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I resigned from Anthropic today

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Re: I resigned from Anthropic today

#61

Just wait till self improving AI are focused on the problems of social scoring and political party empowerment / entrenchment. I doubt the focus is OpenAI and Anthropic looking at each other. I suspect they’re racing BRIC.

Will you be optimizing your behaviour now to alleviate potential negative judgement from AI in the future?

Re: I resigned from Anthropic today

#62

I don't know man, i think racing to AGI to it is still the best thing to do. People claiming dangers and risk are just pretending or posturing. There's no more tangible risk than nuclear weapons, which we handled, and the upsides are insane.

What evidence, short of an actual apocalypse happening, would invalidate that belief of yours?

It might be a matter of choosing which apocalypse you'd like. The non-AI state of affairs is not exactly super compelling on a long timescale right now.

Re: I resigned from Anthropic today

#63
post #31

There's a scene in the movie "War of the Worlds" by Spielberg where the protagonist's son walks into a war zone because he is entranced by the battle ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X7rfWPbEufo ). He is obliterated (along with the rest of the US forces) shortly after. I've always been struck by that scene, because in a lot of ways, if we really are headed towards a superintelligence, I at least want to be there and…

Not refuting your overall point, but the son wasn’t killed. They reunite at the end of the movie.

Re: I resigned from Anthropic today

#64
> The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.

I think he is being over dramatic. In the space of about four years, LLMs progressed from mediocre high school student to Ph.D. graduate in every field. That's impressive, but there is no evidence yet they can outperform or outsmart humans. Their biggest advantage for tasks such as proving theorems or long coding sessions is that they don't get tired.

Re: I resigned from Anthropic today

#65
post #12

He resigned and now what? There are thousands willing to do his role, and many labs are competing in that race. His resignation and his statement doesn't do anything but buy him attention which is what all this post about in my opinion.

Agreed. And his doom words have set a 1000 mouths in the Pentagon/Whitehall/August 1st Building/Kremlin salivating with excitement.

Take China, for example. Look at any recent ML conference, and see the fraction of articles majority-authored from Chinese universities and labs. Do you think they'll slow things down anytime soon? I don't think so!

It's a global arms race, and we're just spectators.

Re: I resigned from Anthropic today

#66
post #35

Related: Sen. Bernie Sanders floats ban on superintelligent AI https://www.axios.com/2026/09/03/bernie-sanders-superintelli...

Unless he has an actual plan for effective global enforcement of his proposed policy, this is all just posturing at best, and a transfer of power to adversarial foreign states (that have no such moral qualms and worries around superintelligent AI) at worst.

Re: I resigned from Anthropic today

#67
post #31

There's a scene in the movie "War of the Worlds" by Spielberg where the protagonist's son walks into a war zone because he is entranced by the battle ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X7rfWPbEufo ). He is obliterated (along with the rest of the US forces) shortly after. I've always been struck by that scene, because in a lot of ways, if we really are headed towards a superintelligence, I at least want to be there and…

> He is obliterated

Technically, he is not. He returns in the final scene.

Re: I resigned from Anthropic today

#68

The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt. If anything, many executives and senior researchers will couch their phrasing in the press to sound sensible - but I hear the same people express fear privately. No other human activity poses this level of danger. A common response is “if they truly believe this, why are they still building it?”…

Humans weren't built to handle long term risks. We just weren't. For basically all of our evolutionary history, we were almost overwhelmingly concerned with the short term. What will you eat today, How will you sleep tonight. Problems on the order of days or weeks. At best, the next season. Our intelligence evolved to disregard super long term risks because it simply didn't matter (what use is worrying about 5 years from now if you're starving and a tiger is stalking you?). So when long term risks manifest in our modern world, our brains get scrambled - Climate Change, Fertility Rates etc. "Safety regulations are written in blood" isn't a saying for nothing. Humans have a strong tendency to let long term risks become imminent risks before doing anything about it, and i don't expect this will be any different.

Re: I resigned from Anthropic today

#69
Towards a metaphysics of Power

"I think you need to have a personal relationship with Power"

When people today discuss the concept of an all powerful machine-mind, what they are doing is engaging in metaphysics, trying to generate a metaphysics of Power.

The question hounding people, which disguises itself as a science fiction plot about computers is: "What is ultimate, transcendental Power?". What is the ultimate principle of Power.

If you are a weak man, or sufficiently neurotic and full of doubt, that you can only conceive of yourself as such, then power is only something you comprehend from the passive, receptive side. Power is something that happens to you. If you are a fearful man, power is a cruelty and a humiliation. And so it follows, that ultimate power - God - is the ultimate cruelty and the ultimate humiliation. Thus, ai doomerism.

If god wasn't real it would be necessary to invent him, and so they did, and being godless, they built an anti-god - cruel, murderous and tyranical - in their minds.

[…]

https://xcancel.com/robertlasagna1/status/207827473401002846...

Re: I resigned from Anthropic today

#70

I don't know man, i think racing to AGI to it is still the best thing to do. People claiming dangers and risk are just pretending or posturing. There's no more tangible risk than nuclear weapons, which we handled, and the upsides are insane.

What evidence, short of an actual apocalypse happening, would invalidate that belief of yours?

Depending on where you live could be considered an active apocalypse that is robots vs robots vs people in Ukraine and Gaza and Iran being live-streamed, and actively betted on.

Do you have a more totalizing definition of Apocalypse?

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