I just skimmed this and the so called zeitgeist here is fear. People are scared, it's material concern and he effectively stoked it.

I work on this technology for my job and while I'm very bullish pieces like that are as you said slopish and as I'll say breathless because there are so many practical challenges here to deal with standing between what is being said there and where we are now.

Capability is not evenly distributed and it's getting people into loopy ideas of just how close we are to certain milestones, not that it's wrong to think about those potential milestones but I'm wary of timelines.

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pfisch 13 hours ago | parent [-]

Are you ever concerned about the consequences of what you are making? No one really knows how this will play out and the odds of this leading to disaster are significant.

I just don't understand people working on improving ai. It just isn't worth the risk.

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lbrito 12 hours ago | parent | next [-]

>I just don't understand people working on improving ai. It just isn't worth the risk.

A cynical/accelerationist perspective would be: it enables you to rake in huge amounts of money, so no matter what comes next, you will be set up to endure it better than most.

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ianbutler 13 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Of course, I think about this at least once a week maybe more often. I think that the technology overall will be a great net benefit to humanity or I wouldn't touch it.

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justonepost1 12 hours ago | parent [-]

Genuine question: how?

I’m younger than most on this site. I see the next decades of my life being defined by a multi-generational dark age via a collapse in literacy (“you use a calculator right?”), median prosperity (the only truly functional distribution system we have figured out is labor), and loss of agency (kinda obvious). This outcome is now, as of 2026, essentially priced into the public markets and accepted as fact by most media outlets.

“It’s inevitable” is at least a hard point to argue with. “Well I’M so productive, I’m having the time of my life”, the dominant position in many online tech spaces, seems short-sighted at best.

I miss being a techno optimist, it’s much more fun. But it’s increasingly hard.

	▲	ianbutler 11 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I really think the doom consensus is largely an online phenomena. We're in a tense period like the early 80s, and that would be true without AI in the mix, but I think its a matter of perspective. We're certainly still way ahead of the 1910s and the 1940s for instance (it's on us btw to make sure we don't fall to that in time). Every generation has its strains and the internet just amplifies it because outrage is currency. Those strains are things you only start to notice as you start to get older so they seem novel when in reality in the scheme of humanity is basically standard. Fwiw if the market actually priced it in it would be in freefall since the market would be shortly irrelevant. We are due for a correction soon though. Internet discourse is a facsimile of real life and often not how real life operates in my experience. So I see all the discourse around extremes on either end and based on lived experience and working in the field think theres a much neater middle ground we'll ultimately arrive at thanks to people working very hard to land the plane so to speak.