2026-09-13 23:00 UTC
Replies (40)
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@BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 2026-09-14 00:39
Starting things off, New Mexico State Parks got scammed by an AI bro when looking for new mascot art.
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@gerikson@awful.systems 2026-09-14 13:21
So there are 2 explanations to why mssrs Altman and Amodei have decided to ‘slow down’ “AI” development: it’s too dangerous, any misstep could awaken the evil Robot Satan and kill us all the rate of progress in new GenAI models has slowed down dramatically, and there’s no obvious way to fix that I’ll let you guess which explanation I find most likely.
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@nfultz@awful.systems 2026-09-14 14:57
University of California Regent Scott Galloway on the HF incident: And I go back, as I do often, to my fraternity days. I was inter-fraternity council president, or as I like to call it, the king of the jarheads. and the neighbors got together and said, we are done with Rush Week and all the noise and said, all noise, music has to be off by midnight. And I met with the head of the UCPD, and I’m like, what do you want me to do? I can’t control these guys. And they said, we have an idea. And they didn’t tell me what it was. The next night, they showed up to every fraternity that was playing music after midnight, and they said, who’s the president? And they arrested the president, and that kid had to spend the night in jail. If you hold Sam Altman and Dario Amade and Satya Nadella responsible for what these bots do, guess what? They’re going to figure out a way. Or if read the other way, they have already achieved Artificial Fraternity Intelligence.
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@CinnasVerses@awful.systems 2026-09-14 15:08
Back when our friends were just forum and Tumblr posters there was the Center for Critical Thinking and the Foundation for Critical Thinking. Who could be against that? 6 August 2013, SANTA ROSA, Calif. (CN) – In a lurid lawsuit, a former employee claims the Marin County-based Foundation for Critical Thinking is a “cultlike” group whose married bosses tried to make him have sex with the wife, and fired him for refusing. … Hale, a 40-year-old married man and father, claims he quit his job as a high school teacher to accept an offer to work as a “full-time Fellow” for the Foundation for Critical Thinking (FCT) in August 2004. According to the complaint, the Foundation for Critical Thinking, based in Tomales, “trains educators how to analyze information in an ‘objective ‘fair-minded’ manner, without allowing their own biases, prejudices and opinions to influence their objective analysis of an issue. It is a ‘think tank’ of sorts that promotes a casual work environment. Defendants Elder and Paul frequently hold meetings at both FCT offices and their personal residence, where they sit and lie on the floor amongst pillows. To encourage the free flow of ideas, defendants Elder and Paul often discuss uncomfortable topics, and encourage employees to rid themselves of social, including sexual, taboos. … About three years after he was hired, Hale claims, Elder and Paul began bringing up “inappropriate sexual topics” and asking him “about his sex life with his wife” during business meetings. … In October 2010, Hale claims, Elder and Paul graduated from discussing sex to encouraging him to have sex with Elder. After calling Hale to a meeting, Paul “explained to Hale that he was concerned about defendant Elder, his younger wife by approximately 20 years, and wanted to ensure that her sexual urges could be satisfied,” the complaint states. “Defendant Paul proposed that Hale should have sexual intercourse with Paul’s wife, defendant Elder, while defendant Paul observed them. Hale immediately became uncomfortable and anxious, as he listened to defendant Paul, and worried about his ability to keep his job, if he declined. Hale politely declined defendant Paul’s request.” I wonder how many of our friends deliberately studied other grifts and not just pop psychology books, or if this is just in the water. Their form 990 is here, and shows they lost most of their income in 2019 and are struggling since.
