So let’s say you’re in Anthropic’s shoes. You see that LLM’s are getting better and better, and it’s very possible that they will have some impact on jobs in the next few years, and a very meaningful impact on cybersecurity.

Is it more ethical to stay silent about these concerns, as you might have a bit of self interest? Or even if it looks a bit self interested, is it better to warn people ahead of time? I think the latter is obviously the better position.

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gazebo2 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Are we really saying that Anthropic claiming AI would take over industries was some benevolent ethical move rather than marketing their product as a cheap replacement for human labor that works in any industry? Wouldn't the ethical thing, if they were actually concerned about labor displacement, be to shut down the lab and work to disrupt and disable other labs instead?

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nl 3 days ago | parent [-]

Oppenheimer believed that technological progress is inevitable: if something can be built it will be.

Anthropic (and Deepmind, and some at OpenAI) believe the same thing.

Their ethical argument is:

1) This technology is coming whether or not our company does it or not.

2) Strong AI needs to be under human control, and we are the best placed to develop techniques to make this happen.

To be very clear: Anthropic (at least) is very happy to restrict access to their best models. They have continually campaigned for regulation to make sure others have to do the same.

> Wouldn't the ethical thing, if they were actually concerned about labor displacement, be to shut down the lab and work to disrupt and disable other labs instead

Personally I strongly reject the idea that labor displacement is unethical.

It will be a serious problem to deal with, but that doesn't make it unethical.

The steam engine displaced labor. That doesn't make it unethical.

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dlmanning 3 days ago | parent [-]

> Personally I strongly reject the idea that labor displacement is unethical.

Oh, well if you STRONGLY reject it I guess that's it.

> It will be a serious problem to deal with, but that doesn't make it unethical.

What WOULD make it unethical?

> The steam engine displaced labor. That doesn't make it unethical.

The steam engine also created new jobs to replace what it eliminated. It wasn't a mostly one-sided wealth transfer to the elite.

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nl 3 days ago | parent [-]

> The steam engine also created new jobs to replace what it eliminated. It wasn't a mostly one-sided wealth transfer to the elite.

Indeed.

You make my point for me.

	▲	wolvoleo 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		What are those to be created jobs going to be doing that AI won't be able to? There's two big differences with the steam machine: this change is happening much faster so society has much less time to adapt, and it's got a much wider scope. Steam machines only replaced a small category of jobs.

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nozzlegear 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Was it more ethical for the boy who cried wolf to have cried wolf so many times that nobody believed him when a wolf finally did show up?

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aspenmartin 3 days ago | parent [-]

Be specific, what are you talking about. Industry has been continuously warning about many of the complex problems that are going to happen as a clear consequence of the technology. I don’t know of any problem they have talked about that hasn’t either already come to fruition in one sense or another or that just hasn’t yet arrived. Dario has been predicting the end of coding for a long time now and look where we already are.

So yea no it’s more like it’s important for industry leaders and those closest to model development to proactively identify the issues that they don’t have complete control over or that we don’t have a regulatory framework for.

Super puzzling to see these comments and of course with zero specifics just “they’re all liars and grifters”

	▲	nozzlegear 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		I'm talking about the breathless alarmism that Dario and his company push out as a marketing strategy. They've given us such gems as these: - "It’s a bit like selling nuclear weapons to North Korea" (from the company that can't go more than a day or two without serious downtime) - "We are releasing a model that is too powerful for the public" - "It would be good for the world to have the option to slow or temporarily pause frontier AI development." - "I believe that biological risks may soon follow, and that serious AI autonomy risks may not be far behind." You can fill my ear with nitpicks about there still being time for these cries of wolf to be born out, but be prepared for me to wax philosophical about all things being possible given an eternal timescale. > Dario has been predicting the end of coding for a long time now and look where we already are. Where? It seems exceedingly unlikely that developers have all been phased out while I wasn't looking, as Dario prognosticated. And even if they all up and disappeared, AI still hasn't found a toehold outside of the relatively niche market of agentic coding.

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watwut 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I think that Anthropic is fully absolutely unethical. And they lied a lot. They were actively trying to make the doom happen while trying to cash out maximally on doom trolling.

If they were actually concerned over social impact, they would try to minimize it. They could have sell their product as a tool to be used to make economy boom, they tried to sell it on promiss to make it shrink for most people.

It really does not matter how much they believed own doom predictions, because they were actively trying to make them true whether realistic or not.

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fwipsy 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Economic growth and short-term job loss are both results of automation. Anthropic seems to have been pretty honest about that to me?

	▲	watwut 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		If only they wrote in normal calm economic terms as you seem to imply ... and I wrote "shrinking economy for most people" not growing.

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aspenmartin 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> They were actively trying to make the doom happen while trying to cash out maximally on doom trolling.

