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I have complicated feelings about this. On the one hand, AI risks are real, AI alignment is a real problem with no certain solution. We should be careful in how we use it. We should also be extremely curious about alignment and control of AI systems - this is important work!

Max Read@maxread.info

really liked this @himself.bsky.social piece. discursive inversion going on right now where, within ai circles, especially on x, "believing in the imminent machine god" is considered the grounded/serious position while "being skeptical of imminence of machine god" is the laughable freak position

But, on the other hand, I think the "machine god" and "P(doom)" rhetoric is totally unhelpful, because it obscures more than it reveals. It doesn't explain the mechanism, and if you want to hook smart people on solving a problem, you want to explain the mechanism.

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The full-frontal emotional assault produces the opposite result: it encourages resistance to the idea that there is any problem at all, because people will deny nightmare scenarios in order to avoid thinking about them (cf. climate change).

I can just about see the argument for the emotional appeal if your aim is to ban AI entirely. In that sense, I have some sympathy with the genuine doomers, who do - so far as I can tell from personal conversations - authentically believe in some variant of a doom hypothesis.

But even there, I think the aim has to be to win consensus among people who do not share your world-view, or your science fiction reading list. A mechanical explanation of the problems and why they're hard to fix still feels like a better rhetorical device than emotive fictions.

Reading about this for the first time since the Hugging Face attack, I get the resistance to wild the fantasies of how the AI might kill us but..if u just go back 2-3 years the doomers immediate predictions (Deception, scheming, hacking, escape, hiding cot, swarms, sacrifice) have all come true! 1/2