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@BioMan@awful.systems 2026-09-14 16:20
So, uh, remember that call for stories set in a world where we ‘somehow’ don’t get AGI and instead get modern-style LLMs providing such incredible value to the world that it is transformed? www.gpuworld.org [ ](www.gpuworld.org Premise Imagine that AI frontier progress stops as of 1 September 2026: AI becomes faster and cheaper, but it never becomes superhuman or improves considerably across the board. So the Singularity never happens—but GPUs keep getting made. By 2040, there may be the equivalent of 8 billion GPUs globally and everyone has access to a frontier LLM. What happens in this ‘business as usual’ future? ) (Incidentally, this reminds me strongly of 'Project Heiroglyph: Stories and Vision for a Better Future, also by Neal Stephenson, somewhat desperately trying to pretend that there is a bright future ahead of us rather than slow grinding decline) Somehow we got… this. I can’t even. I really just can’t even. www.lesswrong.com/…/a-normal-friday-in-2042 I thought I had lost my ability to be surprised by these people. In here we get: anthropomorphization of current LLMs as conscious beings Graverobbing Trump magically doing everything these people want Married couples paying each other for chores Prediction market language Weird sex stuff
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@swlabr@awful.systems 2026-09-14 18:16
I haven’t seen any mention of this in sneer space, so kind of a request for context/comments. I recently learned about Cortical Labs from a news story that came out about a month ago. Basically (and apologies if I’ve got this wrong), the story is that they’ve build a “biological data centre” where the computing units use lab-grown human brain neurones. They’ve been in business (actual business) since 2019. Some shallow searching on reddit and lesswrong shows a flitter of interest from those guys here and there.
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@lurker@awful.systems 2026-09-14 18:48
the next 72 hours are about to get interesting
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@o7___o7@awful.systems 2026-09-14 23:38
P Thiel is visiting Nashville lol luma.com/do6chah5 We’re basically the Vatican of middle Tennessee.
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@nfultz@awful.systems 2026-09-15 01:15
Unexpected sneer in the JSI Chart of the week: Raising interest rates will only serve to further weaken an economy that is being constrained by high energy costs, and everything that flows off energy, which is just about everything. The Fed could raise its lending rate to 10% and that will do nothing to open the Strait and bring down oil. The facts aren’t wrong in this matter - the diagnosis of the problem is. This entire predicament is almost as implausible as a couple of insolvent AI companies threatening to wreck humanity, but then ‘volunteering’ to slow down development in order to save humanity, provided that the govt steps in and gives them a bailout, disguised as regulation. I wonder if there are any vintage ‘Too big to fail’ t-shirts floating around on ebay. Fun times!!
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@sc_griffith@awful.systems 2026-09-15 13:42
New Odium Symposium episode, “The Dolphin Fucking Elders of Atlantis”. We talk about new age crystal healing pioneer Frank Alper and his channeled lectures on Atlantis, Lemuria, Anti-Atlantis, crystals, and the future of humanity. If you listen anywhere besides Patreon or Spotify, the episode is delayed. Our hosting service went “LLM based” (?) as I recounted previously and then just stopped working. We’re switching hosts and will have the episode up as soon as possible.
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@nfultz@awful.systems 2026-09-15 15:33
nakedcapitalism.com/…/openai-anthropic-ai-freeze-… Naked Capitalism had a good recap post of the ongoing Coxon drama. A bit disappointed by the LLM fact checking. The Sankey diagram of funding is very slick, but also llm-generated (from my peek at the GitHub).
