If you look at literally page 1 you’ll find the first footnote pointing at another chapter of the same goddamn book and now I’m going to go weep tears of impotent rage.

Ed: sorry, it’s page 8, which is the first page after the self-congratulatory preface.

By forcing the question of whether to act before debating how, the signatories appear to be clearing ground for legislative and regulatory work that has not yet arrived.

So it’s a pointless attempt to send up a “take me seriously” flare?

Also I think this discourse as always misses the distinction between economic displacement caused by AI and economic displacement justified by AI. Hiring managers seem to be anticipating AI capabilities that do not exist yet, and the disruption to labor is well beyond what the current AI systems are actually able to replace. I think instead we’re seeing a combination of business rubes buying the hype and the consequences of bad incentives that make headcount reduction look really good on quarterly financials while in a lot of areas not having an immediate negative impact on capabilities or production. Especially when it comes to IT infrastructure, for example, the fact that you’re not paying someone goes immediately on the financial statements, but the fact that your infrastructure is less reliable and crashes more often has a huge experiential impact on your customers and employees but it takes time for that to cash out into something that impacts the numbers.

Honestly If we want to use the hallucinatron the same way we use hallucinogens (minus the “transcend reality and pierce the veil of the machine elf realm” part) I have no real problem with that. Scrambling and remixing the contents of the world in ways that might prompt actual minds to create new connections and interesting art seems to fit.

I don’t think there’s enough of a market for that to support scaling to any meaningful degree and so have less problems from an enabling/infrastructure perspective. I mean the chemical alternatives let you transcend reality and pierce the veil of the machine elf realm. AI can’t do that.

This is an important point. If we treat Scott in particular as though he’s speaking in good faith then his arguments are nonsensical. This is not because he’s a fool but because he isn’t speaking in good faith, and his actual worldview appears to be much more amenable to outright fascism and actual totalitarianism than he would suggest here.

On one hand I agree that in a lot of ways our current tech surveillance regime looks like the kind of orwellian nightmare that people are raising red flags about. I’m admittedly less terrified by this than I am frustrated at how quickly and easily these systems get assembled when it comes to protecting shareholders from potentially unfavorable market conditions like “people using the software they purchased and installed on their computer in a way we didn’t expect”. Like, the US can’t get it’s shit together to do basically anything about domestic terrorism to the point where elementary schools are having domestic terror drills in order to feel like they’re doing literally anything to acknowledge the problem, but God forbid OpenAI has to acknowledge their product’s risk of aiding those terrorists when they’re trying to get their IPO off the ground.

But also I think Scott is hilariously uninformed about how in-depth the kind of monitoring systems would need to be in order to function trans nationally and not be subject to individual jurisdiction (because otherwise the only one with authority to go after the secret illegal chinese AI bunker project would be China and that’s a non-starter. As I said in the OP I think this combined with the level of transparency that they’re discussing would basically amount to opening up all the books and internal communications directly to your competitors whether on a corporate or national level, which makes it a non-starter.

I’m not sure if we missed this one or if just I did, but there’s a class action suit against Eightfold AI. The company is accused of essentially creating a social credit score based on your digital footprint and using it to drop applications before anyone at the hiring company got a chance to see them.

I spent the last two years watching my options for keeping my family housed slowly dry up while throwing out hundreds of applications. Now I’m concerned that it dug up my old reddit account from when I was a stupid teenager or decided that comments I made here weren’t suitable for participating in the goddamn economy.

Property rights

Wait not like that.

You’d think that a group of people this long-winded and pedantic would understand that the most seemingly simple rules are the squirreliest in practice

I’m sorry you had to find out this way

Counterpoint, why are these LLM bros still on human social media rather than just asking their chatbots to simulate a forum full of people who disagree with them just enough to be interesting but not so much that they actually risk changing their mind.

I have so many questions about this man and while I don’t actually want answers I would rather get them by choice than wait until his corner of the cultic milieu comes bursting into general relevancy like the Kool-Aid Man.

I doubt that this is how it was originally intended but think about all the boosters pointing at an empty suit while saying shit like “you’re being laid off and this is your replacement,” or “I know you’ve been lonely so I set you up on a blind date with this guy,” or even “this is what’s going to solve climate change.” And then imagine looking around and seeing friends, family, the broader media, and government and business leaders listening to them while smiling and nodding.

I for one would find breaking all of Bitcoin to be quite useful. Once again the conservative comedy-heavy portfolio pays off for the laughing investor!

On one hand, Anthropic sourcing suggests that this is probably at least partially nonsense. On the other hand, though, if there’s any accuracy at all I’m going to spend the rest of my life infuriated that I went down the technical degree route and actively avoided a liberal arts education in order to improve my career outlook and then this happened.

Like, I don’t think they were trying to mislead but I feel like every guidance counselor for kids ought to have a plaque in their office saying “please note that the world is complicated, ever-changing, and scary and I might actually have no idea what the fuck I’m talking about”.

It’s both less sad because he’s probably not completely LARPing as his entire family on twitter, but also more sad because that’s his actual mother who couldn’t be arsed to actually be present and decided to slop it up for social media clout instead.

If it is a firm I hope they’re getting some good word of mouth on the back-end because they’re on point.

I want to piggyback off this to talk about the inevitable Uber comparisons, because not only is the mismatch between investment and returns several orders of magnitude greater, but there’s also a difference in kind. Uber’s model was to undercut the taxi industry and establish a dependence within their niche before increasing revenues. It’s the classic enshitttification cycle. But the AI plan, at least as advertised, isn’t to undercut a specific industry as much as it is to undercut literally the entire white-collar labor force. There are several problems with this, starting with the fact that the technology isn’t actually able to replace the target in the way it would need to. More significantly, however, is that labor doesn’t work like taxis. If labor can’t get work it shuts down the entire economy because they lose their income and can’t actually consume any of the things the market offers. Also labor tends to get mad and break out the pitchforks and molotovs if things get too bad, and “restructuring the economy to no longer provide you the means to sustain your family” seems like the kind of situation that definitionally makes things too bad. In either event the point is that even if this tech is somehow as revolutionary as advertised then there’s not really any winning for the company.

Glad to see that “regulatory uncertainty” continues to mean “we figured out that the government might actually care if we do something illegal”

Harari’s framing makes AI sound like a jungle predator learning to wear a suit. The scarier version is that it’s the suit itself — and the person wearing it has already left the building.

I don’t necessarily hate this, because you can easily read it as highlighting the AI systems’ lack of agency. Rather than posing it as a threat for what it’s going to do, it poses a threat for what it doesn’t do that believers expect it to: actually exercise judgement and thought.

Ed: hadn’t realized that the guy we were taking seriously was the author of Sapiens. Gonna have to assume I was extending entirely too much charity in my assessment.

Honestly that part alone reminds me of the pastebin debacle where people just failed to consider that these things are in fact publicly accessible.

I keep bouncing back to this one and I think that the core objection is that the method of discourse that they’re trying to advance here is fundamentally incapable of handling people actually disagreeing. Like, the whole concept of “identifying a crux” basically requires that there’s a central point of agreement somewhere. In my experience a lot of these issues are better understood as tradeoffs and compromises. It is simultaneously true that some people will do terrible things left to their own devices and locking them up seems to be one of the only things society can collectively agree to do about it and also that locking people up is fundamentally cruel and it’s bad that we do it. The challenge isn’t in identifying the central point of agreement between those two but in managing their fundamental incompatibility.