HN discussion because it's 1) unsolvable without more data 2) infinitely interesting to any intellectual /shrug

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