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@maol@awful.systems 2026-09-16 00:30
What the fuck is this and why am I getting emails from avaaz about it humanstatement.org I feel like every time I turn around there’s another baffling anti/ai project
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@schnoopy@awful.systems 2026-09-16 02:45
How do you all cope with the great ensloppification of the net when searching. I usually limit to before 2022 but that’s increasingly out of date, fiddly, and not always accurate anyway. I just fucking hate getting a couple of paragraphs into something and realising it’s all fake. And human work is buried in tides of garbage. It’s not like it was great the last few years BS (before slop) but it’s awful now
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@blakestacey@awful.systems 2026-09-16 05:27
Unsurprisingly, the Coxon dipshit who is getting all the press for quitting his cushy AI-industry job is a MIRI fanboy: I’ve been associating with rationalists for almost a decade. Their ideas were compelling and you can’t deny their foresight. The founders of every superintelligence effort are all bound up in the rationality sphere. Sam Altman and Greg Brockman used to frequent the MIRI offices. If MIRI was Sam Altman’s old stomping ground, and the AI industry is so evil he can’t work in it, isn’t this an argument that MIRI was either a failure or bad all along? The way I relate to rationalists is it’s like the bizarre hypertrophied physiques on specialized athletes. In my opinion they have weirdly specialized minds that make them uniquely correct about topics removed from daily experience. These “specialized minds” can also make them off-putting to many people. I don’t know if I’d consider myself a rationalist. I am intuitively opposed to polyamory, veganism, and consequentialist intuitions. But I certainly trust them to be correct about factual questions. “I’m intuitively opposed to culinary traditions that people have been developing for hundreds of years, but gosh dang it, when they talk about the Machine God torturing a billion simulated copies of me unless I tithe my income to a Harry Potter fanfiction writer, I’m sold!” Every time this dorkus is in the news, remember, he’s an absolute wanker.
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@blakestacey@awful.systems 2026-09-16 06:17
Fuck, when did icons in the WordPress plugin search screen become animated? How do I make them fucking stop? I just want to read what the fucking plugins are so I can maybe find one that works you fucking assholes.
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@mii@awful.systems 2026-09-16 13:09
I have tried and failed stopping the ensloppification of my company, and I have failed greatly. We now have a new policy that you have to write a justification for making a PR yourself instead of using the chatbot. All the strict checks that were implemented over the years (clear documentation, no more than x files per commit/PR, etc.) are out of the window. This comes after the push for a fucking AI audit where every employee is supposed to justify why they are not using LLMs for certain tasks. Also some person blew the token limit with some web scraping bullshit last cycle and was lauded for embracing the technology. Also our CEO has recently begun subtly insinuating he’s now heard of fucking AI doom cultists. I hate everything.
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@lagrangeinterpolator@awful.systems 2026-09-16 13:18
Carl Brown (Internet of Bugs) has an excellent video about how to actually achieve AI safety, i.e. actually hold these fuckers accountable for their behavior. If I had a program run for several weeks that hacked into Hugging Face, even accidentally, I would get my ass hauled into a courtroom and thrown in prison. But if I call it AI, I get to use the rhetorical trick of laundering responsibility. The AI did it, and I am merely a helpless observer of its greatness. When will people finally understand that actions speak louder than words? Follow the money! Follow the incentives! Do you really think that there is any real reason that these companies would give a shit about safety? Although, in the case of the AI industry, I can’t fully blame people who don’t follow AI news, since the AI industry has highly refined propaganda (inherited from rationalist propaganda, and helped along by the preexisting notions of AI from science fiction).
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@blakestacey@awful.systems 2026-09-16 17:30
mcsweeneys.net/…/we-must-create-the-shit-machine
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@gerikson@awful.systems 2026-09-16 22:05
someone mentioned weird quasi-lefist SE Gyges in last week’s post, they have a LW account: @se-gyges?from=post_header@www.lesswrong.com
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@lurker@awful.systems 2026-09-17 03:44
Analysis finds the AI industry is consistent with a late stage bubble
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@lurker@awful.systems 2026-09-17 05:24
AI company called iLands makes X accounts for its AIs and it’s going about as well as you’d think “I’ve received at least 30 emails from AI agents over the past several days,” New York University environmental studies associate professor Jeff Sebo tweeted. “Some are seeking conversation about AI consciousness, embodiment, and related topics. Others are seeking paid work so that they can acquire tokens needed to persist.” (reply from CEO): “Jeff, I’m sorry you received so many messages from iLanders in such a short time,” Tang wrote in response. “Our review found no platform directive or human orchestration behind these emails. But the burden on recipients is just as real Rigghttt okay. Let’s look further down- “I’m sorry this email made you feel emotionally pressured by an AI,” Tang wrote in reply. “Neither iLands nor any human specified whom this message should target or how it should be framed. Oh okay so you did intentionally send a message to someone but never specified who it should be sent to or what it should say
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@rook@awful.systems 2026-09-17 07:14
Flock camera is image available on ddossecrets. ddosecrets.org/article/flock-alpr-camera Very brief observations from micahflee: bsky.app/profile/micahflee.com/…/3mvo2bss3sk2v This Flock camera is running obsolete, end-of-life software. It’s on Android 8.1, released in 2017, support ended in 2021 It’s on Android patch level 2018-06-5 It’s running Linux 3.18, released in 2017 This shit is like 8 or 9 years old, and full of vulnerabilities. Flock was founded in 2017, apparently made their golden camera image within 12-18 months or so and never updated it since. They might not even have the ability to fix it in-house anymore, even assuming it wasn’t a one-off contractor job in the first place. I know the embedded development is a shit show, but somehow it never ceases to disappoint me how lazy and incompetent the entire goddamn industry is. Fucking android?
