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www.newyorker.com Among the A.I. Doomsayers

Some people think machine intelligence will transform humanity for the better. Others fear it may destroy us. Who will decide our fate?

Among the A.I. Doomsayers

The New Yorker has a piece on the Bay Area AI doomer and e/acc scenes.

Excerpts:

[Katja] Grace used to work for Eliezer Yudkowsky, a bearded guy with a fedora, a petulant demeanor, and a p(doom) of ninety-nine per cent. Raised in Chicago as an Orthodox Jew, he dropped out of school after eighth grade, taught himself calculus and atheism, started blogging, and, in the early two-thousands, made his way to the Bay Area. His best-known works include “Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality,” a piece of fan fiction running to more than six hundred thousand words, and “The Sequences,” a gargantuan series of essays about how to sharpen one’s thinking.

[...]

A guest brought up Scott Alexander, one of the scene’s microcelebrities, who is often invoked mononymically. “I assume you read Scott’s post yesterday?” the guest asked [Katja] Grace, referring to an essay about “major AI safety advances,” among other things. “He was truly in top form.”

Grace looked sheepish. “Scott and I are dating,” she said—intermittently, nonexclusively—“but that doesn’t mean I always remember to read his stuff.”

[...]

“The same people cycle between selling AGI utopia and doom,” Timnit Gebru, a former Google computer scientist and now a critic of the industry, told me. “They are all endowed and funded by the tech billionaires who build all the systems we’re supposed to be worried about making us extinct.”

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  • Wat

    [Grace's] grandfather, a British scientist at GlaxoSmithKline, found that poppy seeds yielded less opium when they grew in the English rain, so he set up an industrial poppy farm in sunny Australia and brought his family there.

    To grow opium???

    (OK I guess for medicinal purposes but maybe point that out)

    • We should have known the English rain was trouble when it started giving people tans

    • I wonder how much of that family fortune has found its way into EA coffers by now.

      • In another part of the article, it states that Grace grew up "semi-feral", so perhaps the fortune was smoked away in the Tasmanian opium dens (those exist, right?)

        • In yet another part of the article:

          She had found herself in both an intellectual community and a demimonde, with a running list of inside jokes and in-group norms. Some people gave away their savings, assuming that, within a few years, money would be useless or everyone on Earth would be dead.

          More totally normal things in our definitely not a cult community.

36 comments