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Comment by Davidzheng | Hacker News Reader

Not just engineers - I see people attributing it to strong priors that nothing happens but in my opinion it's more some form of psychological defense mechanism against understanding there will be an intelligence vastly superior to humans which is a deeply uncomfortable thought (to many).

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“Nothing ever happens” is like “you can’t beat the market.” It’s basically tautologically the strongest predictive model that we can have. A corollary is that something may happen, but it won’t be what you think.

Interesting fact. Bryan Caplan is a economist who became famous for making bets on the future. He would take the "nothing ever happens" side of the bet, and he would almost always win. In 2023 he took the "nothing ever happens" side of an AI bet. Just 6 months later, he wrote:

"When the answers change, I change my mind [...] Base rates have clearly failed me. I’m not conceding the bet, because I still think there’s a 10-15% chance I win via luck... make no mistake, this software truly is the exception that proves the rule."

https://www.betonit.ai/p/gpt-retakes-my-midterm-and-gets-an

At this point, straightforward trend extrapolation suggests that AI continues to get better and better. Arguably, continued rapid AI progress is the "nothing ever happens" bet at this point. If AI progress stops, or slows dramatically, something will have happened.

Straightforward trend extrapolation suggests that AI will consume more resources that galaxy even has. Meanwhile, believing the claims of the AI companies, 40% of people will be forever unemployable permanent underclass with no future for themselves nor for their children. And all the gains being centered on the very top 0.01%.

This is just objectively false - in fact your answer basically contradicts itself because the market reacts to indicators, if "nothing ever happens" was the best strategy, then the market (which is also best) must agree with it.

> psychological defense mechanism against understanding there will be an intelligence vastly superior to humans which is a deeply uncomfortable thought

I once found this a deeply uncomfortable thought. It's been repeated so vacuously and frequently that I'm inured to it. Now, I just regard it as the nonsense that it is. To date, AI labs have not created anything like an intelligence that is on track to be "vastly superior to humans". They have instead created financial black holes that do have their uses, but which arbitrarily fail on the simplest tasks for no apparent reason, and only seem to get meaningfully better on the tasks they are specifically optimized for.

It's appalling to me that in 2026, people hear "AGI" and "ASI" and think of SkyNet rather than investment fraud.

Why should I trust these randos instead of Claude? I know Claude. I would hope Claude is smarter than whoever wants to make rules about my use of Claude. Replace Claude with Kimi, etc. if needed.

I don’t find a petition from people I don’t know who don’t care about me more compelling than my own direct experience with these models.

I suggest you give Claude a link to the petition and ask Claude what it thinks.

(I did so previously and pasted the response here, but it got auto-flagged for AI content.)

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