Grifters don’t usually spend their entire lives devoted to preparing for something that doesn’t yet exist, giving up whatever else they like doing to work on that problem, and spending years trying to plan out how to make things go well for everyone when that thing materializes.
Grifters are opportunistic short-termists. Whatever you can say about these rationalists, they aren’t that.
Eliezer spent his life devoted to science fiction and building a cult around himself, and now him and the rest of them are trying to vindicate themselves before they fade into obscurity.
> AI capability is limited by AI safety in the way the power of a rifle is limited by how safe it is to use
But merely making it safe to use still prevents unnecessary death. And advocacy against rifles in general, or general gun safety is a viable path to limiting the negative outcomes.
Rifles are banned in many places on Earth and they also backfire and misfire less than they used to.
Even so, you can do the simple "call your representative" and "hand out fliers" and "talk to people about how AI is net negative" with no cost to yourself and it absolutely aligns with your fundamental beliefs, right?
And this was itself written by an LLM…we read so much of this stuff now that I’m worried about is we’re all just going to start writing like this whether we use LLMs or not.
> At a macro level brain rot is real, but it cuts across all generations and it started long before LLMs.
The thing is, if there’s a way to do something easier people will generally just do that. All the nostalgia of the olden days has as a component that there were no alternatives as the example in the article highlights.
We can try to preserve the hard way to things that gets improved, but the hard way will only ever be niche if it doesn’t become extinct entirely. There is no going back.
Sure, humans are attracted to laziness by default and at its best technology must be used to lower toil and suffering (unfortunately there are unintended consequences etc for philosophical debates).
The bigger issue with brain rot is attention spans. Social media has ruined attention spans.
And all of that was accomplished without AI! Not all advances are equivalently beneficial as of course you know, and all come with tradeoffs. Not everyone is willing to accept those tradeoffs, especially without being asked.
Parent is concerned about the reduction of independence heralded by centralizing control, wealth inequality, destruction of digital commons and other real downsides!
Grifters are opportunistic short-termists. Whatever you can say about these rationalists, they aren’t that.
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