Playing in the Creek

If there's money to be made, there will always be someone with a shovel or a truckload of sparklers who is willing to take the risk (especially if the risk can be externalized to the public) and reap the reward.

The author seems concerned about AI risk -- as in, "they're going to kill us all" -- and that's a common LW trope.

Yet, as a regular user of SOTA AI models, it's far from clear to me that the risk exists on any foreseeable time horizon. Even today's best models are credulous and lack a certain insight and originality.

As Dwarkesh once asked:

> One question I had for you while we were talking about the intelligence stuff was, as a scientist yourself, what do you make of the fact that these things have basically the entire corpus of human knowledge memorized and they haven’t been able to make a single new connection that has led to a discovery? Whereas if even a moderately intelligent person had this much stuff memorized, they would notice — Oh, this thing causes this symptom. This other thing also causes this symptom. There’s a medical cure right here.

> Shouldn’t we be expecting that kind of stuff?

I noticed this myself just the other day. I asked GPT-4.5 "Deep Research" what material would make the best [mechanical part]. The top response I got was directly copied from a laughably stupid LinkedIn essay. The second response was derived from some marketingslop press release. There was no original insight at all. What I took away from my prompt was that I'd have to do the research and experimentation myself.

Point is, I don't think that LLMs are capable of coming up with terrifyingly novel ways to kill all humans. And this hasn't changed at all over the past five years. Now they're able to trawl LinkedIn posts and browse the web for press releases, is all.

More than that, these models lack independent volition and they have no temporal/spatial sense. It's not clear, from first principles, that they can operate as truly independent agents.

I would expect people today to be quite a lot worse at mental arithmetic that we used to be before calculators. And worse at memorizing stuff than before writing.

We have tools to help us with that, and maybe it isn't a big loss? And they also bring new arenas and abilities.

And maybe in the future we will be worse at critical thinking (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43484224), and maybe it isn't a big loss? It is hard to imagine what new abilities and arenas will emerge. Though I think that critical thinking is a worse loss than memory and mental arithmetic. Though, also, we are probably a lot less good at it than we think we are, generally.

If anything the AI would want to put itself out of its misery after having memorised all those LinkedIn posts

This is such a well-written response. There's something intentionally soothing about this post that slowly turns into a jarring form of self-congratulation as it goes along. Congratulations for knowing there's a limit to wrecking your parents' property. Congratulations for being able to appreciate the sand on the beach, in some no doubt instagrammable moment of existential simplicity. Congratulations for being so smart that you could have blown up your hand. And for "Leetcoding", whatever the fuck that means. And for claiming you quit a shady job because you got bored (but possibly also grew a conscience). And then topped off by the final turn: "This is, of course, about artificial intelligence development". I'd only add one thing to your analysis: We've got a demo right here of a psyche that would prefer love to money (but mostly both), and it's still determined to foist bad things onto the world in a load-bearing way, as a bid for either, or whatever it can get. My parents used to call that "a kid that doesn't care if he gets good or bad attention, as long as he gets attention." I think that's the root driver for almost all the tech billionaires of the past 20 years, and the one thing that unites Bezos, Zuck, Jobs, Dorsey, Musk... it's: "Look dad, I didn't just take your money. I'm so smart I could'a blown off my hand with all those fireworks you bought me, but see? Two hands! Look how much money I made from your money! Why aren't you proud of me?! Where can I find love? Maybe if I tell people what a leetcoder I am and how I could be making BAD AI but I'm just making GOOD AI, then everyone will love me."

Don't get me wrong, I'm not immune to these feelings either. I want to do good work and I want people to love what I do. But there's something so... so fucking nakedly exhibitionist and narcissistic about these kinds of posts. Like, so, GO FUCKING LAY WITH CLAMS, write a novel, the world is waiting for it if you're really a genius. Have the courage to say you have a conscience if you actually do. Leave the rest of us alone and stop polluting a world you don't understand with your childish greed and self-obsession.