Eh, author has a bone to pick with AI companies and his person vision of what intelligence is that they can goalpost move because it doesn't have any stated testable positions. But don't worry anybody, it's just a parrot, not dangerous. Oh, and might want to check your bank because someone else's agentic loop just stole everything from your bank account.

Not anything interesting here that hasn't already been stated 20 other times.

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layer8 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The connection made to climate change in the latter part of the article is new to me, and would be interesting if true. However, I wish the author would cite supporting evidence for their conclusions.

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Supermancho an hour ago | parent [-]

> So why are many of the very same sociopaths who are driving us toward climate destruction now suddenly so concerned about the "danger" posed by AI, and seemingly acting in defiance of their fiduciary duties to warn us that we must slow down development and seek regulation?

> interesting if true.

Not sure what you mean by this. This is obviously about MAGA and other allied political forces in the US, at the very least. I wouldn't call it interesting to document the recent observed behavior. It's been evident through journalistic analysis of public statements, policy, and investment for most of the year.

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layer8 31 minutes ago | parent [-]

Regarding:

> The hope of the Elons and Sams of the world is that this will come to fruition well enough that we only have to bother sustaining the "cream of the crop" in the labor force […]. So basically the plan here is to let things go to shit, and when billions of people die as a natural consequence of that, things will keep running as desired.

For one, I don’t think that Sam Altman can be characterized as MAGA (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Altman#Political_engagemen...). Secondly, I’d be interested in sources substantiating a plan that explicitly includes billions of people dying as a necessary factor for the plan to work out.

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Supermancho 28 minutes ago | parent [-]

> I don’t think that Sam Altman can be characterized as MAGA

He is not usually associated with MAGA. The reference was not directed at the heads of the most well know tech companies, despite the quote about "Elons and Sams". This wouldn't make sense in context. It was a reference to the ruling political regime.

	▲	layer8 27 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Why would “the Elons and Sams of the world” refer to a political regime? That doesn’t make sense.

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thefz 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Still

> The dangers posed by this technology on its present trajectory are best understood as simple accelerants for the existing dangers humans pose to themselves.

Is very true. All the doomspeak "aI EsCaPeD AnD HaCkEd aNoThEr sYsTeM" was a human error all along, and the tech was doing what it is programmed to do, retry until a satisifiable outcome is met.

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pixl97 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The particular problem here is quantified the inherent danger of a technology. That is, once you remove the active management of humans, what dangers can happen.

With dangerous chemicals and radioactive materials these are generally pretty easy to classify. This said, after the physical behaviors, the above technologies can induce behavior changes in humans because they exist. After nukes, a lot more people had issues with extental dread. It also causes n-order interactions that get very hard to predict. For example MAD or laws against using chemical weapons.

And these are weapons with a very easy to map out causal chain in their own behavior. You can't prompt a chemical weapon to make a decision.

We come up with agentic AI and all of a sudden a lot of rules on causality break. In a harness they are a causal agent. They can interact with a digital reality, and with the right tools and/or human contacts they can causally effect analog reality.

Anyone that says 'programmed' about an LLM almost certainly does not know what they are talking about and can be summarily ignored.

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fastball 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

How is that comforting? Humans pose almost infinite danger to themselves. We can (and have) done pretty much everything you can do. We've had the capability to glass the entire earth for 70 years. We've had bioweapons, chemical weapons, mass murder, you name it.

Accelerating the ability for any given person to have access to some amount of these capabilities is terrifying, is it not?

	▲	pixl97 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I'm getting so many replies like the one above yours recently. It's like the average person has not really incorporated the fact that we've made something different than all other things we made before now, we'll, except maybe babies. It is comforting and easy to think this AI technology is the same as everything before therefore I don't have to do anything and the problem will solve itself as other problems did in the past. Maybe many were too young for the cold war. But it really does feel like we're setting a new one up.