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I would like media to care more about the reality that tech tycoons want to kill people than what they’re imagining about AI wanting to kill people. We have multi-millionaires (with support from billionaires!) calling for ethnic cleansing, a thing that has happened in living memory. Not theoretical!

We need to separate outcome from motive. I don’t think any of them want to kill people. I think they want an Ayn Randian world where they can get as rich as they want & not care about victims (empathy is bad). Zuckerberg didn’t decide to hurt kids, he just didn’t care that he was hurting kids. #AI

David Heinemeier Hansson called for the extermination of Romani people, comparing them to animals. An entire roster of tech tycoons responded by each personally giving him $1 million for his open source software project, even though he’s already wealthy enough to have a personal race car team.

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Marc Andreessen and the team at his fund a16z hired — as a *partner*! — a man who has no background in finance, in tech, in startups at all, simply because that man had strangled one of my unarmed neighbors to death on the subway. To send a signal about what they support.

From another direction, it should probably tell us something about how little is required to be a VC (or perhaps just a16z) partner. Shades of "hedge fund analyst" as unemployment insurance for the rich and connected.

I don’t know any of them well enough to know their motivations & we’re both speaking in broadly about every AI leader. But I’ll cede this point: it is likely some of them actually do want that. Thiel comes to mind based on some of his statements, etc. Most just don’t care. No difference in the end.

I hate to tell you this but if you dive down the depressingly named "rationality" cult that a lot of these guys (and they almost to a person are guys) follow, it ends up being the case that a lot of them think exterminating some people is good. It is bleak.

Indeed. And it’s currently actually on his blog if anyone that doubts it wants to read it put so plainly about ethnically cleansing London or hunting down ethnic mintories in Europe. I will not link to it but it’s very much public. Other companies are giving people like this millions.