GoKawiil
Tech News
Nate Soares, president of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, said on The Atlantic's podcast that he has not contributed to his 401(k) in a decade because he believes AI has over a 50 percent chance of causing human extinction within ten years. Soares said he still works to prevent that outcome, calling it not inevitable.
A commentary argues that much of the AI safety movement traces back to Eliezer Yudkowsky and a small, insular Berkeley group that critics, including OpenAI's Roon, have described as a 'sex cult.' The piece notes Yudkowsky's public influence on major AI figures and policymakers, including advising Bernie Sanders, despite efforts by some in the movement to downplay his role.
A blogger critiques the rationalist writing community, citing examples like Eliezer Yudkowsky's million-word 'sequences' and a 9,000-word Gwern post on nicotine, arguing these posts are needlessly long and tedious. The author contrasts this with their own 2,700-word piece on Catholic miracle apologetics, which cut 70% of its draft text, to argue brevity serves readers better.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay titled 'We Must Pace The Frontier,' arguing that AI's transformative benefits—from disease cures to economic growth—come paired with serious risks that warrant a measured development speed. His essay arrives alongside more extreme warnings from AI safety advocates like Eliezer Yudkowsky, who has called for sweeping government control over AI-related speech and publication as an emergency measure.
The piece revisits a 2009 essay musing on why intellectual acknowledgment that a theory is wrong doesn't translate into the same urgency as a real anomaly demanding explanation. It draws on a Zen dialogue about conviction and quotes Eliezer Yudkowsky's fictional 'beisutsukai' story about physicists who failed to overturn quantum mechanics despite knowing something was off. The author admits the essay never fully came together but explores the gap between knowing something is wrong and having the drive to fix it.