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Comment by NoahZuniga | Hacker News Reader

> I do not doubt that these people are sincere in some private, psychological sense ... . As a media scholar, what interests me is not whether Hubinger believes his own number. What interests me is what this genre of utterance does in the world ... . My complaint is not that these statements are alarming. It is that they are apocalyptic in form, hypocritical in structure, and strategically productive in effect — and that they crowd out almost everything else we could be discussing

Strange to say that you think the people that are worrying about doom in public are being sincere, make no comment on whether you think the worry is valid, and yet still complain that its hype.

Like if its true it can't be hype

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As Von Neumann said about Oppenheimer's performative angst over the atomic bomb:

"Some people profess guilt to claim credit for the sin."

This is a great quote. I liked it so much that I had to look up where it is from.

"Adventures of a Mathematician", by Stanislaw M. Ulam.

> The Polish-born mathematician recalls his formative and early professional years in his pre-war homeland and his work and colleagues at Princeton, Harvard, Wisconsin, and Los Alamos.

https://archive.org/details/adventuresofmath0000ulam_v9h3/pa...

Why not? Why can’t the believe their statements and also use them to generate hype?

If they sincerely believed them they shouldn’t be creating the doom machine to begin with anyway. If they believe it and keep going, are they even worth listening to on this topic? Beyond of course taking it at face value “I’m creating this doomsday machine and I will kill you with it inadvertently because it’s earning me a fuck ton of money and power”

> Like if its true it can't be hype

https://www.npr.org/2016/07/26/487522807/why-the-public-perc...

Could AI kill us all. YES!!! Are the people who are building "AI" right now on that path? I would be hard pressed to say even "maybe".

Ultimately continuing to scale the way they have is getting increasingly expensive. Thats the quiet part that none of them are saying out loud...

AI could kill us all but we cant afford to get there, were maxed out and it doesn't look like even with 10x as much money we will is NOT good for sales.

Could a break through happen for recursive self improvement, or continuous learning or continuous training - sure. But that isnt as likely and right now NO ON can afford to run experiments because there isnt the capacity out there even if you have capital.

Like if its true it can't be hype

I was kind of leaning toward thinking all the talk of doom was a bunch of self-serving regulatory-capture hype until this morning when the New York Times ran a long story about the Chinese military is also saying that AI is a threat.

If two sides so far apart from one another in so many ways see the same thing, there must be something to it.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/14/world/asia/china-ai-secur...

I came away with a different read of this article. The article says the head of China’s Ministry of State Security sees AI as a threat to the CCP, specifically calling out deepfakes of party officials, cyberattacks on infrastructure, etc. He’s not calling it an existential risk to humanity.

The article then states this official accused U.S. companies of “hyping the dangers of the technology.”

So I don’t see how this article shows the U.S. and China seeing the same thing.

https://archive.ph/BzBjZ

Read the article. The things the Chinese officials are worried about are:

* Fake videos / disinformation

* Cyberattacks on critical infrastructure

* Data leaks

* Advances in military sensing / targeting technology

These concerns have little in common with the Yudkowskian / apocalyptic doom marketing the US hyperscalers are pushing now. The Times even says this explicitly in the second paragraph of the article:

> "The unusually blunt assessment by Chen Yixin, the head of China’s Ministry of State Security, is IN CONTRAST TO the warnings dominating the A.I. debate in the United States, which have focused on the possibility that A.I. could slip out of human control or pose a threat to humanity itself"

The thing is all the above are threats.

The internet being filled with more trash than ever is a threat to our sanity.

The anti-social posts mass generated by AI is a threat to our societies.

Bullshit news stories is a threat to our political processes and democracy.

Smart cameras every are a threat to our privacy and freedom.

AI enabled scams are a threat to our wallets.

AI hacking is a threat to anything connected along with infrastructure.

Military applications of AI are a threat to everyone.

Ever increasing intelligence in agentic AI will eventually be a threat to our entire species.

All are true at the same time.

Real threats that are happening to regular people already, vs marketing "threats" that the technology is too powerful / valuable.

The fact that you are chiming in to say you don't understand the difference between these 2 distinct categories of threats is fine, we can work on that. But the person who posted the article originally not only acknowledges the distinction, they falsely presented the article as evidence of non-western support for the latter category, even though both the Chinese official and the western reporter directly contradict that claim immediately at the beginning of the article.

I think it's interesting that the top of your list is "internet (social media) being filled with trash".

Read the article.

I did, thanks. I don't need you to tell me to do that.

The common thread is that they both see AI as a threat. It's a different threat to each side, but still a threat.

Just because they see different threats from AI doesn't mean that AI isn't a threat.

If one person wants to paint the house red and another person wants to paint the house blue doesn't mean the house doesn't need to be painted.

"I was kind of leaning toward thinking all the talk of doom was a bunch of self-serving regulatory-capture hype"

"Just because they see different threats from AI doesn't mean that AI isn't a threat"

Why would you make it so blatantly obvious you're acting in bad faith? Do you think the people who post here are stupid?

I really have no idea what you're talking about.

With that level of snap hostility toward strangers online, maybe talk to your doctor about upping your meds.

You made a literally fake post and all replies to it are pointing that out. You haven't made a substantive reply to either.

Thinking AI is an existential threat to humanity because it will take over the world and thinking AI is a non-existential threat because it makes disinformation and hacking easier are not even remotely the same thing.

It's about as much of a common thread as comparing Shohei Ohtani to a loan-shark's enforcer because they both swing bats at things.

Lol

I love the metaphor, but it's a bit limited because the fake and real "threat" categories aren't just unrelated, they are opposites. The fake ones are all the AI boosters talk about, the real ones they would never talk about. The fake ones pump their stock price, whereas the real ones undermine it.

Also, if it is regulatory-capture hype, why would so many people outside the industry be contributing to the hype (including many people who've been warning of the danger before AI labs had any revenue at all)?

What would be their motivation?

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