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by bell-cot 278 days ago
"If Anyone Build IT..." is a cool-sounding trope. Which pushes lots of human emotional buttons. Making that trope a great thing to push, if you goal is to get ahead in our attention economy.

From my PoV, our "shortish-term profits are the ONLY metric that matters" global techno-capitalist system is vastly more dangerous than AI.
2 comments
hollerith 276 days ago
>if you goal is to get ahead in our attention economy.

If a person wants a reputation as smart and able to make accurate predictions, why would he focus most of his public statments on a prediction that if he is right, no one will find out definitively that he was right because everyone will be dead?

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bell-cot 276 days ago
Yes, other motives are possible. Though "get ahead in our attention economy" provides a strong positive feedback loop. And if the trope is very widely circulated, it will find and activate most of its potential Apostles - people who will both strongly believe it, and also zealously try to spread it.

Bigger picture - I see AI as just another bale of straw on the camel's back. Sure, it's possible that AI will end up looking like the fatal bale. But that could come from so much money being invested in AI that we get a global financial meltdown when the AI bubble bursts, leading to a nuclear WWIII.

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PaulHoule 277 days ago
... or "you can get ahead through telling people what they want to hear" or "people mistake dark personality traits for high agency", etc.

What gets me about 'rationalism' is how ahistorical it is. No reference to Korzybski or Teilhard de Chardin. There never was the movie Colossus the Forbin Project or the 1960s speculation that progress in computing would lead to accelerated progress in computing by an equation like

    dx    2
    -- = x 
    dt
all dreams that died when people realized that Simon's General Problem Solver wasn't useful, when SAT and P vs NP fomulated, the rise and fall of expert systems, logic giving way to databases, etc. It appeals though to the kind of young person who's family made a great fortune and wants to jump right into philanthropy or to the person who went to San Francisco because they felt marginalized someplace else and are looking for meaning living in the shadow of "Big Tech"
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hollerith 277 days ago
>No reference to Korzybski or Teilhard de Chardin

Pointing a search engine at site:lesswrong.com finds many references to either thinker.

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