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Please read this article on the massive weirdos who are largely running the massively powerful and big-money AI industry in the U.S. today.

As @segyges.bsky.social notes, here’s famed rationalist and AI doomer Eliezer Yudkowsky - who’s advising @sanders.senate.gov on AI and who is in a recent Netflix documentary - claiming that AI extinction risk is SO bad that it’s worth risking nuclear war. Which is *nuts*. time.com/6266923/ai-e...

I genuinely feel bad for Eliezer Yudkowsky and his partner over the very real terror they seem to feel about AI killing us all - but these are not well people and they need therapy, not insanely influential advisory roles at the top of government and industry. time.com/6266923/ai-e...

“Eliezer Yudkowsky is in a wacky AI sex cult, and also he is one of the most powerful philosophers of this century and I take him quite seriously” is apparently a common take amongst high-level OpenAI employees. www.verysane.ai/p/ai-safety-...

“Yudkowsky is the person who connected Shane Legg and Demis Hassabis to Peter Thiel so that they could secure funding to start DeepMind, which is now Google's AI research division.” Yep, that’s the wacky sex cult AI doomer guy proving instrumental in Peter Thiel funding DeepMind.

And once again, here’s OpenAI CEO Sam Altman in 2023, praising wacky AI sex cult blogger Eliezer Yudkowsky and speculating on if he deserves a Nobel Peace Prize:

The recent Anthropic whistleblower (??), Jacob Coxon, is also all up in the rationalist scene:

Almost the entire US technology policy space has been taken over by rich funders and consultants who genuinely believe the below wackadoodle sci-fi AI scenario is extremely likely, and that preventing it is the most important thing we could be doing right now. www.verysane.ai/p/ai-safety-...

Eliezer Yudkowsky - who, again, is immensely influential among the leaders of big AI companies and the US tech policy ecosystem that his rich fans have all but taken over - seems to think the only way to stop the AI apocalypse is doing straight-up eugenics to make “smarter people.”

how do these dudes have so much time to be philosophizing this much

i'm smart too and can speak in much more efficient sentences, gimme gimme

That’s your problem, efficient sentences will kill you with these types. Reading circuitous bullshit that you have to struggle to parse makes them feel smart, especially if the conclusion is counterintuitive (read: apparently mentally unwell). NB, this is also how we got Derrida and Zizek

Is this why Claude’s writing is such a pain to read?