ah yes, compassion towards everyone, a thing that people obsessed with IQ definitely evince

it's so fucking funny that bill gates had basically successfully laundered his reputation from "the demonic sociopath from the antitrust hearings" to "the One Good Billionaire," but it's been entirely undone again by the epstein stuff. i bet he does believe the doomer shit because they all do because it's also like, yeah bill, this'll definitely be the train that pulls you back into public good graces. definitely

my sense is that AI winter as a term is mainly useful for thinking about, like, academic funding and really basic levels of breathless press coverage and rhetoric. so like after this all blows up maybe people chugging along researching symbolic AI will be in something they could meaningfully call an AI winter again, and it was useful in terms of comparatively analyzing the news rhetoric around this stuff from a couple of years ago, at least before the ascension of madness of doomer-pilled silicon valley rhetoric.

but in terms of raw finances LLMs have occasioned a world-historically overleveraged global economy in a way that so far exceeds "hmm i guess we're not getting grants like we used to" that for all practical purposes we're in an entirely new domain. like instead of a balmy ai summer we've found ourselves on the surface of venus

i also wonder if this is going to lead to an intramovement schism of some kind, if only because a lot of the activists i've noticed turning (or being recruited) towards xrisk shit on the activist level (esp the student activist level) are ex-climate activists. i don't know if the belief that ai xrisk is the One Risk To Rule Them All has just fully slid into the climate change place in these activists' minds or if there's enough lingering reality principle attunement there to give them pause. but i also don't know enough about the way EA types talk to their activist recruits to know if they're being allowed into the full "it's all about the robots" inner sanctum or if the ideologues keep the activists in the sort of "no other existential risks are important too we promise that we believe that 100%" not-yet-clear zone

totally. i also chalk a lot of blame up to the fact that system prompts (I think?) often include language like "you are an AI assistant" and because AI in science fiction is frequently like, a way of alienating and figuring human consciousness by situating it at its limits, it often entails the experience of pain? or like sometimes AI is used to represent what happens when we instrumentalize and objectify experiencing subjects, or experimentally instantiate a real distinction between rationality and feeling, and given that i think most writers believe that these are bad approaches to existence that lead to dysfunction and suffering, well

i think it kind of parallels how so many AI delusional spirals involve New Kinds of Physics -- physics is coded as The Smartest Thing Ever and if an AI is Superintelligent or if you've unlocked Superintelligence through it then "paradigm shifting innovations in physics" are going to be what follows from that line of reasoning + the "you are an AI" thing

glad to see the sick puppies's paradigm shifting culture war movement continuing to thrive

not suboptimal management of my home lab...anything but that...

If all these hysterical plebs would calm down and do some freaking Bayes-theoretic thinking for once they would definitely realize that the primary concern facing modern society is letting the text prediction algorithm achieve demonic apotheosis

It's enduringly odd to me that Scott Alexander is a psychiatrist. I don't really have any insights about this; I just think it's kind of funny. All the psychiatrists I've seen have been mildly-eccentric-but-it-doesn't-seem-to-really-matter, so I wonder if he is just a normal doctor who turns around and taps out a fucking Astral Codex Ten post. I wonder what posts my own damn psychiatrist is making

this isn't really a sneer. and maybe it's in the wrong place tbh. idk.

i have a long-time internet friend / "mutual" who is the only person i'm regularly in contact with that i think might be fully Seduced by the Chatbot. (i have a really good friend and long-time collaborator who's all in on Agentic Coding, which is a real bummer, but he's a strictly "I use this for computer stuff and do not ever talk to it like a human being" type of guy, plus the company he works for is all in and he's sick of writing shopify websites for bullshit brands blah blah blah -- anyway that's a whole other genre of thing.)

anyway friend A is an incredibly kind person who's been unbelievably supportive of me over the years. we've disagreed a number of times, i think we are good at doing so reasonably. and even though his arguments sometimes resemble those of more nefarious figures, i think he's motivated by an earnest optimism about technology's capacity to change the world for good -- one i find very naive, but believe is coming from the right place

anyway i posted a link on mastodon to a long piece i wrote, he, like, read it a bunch of times, paraphrased my argument back to me to make sure he had it right, and then kindly said he disagreed. well and good enough. except it feels a little more personal than disagreements we've had before, because one of the implications of the piece would be that he himself is probably experiencing low-grade psychosis lol and is therefore not necessarily a reliable narrator of his own experience

idk. it'll come as no surprise to anyone on this particular website that i feel very strongly that i'm right here -- if not about this guy's particular mental experience, i minimally feel that i'm adequately representing the interests of the constituency my piece represents. (it's a newsletter i maintain as part of organizing i'm doing.) it's also a genuine expression of my belief, which is that this bullshit article i was writing about was fucking bullshit

but not only does it go against all my Late Millennial Woke instincts to stake a claim that people's Lived Experiences are not valid lol -- it's just kind of a bummer to ultimately genuinely believe that my friend has been ELIZA'd or whatever. he's said i'm really helping him think through this moment but i also just kind of, idk. it's just not a good feeling

lmao this is a great bit

God as someone involved with actual anti-AI organizing on university campuses this is increasingly scaring the shit out of me.

That said I wonder if I could somehow steal their money for nefarious Ludditic purposes. I don't actually wonder this, really, but it does remind me of when, during my master's degree at a university bombarded by culture war garbage, I was debating going to the well-advertised well-funded conservative groups' fancy dinner book clubs about Plato or whatever. "Hey I'm here to chat about the Great Books! Don't worry that my name is this but my voice sounds like this. It's not a big deal bb" / "Oh yeah I'm soooo scared of the big brain computer. Like what if it gets too big lol. That would be sooooo bad! Here are my account and routing numbers"