These words make no sense. Anthropic delayed mythos/fable rollout. A mythos model without safeguards would have been a pretty bad idea, and they sacrificed a ton of revenue and risked being scooped by any of the other labs in the meantime. Frontier models are only frontier temporarily until the next lab releases their model. Of course they are a company and need to act in their own best interest.

It is also clearly serious the problems we need to think about as we march quickly towards even more capable systems. Why on earth is it a problem to point this out?

> If they were actually concerned over social impact, they would try to minimize it. They could have sell their product as a tool to be used to make economy boom, they tried to sell it on promiss to make it shrink for most people.

What a really weird take; they employ some of the best safety and alignment teams in the industry and this is an active area of research that they are campaigning for more attention on. You complain about them “doom trolling” and then complain they don’t do anything about…the doom? No sense at all.

It is perfectly consistent to (1) sound an alarm and (2) March full steam ahead as quickly as they can. If they don’t do (1) that’s unethical. If they don’t do (2) someone else will. I would rather someone like Dario align these models than the CCC. Plus it would be nice not to have a war over Taiwan which is inevitable if China gains enough of the upper hand in this AI race.

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ifwinterco 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

The issue is both OpenAI and Anthropic have lied so many times that it’s no longer rational to take anything they say at face value.

Also: they don’t have to know they’re lying to say things that aren’t true. There is definitely some cult-like behaviour at the moment on the west coast

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aspenmartin 3 days ago | parent [-]

Be specific, what do you consider their lies to be? Also, this is pretty straightforward. You have a decade of extremely stable and predictable performance trajectory. It’s easy to see the writing on the wall. You can feel whatever which way about their motivations and ethics but if you read say Dario’s raw words they are pretty reasonable. We have to have a good regulatory framework and do what we can to prepare ourselves while also not ceding a critical strategic advantage. The west coast is always cult like, that’s not new. And it ignores the very real substance to the discussion.

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ifwinterco 3 days ago | parent [-]

Every year since 2023 the models are too dangerous to release and in 12 months all white collar jobs will be obsolete. This might not have been a deliberate lie but it's clearly been untrue and they've said it again and again.

Predictions with wrong timing are frankly worthless. I predict at some point in the future the S&P 500 will be at 10,000. Of course I'm guaranteed to be right. But have I really predicted anything useful?

If Dario was really worried about protecting the sheep, he wouldn't cry wolf every five minutes because everyone knows that's the worst possible thing to do.

And if you want to ask if Altman is trustworthy... ask Satya Nadella or anyone else who's ever made the mistake of doing business with him

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aspenmartin 2 days ago | parent [-]

> Every year since 2023 the models are too dangerous to release and in 12 months all white collar jobs will be obsolete. This might not have been a deliberate lie but it's clearly been untrue and they've said it again and again.

How is a prediction a lie? Did they tell you "this will definitely happen in X time"? Their speculation is not only valuable (they are the closest to the technology) but also necessary (they need to buy long term compute contracts so these predictions are literally what they have to bet their real money and company success on).

They have said again and again that this will make an incredible amount of tasks obsolete, and they are of course right about this. The models _are_ dangerous to release, every time we hit the frontier. This has become _increasingly true_.

> Predictions with wrong timing are frankly worthless.

Who cares?

> I predict at some point in the future the S&P 500 will be at 10,000. Of course I'm guaranteed to be right. But have I really predicted anything useful?

You aren't cherry picking and strawmanning here? Should we have a tour of all of the things that have indeed been predicted well and already come to fruition? Was 2025 "the year of agents"? It very much was, wasn't it? Additionally, unlike the S&P, performance trajectory, for almost a decade, is incredibly stable and predictable. It's hard to know, a priori for a given task or category of tasks, what specific error rate will trigger a phase transition but it's absolutely obvious and clear that this will happen quickly. It has indeed happened quickly. Does 2026 coding look anything remotely like 2024?

> If Dario was really worried about protecting the sheep, he wouldn't cry wolf every five minutes because everyone knows that's the worst possible thing to do.

No you're right he would make well reasoned arguments for the types of problems we need to address urgently. Hmm...that feels pretty ethical.

> If Dario was really worried about protecting the sheep, he wouldn't cry wolf every five minutes because everyone knows that's the worst possible thing to do.

I don't feel either of them are trustworthy, they are CEOs acting in their companies best interest. But people suggesting Mythos delay was some sort of PR ploy is some of the most extreme mental gymnastics I've seen. I listen to the actual words spoken by these people and consider the hard data that is in abundance at this point. I listen to the large body of research on alignment and safety and measurement that anyone can read for themselves or use AI agents to digest for them.

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ifwinterco 2 days ago | parent [-]

I’ve just watched enough old Adam Curtis documentaries to know historically how these things always end, true believers in many dead ends have exactly this kind of zeal.

Very smart people, reasoned arguments, “science”, all wrong.

But maybe this time will be different

	▲	2 days ago \| parent [-]
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