The easiest way to grow AI resistance is to get Dario Amodei and Sam Altman on TV and let them talk.
Tell me more? I'm guessing you might say: neither connects with everyday people, they have misaligned incentives*, they (like most corporate leaders) don't speak directly, they have more power than almost any elected leader in the world, ... Did I miss anything?
My take: when it comes to character and goals and therefore predicting what they will do: please don't lump Amodei with Altman. In brief: Altman is polished, effective, and therefore rather unsettling. In short, Altman feels amoral. It feels like people follow him rather than his ideas. Amodei is different. He inspires by his character and ideals. Amodei is a well-meaning geek, and I sometimes marvel (in a good way) how he leads a top AI lab. His media chops are middling and awkward, but frankly, I'm ok with it. I get the sense he is communicating (more-or-less) as himself.
Let me know if anyone here has evidence to suggest any claim I'm making is off-base. I'm no oracle.
I could easily pile on more criticisms of both. Here's a few: to my eye, Dario doesn't go far enough with his concerns about AI futures, but I can't tell how much of this is his PR stance as head of A\ versus his core beliefs. Altman is a harder nut to crack: my first approximation of him is "brilliant, capable, and manipulative". As much as I worry about OpenAI and dislike Altman's power-grab, I probably grant that he's, like most people, fundamentally trying to do the right thing. I don't think he's quite as deranged as say Thiel. But I could be wrong. If I had that kind of money, intellect, and network, maybe I would also be using it aggressively and in ways that could come across as cunning. Maybe Altman and Thiel have good intentions and decent plans -- but the fact remains the concentration of power is corrupting, and they seem to have limited guardrails given their immense influence.
* Here's my claim, and I invite serious debate on it: Dario, more than any corporate leader, takes alignment seriously. He actually funds work on it. He knows how it works. He cares. He actually does some of the work, or at least used to. How many CEOs of the companies they run actually have the skills to DO the rank-and-file work? Even the most pessimistic people probably probably can grant this.
A surprisingly high number of people are already being tricked into supporting things that clearly threaten their ability to survive in this economy, and even their ability to survive period. I wouldn't trust the general public to be smart enough not to line up to shoot themselves in the foot/face. They'll get increasingly angry as they get increasingly screwed over, but it remains to be seen how long that will take or who they'll blame for it.
My takes on some of the comment above:
> A surprisingly high number of people are already being tricked into supporting things that clearly threaten their ability to survive in this economy, and even their ability to survive period.
I agree. Yes, I know that I'm far from a neutral judge of other people's core values, but I can say with high confidence that I've lived and worked among more US cultures than the typical tech demographics, by far. Born in Texas, worked in Colorado, San Diego, San Francisco, Berkeley, DC (the District itself), Northern Virginia. My industries range the for-profit, not-for-profit, tech-heavy. Other variations include idealist-heavy, good-execution, poor-execution, heavy on the dogma versus heavy on the pragmatism, pro-military, pro-patriotism, and the opposite.
I can say personally in an important sense, I fit nowhere. When I lived in Berkeley, I didn't fit the mold. When at SF startups, the culture felt shallow. I'm sort of "post culture" in a way. In DC, people seem rather blinkered. I see it, but I rarely feel like I'm truly part of any one culture. The only culture that I feel fits me is the "question everything -- but not like a conspiracy nut -- and then try to build something that matters". [1]
So, by objective standards -- counting places I've lived, different industries I've worked in, friends from different backgrounds, socioeconomic conditions, I think I'm easily in something like a weird 0.1% that actually deeply has experienced Trumpland and many variations of classic liberalism. If I didn't get out of my hometown, there is at least 20% chance I would now support Trump, if only due to tribalism and trusting of one's neighbors. So I know many Trump supporters.
All in all, I can't think of more than a handful that support him for reasons that I find even to serve their own long-term self-interest. There are special cases in a sense, like "techno-libertarians" or single-issue "pro-Israeli" voters or even smart people who feel like"f--k the democrats" who use these rationales to justify voting for Trump.
Saying I'm in the top 0.1% may sound presumptuous, I get it. But I don't like how some people water down their statements in the hope of sounding modest. See [2]. This is a kind of "false modesty" imo. I don't take any credit for my life circumstances. I was born into this position, and here I am. So I'm acting as a mirror to share this back. I've spent easily dozens of hours in one-on-one conversations on these topics, so I'm not coming at this with any particular dogma. This is my hundreds or thousands of hours of experience distilled. I really feel for Trump supporters on one level, even as their close mindedness and enable-ism wreck the economic and core principles of the US.
I welcome charitable and constructive disagreement on anything I've said. But more importantly, I ask for curious conversation.
[1]: Actually, there are some cultures I do fit into. Bayesian thinking being a key one. I admit I'm more than intellectually opposed to frequentist statistics -- it actively pisses me off in some ways. I'm pro-causality and pro-modeling. If people don't state their models, I don't take their predictions seriously. These are my strongest meta-opinions I think. People like Max Tegmark, Stuart Russell, Nate Soares, Yudkowsky -- these folks seem to think in ways that seem enlightened to me. The best "mainstream" thinkers I've seen probably are ... hmmm ... Ezra Klein, though he is more political than intellectual in my opinion.
[2]: "Against Modest Epistemology" by Eliezer Yudkowsky. November 14, 2017. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/svoD5KLKHyAKEdwPo/against-mo...
Yep, Dario is straddling this sort of impossible line: he's the least-scary harbinger who is try to be one of the more transparent people to sound the alarm. But the funny thing about saying "don't shoot the messenger" is that it usually gets uttered well after the messenger has taken a bullet.
> You're overthinking the parent comment, I think.
Luckily, the phrase overthinking is on the way out. We really don't want any more Idiocracy Part II. In this day, we need all the thinking we can get. We often need (1) better thinking and (2) the ability to redirect our thinking towards other directions.
In my experience, 2026 is the year where almost all stigma about "talking AI" is out the window. I am nearly at the point where I say whatever I think needs to be said, even if I'm not sure if people will think I be crazy. So if Typical Q. Person asks me, I tell them whatever I think will fit into their brain at the time -- how AI works, why Dario is awkward, why superintelligence is no bueno, etc.
Dario is not just a messenger, though. In his case it would be more like, "Don't shoot one of the generals in the invading army." To which it would be reasonable to ask, "Why not?" Even if he's the general saying that he wants minimal civilian casualties.
* If you are trying to judge Dario, we're not having the same conversation. How many people on earth can grasp even ~1% of the situation he's in? How many have the intellectual tools and ability to reason through it? Maybe 0.1%, tops.
https://x.com/allTheYud/status/2042716955145310421
Yudkowsky's main focus is on AI extinction risk, and that is the standard by which he is evaluating these people (and companies).