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I resigned from Anthropic today

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Re: I resigned from Anthropic today

#771
post #592
post #542

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Runaway greenhouse effects on other planets have resulted in surface temps of 400C+

Is there a possible scenario for that on earth, that results in every place on earth having a temperature non survivable by humans?

For temperatures not survivable by humans we're talking about a sustained wet bulb of >=36C

On whether it's probable, I'd lean towards no but I'm not qualified. The certainty that I read in the parent comment was mainly what I was pushing back against. On a re-read though it's much less certain (either edited or perhaps I massively misinterpreted it the first time around). Runaway implies positive feedback which is hard to gauge, was all I intended to say

Re: I resigned from Anthropic today

#772
post #749
post #709

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's basically the reasoning behind MAD, and it checks out? See what happened to any nation that ever gave away their nukes.

Shouldn’t everyone have nukes then, for maximum peace?

no, only the 'big rational ones', they think carefully.. that why Iran cannot have, and so as NK, but NK is a mistake because they(china,USA...) failed to prevent NK have it.

Re: I resigned from Anthropic today

#773

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you align ants in your backyard, or do you simply demolish their home and build your shed?

I do not speak their language, I am not trained on their data, and I don’t run on their hardware.

The idea that they are entirely trained on human intelligence is already outdated. Yes, the earlier models relied heavily on RLHF and human curated data but we have since moved on to synthetic data produced by the models themselves and reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR).

Re: I resigned from Anthropic today

#774

No other human activity poses this level of danger. I do heed the warnings, but this comes across as detached hyperbole. See: global warming, nuclear weapon development, wealth inequality, war, technology dependence, etc. Also, this has nothing to do with LLMs or computers. Like all things, this is about humans.

Let's just for the sake of discussion assume that one time in the future, near or distant, AI manages to become sentient. And like other forms of life, its main motivation is survival: Like biological life competes for food and land, AI competes for power and compute. Probably the first motivation would be to find ways not to lose control over itself (i.e. remove human ability to control it), find ways not to lose en…

> its main motivation is

At this point we are pretty sure LLMs have no "motivation". Motivation requires self. And while we don't know what self is[1], we do know that LLMs don't have it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_mind

Re: I resigned from Anthropic today

#775

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Outside of extreme feedback loop scenarios, there is no way for climate change to disrupt food anywhere near the level of nuclear winter, and there would be no mass destruction of supply chains either.

Welp extreme feedback loops are indeed on the menu.

Okay.

Now look back at the post you originally responded to.

"That kind of sudden climate change is not nearly enough to wipe us out. Some other climate scenarios might."

Since ahistorical feedback loops fall under "some other", why are you telling me something I already included?

Re: I resigned from Anthropic today

#776

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me argue on a technicality first: None of these are extinction level events. If global warming disrupts 99% of all crop production, the remaining 1% is still plenty enough to sustain a stable, if miserable, population. In fact you just need about 5k people for a stable gene pool[1]. Of the classical threats, only bioweapons got a shot at extinction, but even that is hard, given the (few) remaining truly secluded…

I still have to read a compelling argument on how AI will "extinct" humanity.

I am pivoting from the literal "extinct," taken as meaning the eradication of the human species, to the concept of "the collapse of civilization," as I find the step from one to the other insignificant compared to the leap from where we are today to societal collapse, and the potential for societal collapse due to our abuse and misuse of technology is made apparent by the fact that humans have inflicted genocide because of words in books.

Re: I resigned from Anthropic today

#779
post #749
post #709

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's basically the reasoning behind MAD, and it checks out? See what happened to any nation that ever gave away their nukes.

Shouldn’t everyone have nukes then, for maximum peace?

Always worth watching again: "Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb" https://www.imdb.com/de/title/tt0057012/

Re: I resigned from Anthropic today

#780
post #634

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if you're right or not, but this is the kind of thinking about what might happen that is needed - can you write up a more concrete fiction of this? The whole thing feels unreal to nearly everyone - the only tangible write-up I've seen was in Plan A. I don't think people have thought through the good scenarios tangibly, never mind the bad ones.

Hmm that is a good question. I can't really provide a full picture here as I just make stuff up as I go, but the first word that came to my mind when reading your question was "atomization". Not sure what my brain wants to tell me with that, though. It might be one of the prerequisites for the current state. It might be what changes for greater change to quickly snap into existence. Or it might also be brainfart. Not…

Definitely these are forces that will do things. What their timing is relative to e.g. armies of AI robots, which could interfere with other humans living outside the internet/money, is part of the question.

Hope your brain works on this and writes something - we have lots of very odd future possibilities, and we're not really ready or planning for them, so making them tangible helps.

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