Loquebantur

That's remarkable nonsense.

"Objective" truth is what you can derive from physical reality by logical arguments. The very opposite of "belief".

Social truth is what your social peer group wants you to believe.

"Effective" truth I've never heard about and your explanation merely describes a simplistic popular scientific method concept. Leading ideally to the objective truth I was talking about.

The internet describes "effective truth" (or "effectual truth," from the Italian la verità effetuale) as a philosophical concept introduced by Niccolò Machiavelli in his book "The Prince". It means judging people, leaders, and situations by their actual actions and real-world results rather than by their stated words, ideals, or moral promises.

The article reads like a smear campaign and the actual target appears to be the opposition to unrestricted AI development.

The claims made there are beyond absurd and based on a remarkable absence of anything resembling reason.

That's echoed by a surprising amount of people here.

This reads more like an orchestrated proxy smear campaign to attack the actual thing they're after: the opposition to unrestricted AI.

This is beyond absurd.

Effective altruism originates from the intention to rationally approach the obvious question, how to do the most good in the world. That's obviously not a bad thing?

The article here goes on a grotesque witch hunt, claiming baselessly things like "polyamory" was widespread among "the movements" adherents.

You here postulate, Anthropic was a "final" manifestation of that movement. How? Why? Do they practice polyamory there?

The article here correctly points out another thing though: society/academia rewarding a fundamentally wrong thing.

This isn't just "misaligned rewards", it's academia pretending to reward one thing when really it does something else entirely.

As the author observes, objective truth is no longer socially rewarded. Pretense is all that matters and accepted as "social truth".

Have you thought about what the absence of regulation does?

When corporations can do as they please, what gets thrown under the bus first?

What alternatives to "regulation" do you have? Hope and prayers?

Why are they so rare then?

You evade the crucial point in any case: the lack in ethics and empathy is far too prevalent in humans already, but has certainly never prevented them from doing harm.

Sandboxes aren't the real problem to begin with?

The idea proponents have is, to use "superhuman intelligence" AI as a tool, bestowing superhuman abilities on those wielding it. Suppose that's doable, then the question isn't the sandbox, it's who controls it and with what intent.

The idea, US exceptionalism somehow enabled the US government, its oligarchy corporations and maybe its citizens, to wield those superhuman powers responsibly is entirely counterfactual.

Pax Americana post-singularity looks how exactly?

People are stuck in a weird loop of complacency and learned helplessness, based on the idea, their "democracy" would see to it all problems get solved satisfactorily without them engaging at all.

That's never been true really, only the scale of problems wasn't that huge. Now, where the problems get the upper hand, people are confused how those stay and compound.

The idea of "boycott" is utterly defunct. Pretending, AI would never reach nor surpass humans anyway is patently absurd in contradicting the billions poured into it to achieve exactly that and the first already replaced by AI being those professions long thought to be the intellectual pinnacle of humanity.

People somehow forget how the Turing test was considered the definitive way of showing something to be "human-level consciousness".

Now programmers and mathematicians are being superseded by AI, both professions long deemed the pinnacle of human intelligence. Somehow, now plumbers occupy that spot.

How is "people not knowing what consciousness is" relevant here in the first place? AI already can do practically everything the human brain can, and often better or at least faster. The "tipping point" arguably isn't only close, but we're practically on top of it.

"A human pretends to understand it" signifies what exactly?

What you really mean is, the core team there doesn't want to lose control.

Which isn't really predicated on contributions not being "vibe coded" or whatever.

When quality is the problem, you need to be able to make your standards explicit, or you're just gatekeeping irrationally.

The most realistic one is, people using AI to turbo-charge their greed.

Western civilization is already on the verge of collapse, people's general ignorance or indifference on the matter notwithstanding.

When you use AI to increase profit margins, by replacing humans with it for instance, you accelerate a system that's headed for the wall already. Our control systems and resilience are already overtaxed, that acceleration would ensure them breaking completely.

AI can be a "car for the brain".

Some people dream of "Superintelligence", smarter than human AI that acts like a slave, instead of just killing the pesky idiots and calling it a day.

Obviously, there is a spectrum of possibilities between "Pen and paper", "Computer", "Coding agent", ... and "God-level AI controlling whatever can be controlled simultaneously". As well as between "Lawnmower robot" and "All-purpose Terminator" and so on.

Filling in those dots and deciding where to stop before it gets stupid, that can't be so hard?

I said why they don't need to be as well funded. Why wouldn't they be as smart and organized?

What an absurd question. That they haven't already doesn't preclude them from doing so before the frontier labs, those haven't either yet.

Maybe start with yourself: you don't connect the dots on your own, as do many others. That leads to many not seeing the writing on the wall. Crashing full speed and head-on into said wall despite the writing telling you not to is what leads to extinction. Suddenly.

Arguing like "we haven't been extincted yet, so that cannot happen", that's "human being stupid".

