Hacker News Reader

Comment by ben_w | Hacker News Reader

There's plenty of people who think greenhouse gas/global warming campaigns against fossil fuels are "exaggerating", that "earth was warm/the climate changed in the past", that a fee degrees isn't bad, that CO2 is good for plants.

Are you likeminded?

In this case, it's as if the oil and coal companies all said in the 60s and 70s "oh no, this research we did, it's all really bad; we need help to figure out how to transition away from this incredibly economically important input", rather than the observed reality where their entire PR campaign was approximately:

  there is no problem everything is fine and all critics are smelly hippies and/or communists; and/or hate the poor who are raised out of poverty by all the economic growth from the fossil fuel industry.

What if the oil and coal companies were basically all pro nuclear, pro hyrdo, pro wind, pro solar, and believed in peak oil?

View on HN

But that did actually happen.

The oil corporations were publicly claiming to support carbon taxes, while also secretly fighting actual implementations of carbon taxes.

All the communist/hippy stuff was done by people a couple of steps removed from the actual companies with obscure money trails. The official statements were much more sophisticated propaganda that if you weren't paying attention to who they were paying in the background would make them seem reasonable stewards of the climate transition.

Here’s one crucial difference: there’s overwhelming evidence that human emissions have an effect on our climate. The mechanisms are generally well-understood and the research is widely disseminated and easily available to anyone that’s interested.

With the ‘dangers’ touted by these insiders, it’s all “trust me bro”, hyperbole, and very little hard evidence. As such, a skeptical mind would question their motives.

You're simultaneously overestimating what was observable in the 70s climate research, and ignoring all the actual research and evaluation test results for AI today.

I don't expect people to be familiar with more than "trust me bro", but it's all right there for you to find with a search engine of choice.

And, indeed, available for the LLMs themselves to explain to you in interrogative conversation.

Who should I be more scared of? China, which has been doubling down on open transparent research, or the secretive US companies who are in bed with the most unhinged administration we've ever had and has been actively starting wars?

They're not proposing anything concrete, and when they do, what do you think the proposal will be? Will OpenAI and Anthropic open themselves for inspection so we can verify they really have stopped developing these "world ending" technologies? Or are their proposals going to be aimed at everyone running open Chinese models?

Dunno about "should"; personally I am more scared of the US than China here, but I do know how propaganda can be, makes "should" really difficult.

> Will OpenAI and Anthropic open themselves for inspection so we can verify they really have stopped developing these "world ending" technologies?

This is compatible with the language being used, but I suspect they're not going to do that.

Yeah, they won't.

And if a threat to the human race does come from AI, it's going to come from OpenAI/Anthropic. Hypercapitalist, secretive, in bed with the government, plus multiple real documented hackings of open source infrastructure already.

We're a hell of a lot safer with China doing the same research out in the open and making it available to anyone. The choice might well be: one or two superintelligent autonomous AIs at OpenAI/Anthropic - or a lot of smaller ones, unable to be controlled but also coming out of a diverse set of environments.

One of those leads to a stable ecosystem where we can all coexist, the other is genuinely terrifying. But make no mistake, from OpenAI/Anthropic this is all motivated by their stock price - when you're in the silicon valley mindset, it distorts your reality. They've convinced themselves that everyone's safer if they stay on top and in control, conveniently ignoring how that benefits them, and I don't believe them for a minute.

Funny you should try and spin the conversation off into climate change to avoid answering the question. Big AIs contribution to climate change likely has a much more tangible route to killing millions of people and destroying society and there's actual evidence and a tangible mechanism for that. But for some strange reason the business media and all the outlets owned by big AI investors aren't interested in long think pieces about that risk. But that would be a lot more credible if that's what all these social media posts about potential apocalypse were referring to

Yet here we are talking about some vague "trust me bro" instead and you making some vague insinuation of climate change denial.

But that's an aside. Do you think we should treat them as liars or threats?

> Do you think we should treat them as liars or threats?

I answered that with the analogy you called "spin" and "avoiding the question", and completely misunderstood because "vague insinuation of climate change denial" is almost the exact opposite of my point ("what if the oil companies were screaming from the rooftops about the problem" is as far from denial as you can get).

Threats. Like they claim to be.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com