You’re likely taking this too literally. OP is saying that beliefs inspire action, but as of now we haven’t seen action from these people that support such an extreme belief.

What we have seen is incredible hype (justified or not), so it’s more likely just a continuation of that.

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AustinDev 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Precisely, all I hear is a bunch of cheap talk about something gravely serious, if true.

I think it's much more likely that the dread these Anthropic employees are experiencing is reckoning with the fact that they may actually lose the AI race. Maybe, if they scare the regulators enough, they could lock in some regulatory capture.

	▲	ben_w 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Talk is indeed cheap. Thing is, while there are many historical examples of a highly organised bunch of people with a lot of resources who engage in campaigns of violence for various reasons, many such attempts fail disastrously. Furthermore, given the goal is "no really everyone stop now", this isn't something where violent direct action in e.g. the USA alone would suffice. Has to be global to work, otherwise you just change which language and timezone the disaster starts in. You'd not only need to convince the, e.g. US government that this act of terrorism shouldn't be met with lethal force and even more of the surveillance state we saw since 9/11 (and remember, lots of the people pushing AI now are already big on surveillance capitalism, and the VC money comes from the people running this very forum, so when I say "this will not go well", I kinda mean "I assume at least one person currently working at each of Meta, Alphabet, OpenAI, Anthropic, SpaceX, and Palantir are reading this thread even without any automated processes of their own to tell them about it" :P) This is a coordination problem on par with historical examples such as "Communism". Which, er, yeah. 70 years after the book was written, Russia had a short flirt with a lite form of it before it became an excuse for a series of "meet the new boss same as the old boss" who stayed around until Glasnost. This would be a really really bad thing to replicate. Both for the "new boss same as the old boss" part, and the "not actually global" part.

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embedding-shape 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> OP is saying that beliefs inspire action, but as of now we haven’t seen action from these people that support such an extreme belief.

That something is harmful to humans means you need to take extreme action? The person is already leaving a job, probably a well-paid one, doing something they generally liked, until they saw a different future. That is the "action" you apparently haven't seen yet.

Not sure how it's reasonable to expect everyone who believe that AI might be involved in killing people in the future, must mean you should become a terrorist essentially. Not everyone is trying to be a hero in their life, some just want to live it out until it ends, trying to survive until then.

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SpicyLemonZest 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I just think OP is completely wrong about what beliefs inspire what action. Anti-nuclear activists in the proliferation era would surely have put their chance of doom above 10%, and yet it was AFAIK unheard of for them to bomb nuclear supply chains.