Thread

What I learnt co-leading an AI Safety bootcamp for legal and governance practit

22 points · 20 comments · joozio

panny · 1791136228 · focus · HN ↗
My entire opinion of AI safety has been colored by the fact that I recently learned AI safety is a sex cult.
<a href="https://archive.today/bkOXn" rel="nofollow">https://archive.today/bkOXn
1. ItsMattyG · 1791136419 · focus · HN ↗
  You fall for this stuff? It's obviously not a sex cult
  1. panny · 1791136839 · focus · HN ↗
    >You fall for this stuff?
    This stuff? A spanish speaking critic of AI safety says, "Hey guys, it's really not so dangerous." What did you mean by "this stuff" precisely? Is it like "you people" perhaps?
    ItsMattyG · 1791138372 · focus · HN ↗
    painting groups you don't agree with with obviously false descriptors like 'sex cult'
    panny · 1791138757 · focus · HN ↗
    Hi MattYg
    <a href="https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/users/matthew-yglesias-1" rel="nofollow">https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/users/matthew-yglesias-1
    ItsMattyG · 1791142017 · focus · HN ↗
    hi
    that's not me, but hi
2. bryan0 · 1791137633 · focus · HN ↗
  This reminds me of during covid, when one of the biggest public proponents of vaccines in the UK was having an affair. The anti-vaxers then, instead of focusing on whether vaccines were helpful, focused on the affair. That allowed them to dismiss the pro-vaccine point of view without actually engaging on the merits of their argument.
  1. ianm218 · 1791137820 · focus · HN ↗
    I think the thing is engaging with “ML is mostly math and science engineering, AI is getting better at autonomous math and science, if it gets fully super human the rate of change could be mind boggling” is hard to fully dismiss in the same way you can fully dismiss weird Bay Area people. So that’s why we are seeing the pivot towards the personal attacks on these people.
  2. harvey9 · 1791138208 · focus · HN ↗
    In conducting his affair he was breaking the lockdown rules that he had written, which harmed their credibility. The antivax crowd (I am not a member) quite reasonably extrapolated that if the architect of lockdown was not locking himself down then he wasn't too worried about the virus, ergo vaccines were being oversold. When you are a public figure like that then the personal is political.
3. ianm218 · 1791137670 · focus · HN ↗
  It seems like to me it would be more effective to focus on the object level aspects of their arguments rather than their weird lives? Their argument isn’t “look at my credentials, I’m an expert you must believe me” it’s that “ML research is largely math and science engineering, as AI gets better at math and science it can use that to speed up the cycle at which point something bad could happen”.
  These Bay Area people dedicated their lives to AI risk often before AlexNet even showed deep learning could scale, by definition they are eccentric people.
  At the same time, people like the AI 2027 guys (who that article speaks poorly of)… have been basically fully on the money so far.
4. yard2010 · 1791139016 · focus · HN ↗
  Why that was a weird rabbit hole to go into. Thank you. I don't fall for this stuff though. It looks like a conspiracy theory like the world is flat, etc. That's enough internet for today.

Open on Hacker News to reply ↗

Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.