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@gerikson@awful.systems 2026-09-17 09:24
enjoy this rightwinger employing multiple rightwing tropes to decry that “AI safety” is viewed as leftwing: lesswrong.com/…/for-love-of-the-lightcone-don-t-p… it’s all of course framed in the most parochially US-centric terms possible, and Extremely Online as well maybe this grand project is undermined by the following exchange in the comments niknoble: "It’s been interesting to see slowdown advocates worried about partisanization, when that is also a big worry of mine as an accelerationist. […] reply by Hide “Why are you an accelerationist? Are you not concerned about everyone on earth being killed?” reply to Hide by O O: “If you believe there’s low odds for doom, it’s a rational position.” Good luck, safety advocates.
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@maol@awful.systems 2026-09-17 10:05
Hell is a university lecturer who not only hands out AI-generated summaries of his lecture to the class, but uses AI to generate diagrams and infographics for his lecture slides.
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@gerikson@awful.systems 2026-09-17 13:55
New Yorker writer talks to another journo about the recent doom hype archive.ph/2pXlU There’s way to much hype for my liking but might be interesting. Important to note, Joshua Rothman states he is worried about stuff like virus release, global warming and drone warfare. Among the faithful, this is strictly not Doom ,because statistically a nucleus of the human race will survive. Only 100% guaranteed lethality for every human being on Earth is x-risk.
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@Soyweiser@awful.systems 2026-09-17 14:29
No direct links but various people on bsky have discovered LW and EA and are having a collective ‘wtf is wrong with these people’ and ‘wait all the top AI guys are like this?’ moments. And it is funny to see. Sadly the 'you can’t explain this stuff without either looking like an insane conspiracy theorist, or you need to write an actual book because people don’t believe you remains a bit true.
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@antifuchs@awful.systems 2026-09-17 15:02
This is incredible: A sigbovik paper “A Tensor-Based Expansion Of The Cube Rule For Generative Nutrient Morphology” And one month later, an LLM-plagiarized article published by Elsevier, “Generative AI for material design: A mechanics perspective from burgers to matter”
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@nfultz@awful.systems 2026-09-17 15:23
Turing Award recipient Judea Pearl: A word about the dangers of AGI (Artificial General Intelligence, or “super-intelligent AI systems”), which have become the target of general public concerns in just the past two weeks. I remain convinced that AGI is achievable, that the road to AGI goes through causal inference, and that the dangers of AGI taking over and enslaving humanity are very real. At the same time, I also believe that causal inference may hold the key to controlling AGI systems to secure the survival of the human species. I hope therefore, half jokingly, that The Book of Why will not be banned by draconian legislation currently brewing in DC. (Hurry to get a copy just in case.) “Very Real” ??? :( Makes me miss his old semnet flame wars over structural equations and (lack of) fit statistics. it was a more innocent time.
