It's a bit like pattern matching the Cold War fears of a nuclear exchange and nuclear winter to the flood myths or apocalyptic narratives across the ages, and hence dismissing it as "ah, seen this kind of talk before", totally ignoring that Hiroshima and Nagasaki actually happened, later tests actually happened, etc.

It's indeed a symptom of working in an environment where everything is just discourse about discourse, and prestige is given to some surprising novel packaging or merger of narratives, and all that is produced is words that argue with other words, and it's all about criticizing how one author undermines some other author too much or not enough and so on.

From that point of view, sure, nothing new under the sun.

It's all too well to complain about the boy crying wolf, but when you see the pack of wolves entering the village, it's no longer just about words.

Now, anyone is of course free to dispute the empirical arguments, but I see many very self-satisfied prestigious thinkers who think they don't have to stoop so low as to actually look at models and how people use them in reality, it can all just be dismissed based on ick factors and name calling like "slop".

Few are saying that these things are eschatological inevitabilities. They are saying that there are incentive gradients that point in a certain direction and it cannot be moved out from that groove without massive and fragile coordination, due to game theoretical reasonings, given a certain material state of the world right now out there, outside the page of the "text".

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keiferski 13 hours ago | parent [-]

I think you’re missing the point of the blog post and the point of my grandparent comment, which is that there is a pervasive attitude amongst technologists that “it’s just gonna happen anyway and therefore whether I work on something negative for the world or not makes no difference, and therefore I have no role as an ethical agent.” It’s a way to avoid responsibility and freedom.

We are not discussing the likelihood of some particular scenario based on models and numbers and statistics and predictions by Very Smart Important People.

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theSherwood 12 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I agree that "very likely" is not "inevitable". It is possible for the advance of AI to stop, but difficult. I agree that doesn't absolve people of responsibility for what they do. But I disagree with the comparison to religious predestination.

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bonoboTP 13 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I'm not sure how common that is... I'd guess most who work on it think that there's a positive future with LLMs also. I mean they likely wouldn't say "I work on something negative for the world".

	▲	keiferski 13 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I think the vast majority of people are there because it’s interesting work and they’re being paid exceptionally well. That’s the extent to which 95/100 of employees engage with the ethics of their work.