Hacker News Reader

I tend to believe what people actually do over what that say. If you earnestly believe over 10 percent chance, or say minus 1 billion human lives expected value, well I struggle to understand how they'd rationalize their current course of action of business as usual. Terminator 2's depiction of Sarah Connor comes to mind for what I'd expect, a logical consequence if you seriously believe and internalize the consequences.

View on HN

This. If you truly believe the thing you are building is going to kill you and your family, your decision is not "let's keep going" unless you are a complete nihilist. The fact that people buy the whole "well we have to because if we don't someone else will" argument shows just how pervasive and complete irrationality has become. People eat up content and do not even apply a microsecond's wort of critical thought to what they're being told. Internet media has created a perfect storm of complete gullibility. Funnily enough, "normal" people are currently more rational than most so-called "technologists" who are completely giving themselves over to hysteria while they simultaneously offload all of their critical thinking to a stateless word completion engine running on servers somewhere in Texas.

This fixation on "entire humanity" and "truly believe".

How about this, they think it's possible LLM could totally facilitate a mass murder of never seen before scale, but they continue to work on it because they're rich and sheltered enough they are not that worried that their family personally will be killed. The rest of humanity doesn't matter compared to making more money.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com