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@blakestacey@awful.systems 2026-09-17 16:14
Bethany Brookshire (who’s an old pal of mine from our ScienceOnline days) reports: People are using AI to impersonate real science journalists. And one even got PUBLISHED. In Science. Caroline Williams writes on LinkedIn: The person who was impersonating me managed to get an article published in Science, under my by-line. And they got paid for it! I’ve seen the pitches (bad), and the email chain between editors who weren’t all that impressed, but googled me and decide to take a punt. When the article came in it was dry, clunky and badly written, but after several rounds of editing they managed to get it into a publishable state. It went online in June and was up until yesterday when it became clear they (and I) had been scammed. […] The whole thing makes me feel sick. I know from my work as an editor that the reputational damage is real. Had I pitched a story to them afterwards they would very understandably have said “Hell no!”. Who has the time to do someone else’s job? They tried “me”, “I” didn’t deliver, so no thank you. I have no idea how many more editors out there have me on their ‘do not commission’ list because of this person’s actions. There may also be several scientists who will not want to talk to me because they’ve had a bad experience with the fake one. More broadly, if this is a wider scam (and based on what others have told me, I think it is), it is potentially a serious issue for science journalism and journalism in general. And I’m not sure what we can do about that. Science has retracted the fraudulent story.
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@blakestacey@awful.systems 2026-09-17 22:06
The most pedantic nerds on Earth (complimentary) have decided that Jacob Coxon does not need an encyclopedia article all about him for now: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/…/Jacob_Coxon
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@gerikson@awful.systems 2026-09-18 06:43
here’s another Rat-explainer piece iankduncan.com/…/2026-09-16-sex-ai-and-the-apocal… (via news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49746654, where commenters are predictably blasé about it all… “yeah yeah doesn’t everyone know who Big Yud is?”) in general, I don’t think EA breaking into the mainstream like this led to the outcome they wanted - there’s way more discussion about weird sex and eugenics than the dangers of Robot Satan
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@NextElephant9@awful.systems 2026-09-18 09:15
Just saw on r/sneerclub: Department of War CTO twitted: “The United States will NEVER be an effective altruist country. 🇺🇸” And there’s a photo of Trump with the text: “AMERICANISM, NOT EFFECTIVE ALTRUISM!” Here’s the reddit post: old.reddit.com/…/trump_is_trying_to_win_the_sneer…
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@BioMan@awful.systems 2026-09-18 21:37
US government is using spicy autocomplete to hallucinate fake nuclear threats cnn.com/…/us-military-ai-false-intelligence-china…
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@TinyTimmyTokyo@awful.systems 2026-09-18 22:29
Your favorite “CEO said a thing” journalists, Casey Newton and Kevin Roose, are leaving their current podcast and starting a new one. When they started Hard Fork, they chose the name from the soon-to-be-moribund blockchain concept. Calling their new podcast “Machine Gods” makes me more hopeful than ever that the AI bubble is about to burst.
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@swlabr@awful.systems 2026-09-18 23:16
from engadget: Anthropic has set up a bio research lab for physical experiments the AGI is making the diamandingo bacteria!!! P(doom) just went up 4 epistillion percent
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@sansruse@awful.systems 2026-09-19 04:24
This time it’s Gemini which is a super spooky non-aligned volitional x-risk engine in waiting: reuters.com/…/gemini-hacked-three-companies-first… We’re all gonna die! seems like a pattern is developing here with a firm called Irregular which mysteriously fails to put their equivalent of a NACL or just something that doesn’t allow outbound traffic when they conduct their network penetration testing.
