This post is not (mainly) calling out EA and EAs for wanting to accelerate AI.
It’s calling out those of us who do think that the AGI labs are developing a technology that will literally kill us and destroy everything we love with double digit probability, but are still friendly with the labs and people who work at the labs.
And it’s calling out those people who think the above, and take a salary from the AGI labs anyway.
I read this post as saying something like,
If you’re serious about what you believe, and you had very basic levels of courage, you would never go to a party with someone who was working at Anthropic and not directly tell them that what they’re doing is bad and they should stop.”
Yes, that’s awkward. Yes, that’s confrontational.
But if you go to a party with people building a machine that you think will kill everyone, and you just politely talk with them about other stuff, or politely ignore them, then you are a coward and an enabler and a hypocrite.
Your interest in being friendly with people in your social sphere, over and above vocally opposing the creation of a doom-machine is immoral and disgraceful to the values you claim to hold.
I (Holly) am drawing the line here. Don’t expect me me to give polite respect to what I consider the ludicrous view that it’s reasonable to eg work for Anthropic.
I don’t overall agree with this take, at this time. But I’m not very confident in my disagreement. I think Holly might basically be right here, and on further reflection I might come to agree with her.
I definitely agree that the major reason why there’s not more vocal opposition to working at an AGI lab is social conformity and fear of social risk. (Plus most of us are not well equipped to evaluated whether it possibly makes sense to try to “make things better from the inside”, and so we defer to others who are broadly pro some version of that plan.)
This post is not (mainly) calling out EA and EAs for wanting to accelerate AI.
It’s calling out those of us who do think that the AGI labs are developing a technology that will literally kill us and destroy everything we love with double digit probability, but are still friendly with the labs and people who work at the labs.
And it’s calling out those people who think the above, and take a salary from the AGI labs anyway.
I read this post as saying something like,
I don’t overall agree with this take, at this time. But I’m not very confident in my disagreement. I think Holly might basically be right here, and on further reflection I might come to agree with her.
I definitely agree that the major reason why there’s not more vocal opposition to working at an AGI lab is social conformity and fear of social risk. (Plus most of us are not well equipped to evaluated whether it possibly makes sense to try to “make things better from the inside”, and so we defer to others who are broadly pro some version of that plan.)