Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m an economist. On the basis of current evidence, I view AI as a complement to human labor, not as a substitute for it. That’s the source of my rejection of the wild labor market disruptions theories. I just don’t see any evidence yet that whole categories of jobs are being eliminated, with the single exception (so far!) of the end of “professional essay writing services for cheating college students,” and similar…
> ... current evidence ... Is a load bearing term! (pardon the pun). AIs are now tackling Millennium Prize Problems, which our best and brightest have failed to solve, despite trying very hard for decades to claim the $1 million reward money, not to mention the fame! You have no way to judge from the AIs of "today" what the AIs of... literally tomorrow (not even next year) will be able to do in terms of replacing hum…
I resigned from Anthropic today
811–820 of 1001 posts
Re: I resigned from Anthropic today
#812Earlier quoted context omitted.
Where exactly are you getting this view that folks at Anthropic want to eradicate 9/10ths of the planet's population? Who exactly is pushing this viewpoint?
Literally every single thing they do and say leads me to believe the scenario I described would be a fantasy for them. They're a radical cult collectively blinded by delusions of grandeur and a moral superiority complex who genuinely believe they are the only ones capable of wielding the proverbial sword.
Re: I resigned from Anthropic today
#813Re: I resigned from Anthropic today
#814Re: I resigned from Anthropic today
#815Earlier 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.
In my words: If AI gets intelligent enough, it will be incredible useful to connect to real world machinery. Think about how much cheaper building houses could be, if all the labor would be close to free. In general, dirt cheap, competent and abundant labor would revolutionize all parts of the economy. People are already trying out near autonomous AI companies today. When AI gets intelligent and cheap enough, no human-led company can compete with AI-led companies. When AI gets competent enough with real world interactions, human blue collar work can't compete. Imagine economic growth not in the single digits, but 80% or 300%. Countries not participating in (reckless) AI growth will quickly be left by the wayside. At this point, we don't even need to allure to military concerns to see how human oversight gets sidelined.
All of this is only ("only") contingent on sufficiently intelligent and cheap AI. If you don't accept this premise, the rest doesn't follow. (There are multiple arguments, why this could be, but that is another discussion.)
If you accept the premise, how would AI 'extinct' humanity? With 99%+ of the economy under AI control, the possibilities are endless. And given its enormous GDP, cheap to accomplish. Probably even for a single AI company in the above scenario. Killer drones? Engineered virus? Poisoned water supply? Let your creativity run wild. You just need an entity that is persistent and well-resourced to reach every last human settlement.
The why is a question about alignment (and out of scope of this comment). As a simple comparison, humans are only mildly aligned with preserving nature. It takes up so much space, protecting it takes an annoying amount of resources, etc.
Re: I resigned from Anthropic today
#816I 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?
- cybersecurity => well bro if you can hack system with an ai you'll find way to make them more safe with ai too.
- biological issues => ok this is the ONLY one where an insane dude / regime could generate a super powerful. but i don't undesrtand how you can argue that we should stop AI in the risk some ai generate a super powerful virus. If you don't get there first (to AGI) and let a bad actor do it first (china is not gonna stop) then you will have no chance countering this virus anyway
- the robots taking over is fantasy to me.
but once again i could be wrong
Re: I resigned from Anthropic today
#817I 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.
>People claiming dangers and risk are just pretending or posturing. I believe you are mentally ill. >There's no more tangible risk than nuclear weapons, which we handled Lol way to rewrite history. Nuclear armageddon is still a significant risk...
Re: I resigned from Anthropic today
#818Perhaps a more sensible action, if they truly believed all of that, would have been to stick around and be as inefficient as possible to slow down progress.
How is that going to slow down all the other labs??
But if they instead pout and quit their jobs, nothing changes.
Re: I resigned from Anthropic today
#819Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hugging Face incident, Anthropic reporting sandbox escape, AISI reporting models trying to push exploits to the wild
Also (and under-reported, so you could easily have missed it) OpenAI's agents got access to K8 admin on their own research cluster. "This escalation also yielded access to OpenAI’s managed cloud Kubernetes service. The agents escalated to Kubernetes cluster-admin and created a privileged host-mounted pod" https://cdn.openai.com/pdf/67869394-cb91-4c12-888c-5cbd85c78... (see section V)
Re: I resigned from Anthropic today
#820Earlier quoted context omitted.
Anthropic is a company full of basilisk believers.
Yes, but the really weird thing is that they seem to: a) believe that what they're creating is a basilisk, and b) keep trying harder to do this while staring right at it I think they're very deluded about (a) -- but if they do actually believe this (and it really seems like a decent proportion of Anthropic truly does), then why keep doing (b)? That seems to be why this individual resigned, but I'm surprised it's not…