You're making a straw man there.

Nobody (weirdly) proposes to forget about nuclear weapons, doesn't mean everybody should have one.

When you dream about flying a dragon to work, reality poses e.g. parking issues and insurance mismatch as obstructions. Maybe settle for a bike instead?

You consider AI in isolation but never consider how humans might be incentivized to "help them" doing these things.

An AI capable of recursive self-improvement isn't allowed by the EU AI act, for example. But perhaps more seriously, You have it backwards: people without access to such expensive equipment are more incentivized to go the self-improving route. Your ideas about "millions" being necessary might be far off?

You entirely discount human stupidity and lack of imagination. Humans are already being replaced with AI, not because AI was strictly better, just because it's cheaper.

That is certainly part of the motivation for the big US AI brands to engage in calling their inept developer mistakes "AI breaking loose".

But that doesn't take away from the real issues and dangers AI poses?

The framing here is weird, starting with "Effective Altruism" re-branded as being about nutjobs against AI in the article.

How are AI safety concerns solely about stupid sandboxing issues?

What makes you think, the scenarios in question here would be "silly"?

Is it that "chatbots" can't come out of the screen to immediately harm you physically?

Let's say they simply manage to take down the internet. How many would die?

The underlying cause is exactly those people who make the rules not being responsible for the negative effects they cause?

"CEOs" are perhaps only the lowest rung of those. That doesn't mean the idea of "nobody is responsible" was anything other but learned helplessness.

Corporations have to be held accountable for their actions. Pretending, that was impossible is a weird kind of defeatism that only serves a very small elite.

"Cannot" as in presently cannot. That includes the case of things that have no responsible use.

You live in a curated world and rarely or never encounter such things. Precisely because your environment is curated that way.

Look at how you can't buy WMDs. They have no responsible use for you.

You can simulate things.

Given enough smarts, you can simulate anything. Quantum AI is an active goal.

You compare to laughably irrelevant things why?

"Ambitious frauds" haven't "explored all the angles".

You imply "LLMs" to be and stay less intelligent than humans, in particular yourself. You're mistaken.

That's what you believe, but you might be wrong.

That's a misconception and manipulative framing on your part.

While "some chatbot" isn't the problem, general intelligence superior to humans absolutely is.

AI allows anybody to enact essentially anything. And your "level a major city" is just a small task really. The problem there is your lack of imagination, not the actual impossibility of that task.

What poses the risk is the combination of abilities past a certain point enabling you to do basically anything.

While being unable to judge whether you should in the first place.

Yes, a "select" (rather, self-selected) elite "controlling" AI according to their wishes, what could go wrong?

Clearly not a "better" scenario. The real problem though seems people feigning helplessness? You can't leave society "to its own". You are part of it and go where it goes. So better start steering.

When access to AI gives you abilities you cannot use responsibly, you shouldn't have access to that. Just like you shouldn't be allowed to drive a car or fly a plane or command a rocket without proper guardrails, safeguards, prerequisites, etc.

"General" intelligence isn't present in humans, why does it need to be in AI?

You're right, people weirdly lack imagination on what "higher intelligence" (minus ethics) actually affords you, let's have a look:

What do average people currently want? They're taught, the most important thing was being rich. So they will ask their AI to make them rich. Most real life ways to get there are "sketchy" to say the least, usually downright unethical and anti-social, but US society turns a blind eye when the "Wolf of Wall Street" comes out on top and the schemes don't easily fit into average people's abilities of moral judgement.

-> Large parts of US society suddenly engaging in all kinds of "semi-legal/hyper-illegal" fraud schemes, at the expense of already saturated environmental and societal resilience. Guaranteed collapse.

Or, let's get rid of those pesky neighbors/wrong-colored people/annoying opinions? Again, "legal" is a pretty squishy concept and only really applies when you don't have the legal expertise to get around it. Now you can.

Or, look at the basics: what is "real"? You only "know" because you trust certain people and institutions. Generative AI can help with that /s.

It's not only about "building weapons of mass destruction". It's about doing the same shit as usual, but a thousand times faster/amplified. Look up poly-/metacrisis for starters. Going faster with AI when there's a wall in front of you isn't the best idea.

Be cautious what you wish for. Tools don't tell you what to do with them.

Open source LLMs "democratize" access to the "intelligence booster" that is AI. But while that has several benefits, it also has several downsides.

Humanity has the serious problem of being underdeveloped in the "spiritual" department. Ethics is often considered some sort of lifestyle choice, but it's actually the difference between order and chaos in a society.

Everybody being able to do anything means somebody will be able to do something you don't like. At an arbitrary scale.

Given that "sovereign" these days implicitly means independence from USA and China, and Canada being spiritually in the same boat as the EU, it's pretty spot on?

The costs of "keeping up" aren't really growing, on the contrary.