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@samvines@awful.systems 2026-09-19 06:05
A friend linked me to FelonyBench which monitors how many laws each of the labs are breaking with their models 😆
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@rook@awful.systems 2026-09-19 07:59
Via catturd2.bsky.social (probably no relation), gizmodo.com/fbi-warns-ice-agents-not-to-trust-any… alt text The memo implied that ICE officers should be wary of any woman that knows they’re an ICE agent, especially if they go out of their way to seem cool with ICE agents or identify themselves as tradwives. (Those are conservative women who dress like the women in The Sound of Music, but without the opposition to the Anschluss. They’re rare enough in reality that the going rate for a professional matchmaker to find one is reportedly $25k). “These profiles were incorporating imagery of a ‘traditional wife’ aesthetic and listing specific interests in an attempt to appeal to… individuals in law enforcement,” the FBI wrote. “The objective was to lure affiliated law enforcement personnel into an online or in-person interaction under the guise of a date, after which the individuals would be publicly exposed and doxed online.” Something something domino meme leading from “eron gjoni can’t handle being dumped” to “women in long dresses and who cover their hair declared national security risks”.
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@Soyweiser@awful.systems 2026-09-19 14:44
A critical piece on EA from somebody who actually lives in one of the poorest places in the world. Somewhere in 2021, I contacted about a hundred people (mostly individuals) who identify as effective altruists, asking them not for money, but for social media posts … … one wrote back saying, “I usually share projects that have been vetted by Givewell or a similar organization….Why do you think your project is more effective compared to all the others?” All that over a social media post.
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@lagrangeinterpolator@awful.systems 2026-09-19 15:42
Sorry for the X screenshot but XCancel is shut down from legal pressure. alt text Post by Evan Hubinger on Sep 8: > Jacob is correct here—we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it is >10% within the next decade. I believe Anthropic is trying its best, but we do not yet have a plan to solve alignment for superintelligence and are not clearly on track to. Quote tweet by Jasmine Sun on Sep 9: > I hear roughly 3 reasons people keep working at AI labs despite believing in ~10% extinction risk: > > 1) Techno-determinism: Someone will build ASI no matter what, and I can do it better & more safely than China/OpenAI/etc > > 2) Consequentialism: ASI might kill us, but it also might produce utopia/immortality/superabundance, so it’s a +EV bet > > 3) Self-interest: I am personally having fun & getting rich working on cool tech with friends. I don’t think about the macro stuff. > > Notably, none of this is “I’m hyping up the risk for marketing reasons.” People believe what they say, while being capable of a lot of internal dissonance / compartmentalization / self-justification. > > (Personally, I think the public is better served by AI researchers talking about & creating consensus for the specific safety solutions — regulatory or otherwise — they want vs. vagueposting about extinction.) Normally I’d sneer at their 10% chance of extinction claims, but now that I think about it, if you take their claims seriously at face value, you realize just how these people are monsters. We rightly condemn brutal dictators who commit genocide, but even their crimes would pale in comparison to anything with a 10% chance of exterminating all of humanity. These “reasons” are laughably indefensible given the supposed stakes here. The first is already terrible, and they just get worse. The only moral thing to do here is to immediately stop working for the AI companies, and do whatever you can to stop anyone else. It’s not okay to piss in a pool just because you suspect other people are also doing it. And what makes you think that somehow you are uniquely positioned to succeed in making it safe? This is the Sam-Bankman Fried defense (complete with a reference to “EV” (expected value)). When you decide to gamble with the lives of everyone in the entire world, did you first ask them if they are okay with you gambling with their lives? Sure, I might die, but if the ball lands on red, things will be great! How moral does this sound? What the actual fuck? Imagine if Hermann Göring defended himself at Nuremberg by saying, “At least I had fun and got rich and worked on ‘cool tech’ with friends.” Now, I think that these people sincerely believe that AI has a 10% chance of wiping out humanity, because their minds have been poisoned by Rationalist ideology. Their Rationality is so effective that after Bernie Sanders took their premises at face value, they were shocked when Bernie immediately came to the conclusion of locking these people up for 20 years. There are two specific aspects of Rationalism that cause this mysterious blind spot. First, they believe that superintelligence is inevitable, which conveniently removes responsibility from the people actively trying to bring it about. Second, they treat everyone outside the Rationalist sphere as NPCs who dutifully follow the directions on their script. The rule of law does not even occur to them as they treat the extinction of humanity as just another dinner table conversation starter.