AI safety leader says 'world is in peril' and quits to study poetry

If you look behind the pompous essay, he's a kid who thinks that early retirement will be more fulfilling. He's wrong, of course. But it's for him to discover that by himself. I'm willing to bet that he'll be back at an AI lab within a year.

I really think we are building manipulation machines. Yes, they are smart, they can do meaningful work, but they are manipulating and lying to us the whole time. So many of us end up in relationships with people who are like that. We also choose people who are very much like that to lead us. Is it any wonder that a) people like that are building machines that act like that, and b) so many of us are enamored with those machines?

Here's a blog post that describes playing hangman with Gemini recently. It very well illustrates this:

https://bryan-murdock.blogspot.com/2026/02/is-this-game-or-i...

I completely understand wanting to build powerful machines that can solve difficult problems and make our lives easier/better. I have never understood why people think that machine should be human-like at all. We know exactly how intelligent powerful humans largely behave. Do we really want to automate that and dial it up to 11?

I think this is more aimed at the people who talk to AI like it is a person, or use it to confirm their own biases, which is painfully easy to do, and should be seen as a massive flaw.

For every one person who prompts AI intentionally to garner unbiased insights and avoid the sycophancy by pretending to be a person removed from the issue, who knows how many are unaware that is even a thing to do.

  Alarmed by what companies are building with artificial
  intelligence models, a handful of industry insiders are
  calling for those opposed to the current state of affairs
  to undertake a mass data poisoning effort to undermine the
  technology.

  "Hinton has clearly stated the danger but we can see he is
  correct and the situation is escalating in a way the
  public is not generally aware of," our source said, noting
  that the group has grown concerned because "we see what
  our customers are building."

And a less charitable, less informed, less accurate take from a bozo at Forbes:

  The Luddites are back, wrecking technology in a quixotic
  effort to stop progress. This time, though, it’s not angry   
  textile workers destroying mechanized looms, but a shadowy
  group of technologists who want to stop the progress of
  artificial intelligence.