Comment by newcommentsorry | Hacker News Reader

Comment by newcommentsorry | Hacker News Reader

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newcommentsorry

This is a very tech-focused message board, populated by mostly tech-insiders, so perhaps a little outside perspective will help people understand.

Tech people are following a religious belief system whose utopian promise is the all-powerful computer that will end all suffering. I once read an article in reason magazine from over 30 years ago about how an advanced computer in the future will bring everyone who has ever lived back from the deat and let them live in paradise. They were completely serious. Atheists reading this may object to my description of the tech belief system as religious, but I believe it is accuarte. The idea that tech is an imrpovement and will improve people's lives is believed as an act of faith. Tech has its own moral systems based on some form of libertarian progressivism. And in the future, through the inevitable scientific magic of exponential something, a computer will ascend to godhood and judge all mankind for their actions before allowing some into eternal paradise.

To what extent any of this is true is up for debate, but most west coast tech elite are actively working towards this future, and these are the ideas that drive them. It's hard to talk to them about it because this is their woldview, and they imagine everyone to believe what they do.

Heard a tongue-in-cheek comment about "building a god" from someone at one of these AI labs.

The builders believe that the machine you describe will judge them positively, purely because they are building the system according to their judgment and beliefs.

> Tech people are following a religious belief system whose utopian promise is the all-powerful computer that will end all suffering.

Uh, I don't really think that's anywhere close to an accurate characterization of most people here. Everyone, including Dario and any researcher at any frontier lab, knows the situation is quite scary and unprecedented. There are problems that will be solved and diseases that will be cured, but will we be living in an Orwellian universe? Will a rogue drone swarm find you cowing in your basement and murder you? I mean the technology for this is already mostly here, it's a matter of the willpower and budget to roll out something really evil.

The comment's question is about capabilities and why the discussion about capabilities often times is far removed from todays capabilities.

I dunno, I don't think an outside observer would be too hard-pressed to find the fervor with which some talk about the endless possibilities and miraculous works of AI to border on the cusp of religious.

Some people sure, but some people believe the earth is flat. What’s without a doubt is the impact AI has already had, something maybe 2 years ago was dismissed as religious fervor maybe. Statistics and robust measurements plus stable scaling laws make this pretty far from religious I would say.

Idk, I don’t see the same mindset in China. There’s a post floating around here about someone who visited the DeepSeek lab and said they just view it as another technology. Like a commodity. So I tend to think either the big tech ceo’s in America are delusional or malicious, or perhaps 50/50.

The role of the modern American CEO is basically to be a huge grifter, no wonder when I see Amodei or Altman they always remind me Sam Bankman-Fried, who btw has now applied for pardon from Trump.

I mean Amodei was hawking the doubling of human lifespan to some boomer investors, I wonder why he chose that audience. They are just afraid of dying like the rest of us plebs but instead of believing in god or other deity, they have turned the AI into one.

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