No group of people is screaming louder than the TESCREALists about the risk of human extinction. Yet many of them simultaneously ENDORSE the extinction of our species! (3,200 words)
Am I the only one noticing that these wankers are all men? Who look like they have no pets, have not been outdoors in years and couldn’t keep a houseplant alive? TESCREALism seems to me like the latest technological iteration of patriarchal male self-hatred foisted upon humanity. These people should not be in charge of anything ever.
Exactly. Notice how it’s a community largely populated by wealthy techbros who have no use for the rest of us. These are the same wankers who want our national protected lands to build their own nation states to govern autocratically because they believe that’s what we want-though we don’t know it yet. I’d say you can’t make this shit up, but I can’t escape from Loki’s diatribes in The Avengers. It would be hilarious if it wasn’t so dangerously sad.
I remember a time when someone pitched an app to another group of people, and one of audience went, “Oh, so basically you want to make a replacement to do all the things your mother used to do for you.”
Thank you for clearing the fog around this entire thing. It is insane that some people really hold these thoughts. I have always wondered at that segment of this infamous Peter Thiel interview when he's asked if he would want the human race to endure and he hesitates to answer. I thought surely people misunderstood the reason for his hesitation. But reading this article, it all makes sense now.
I suppose we do need Ai safety research. It is something we do have in common with the AI Doomers. But the fact that our species extinction is offered up as a trade-off for anything makes me doubt the saneness of these people.
I definitely agree with you on your view of AI: I also believe and want it to be used for good, I think it can be used for great advancements in the medical and mathematical fields. However right now, (aside from maybe AlphaFold) it’s not being used for that!
It’s being used for students to cheat there way through school and never learning anything, people using it as companions and therapists even though it isn’t really good at either unless you’re (I hate to say it) mentally-ill, and of course being used to generate AI-porn.
Additionally, we waste so much resources on trying to create AGI or ASI, or some similarly conscious being even though it’s clear that’s not happening anytime soon. If we could move beyond this paradigm, I think AI can be used for great things…but until people stop trying to use it to take away jobs from humans or it’s stopped being used by the TESCREALists, I won’t be using it anytime soon.
Interesting, and way over my head. What are the numbers of TESCREALists and how far away is their envisioned future? Who/how/what will power this future? Pretty crazy these folks are getting paid.
They’re getting paid and subsidized by US tax payers. Their data centers are largely paid for by government subsidies. The insane amount of water (they claim they can only use fresh, clean drinking water-no recycling it) and energy data centers require are largely paid for by citizens who have seen increases in utility bills. Governments are not requiring remediation plans so when, as predicted, this whole endeavor self destructs in 2-3 years, it will be the burden of property tax payers to clean up the site.
All of this is to make sure we beat China in the race to be biggest idiots. Meanwhile, China has built less than 500 data centers to the more than 5,000 in the U.S. we are racing a country that is strolling! You know what China is building enthusiastically? Renewables! We’ve been sold a narrative that we can’t let China beat us on AI, while China has already moved on from AI.
So, to better answer your question, depending on which prediction you want to believe, AI will self implode anytime between this month and late 2027. Btw, it will take our economy with it, which is why the techbros who are eagerly purchasing our president are already discussing potential government bailouts.
My sense of David Kreuger, having talked with him a bit, is that – compared to others in the rationality community – he's pretty grounded in terms of wanting people to live their lives and not assuming that some people are supreme in their thinking.
So in his case, when he says 'human extinction', I think he literally means the extinction of the current human species.
It's frustrating because the way transhumanists redefine 'humans' and 'humanity', it could mean everything from radically genetically engineered IV babies to emulations of scanned human brains on cold calculating computer chips.
Also, I dislike the term 'superintelligent AI'. Not only does it have eugenics connotations and boosts the hype, but it hides the agenda of the people jostling to develop machines that can do 'good enough work' at scale. It's the human replacement agenda.
As I was reading through the entire story about all of these people who were so gung-ho about bringing in some kind of new digital mind into existence, and then remember periods in my life where I wondered why I came into existence into this vale of tears and I was like… you know, that sort of shit makes me hesitant to bring forth actual human children into existence, much less some kind of “mind-children”, to borrow their parlance.
Like, what's going to happen to you when your Digital Sapience points at you accusingly and tells you that they didn't ask to be born?
The greatest danger, and the greatest tragedy, will be humans acquiescing to technological transhumanism: surrendering themselves prematurely, giving up their humanness before having explored it fully.
The impulse toward transhumanism is not illegitimate. It is valid, necessary even for the evolution of our species. It is a primordial impulse that naturally rises to the surface once the mundane struggles of survival have been conquered, as it does among the billionaire techno-utopists. But the path being taken is misguided and will end in tragedy, whether or not AGI dreams are fulfilled.
To write off humanity prematurely is already a grave disservice. To then lead it down a path of ruin is the deeper tragedy, one we must begin to reverse.
There is another way: a natural transhumanism that does not rely on external technological enhancement.
And the moral cowardice of this writer’s grandiose self-conception: have we seen it saying anything about the horrific slaughter, potentially genocide in Sudan, funded by US allies? Too dark a question for it to address I suspect.
Thanks for this very informative analysis. I come to the conclusion that this is all a gigantic pile of horse shit dreamed up as a “revenge of the nerds”, only these nerds have stumbled upon billions of dollars so that we may have to worry about how they vent their resentments toward humanity (the one and only). Yudkowsky definitely fits the part (I would recommend he abandons mental masturbation and gives the natural one a try - much safer for the rest of us). On the other hand, look at Bezos, another archetypal nerd but one who has successfully transitioned to cool kid. In comparison to accelerationists and doomers, his gutting of the Washington Post or his naked bribing of Trump seem reasonable, even benevolent. Oh well.
Am I the only one noticing that these wankers are all men? Who look like they have no pets, have not been outdoors in years and couldn’t keep a houseplant alive? TESCREALism seems to me like the latest technological iteration of patriarchal male self-hatred foisted upon humanity. These people should not be in charge of anything ever.
Exactly. Notice how it’s a community largely populated by wealthy techbros who have no use for the rest of us. These are the same wankers who want our national protected lands to build their own nation states to govern autocratically because they believe that’s what we want-though we don’t know it yet. I’d say you can’t make this shit up, but I can’t escape from Loki’s diatribes in The Avengers. It would be hilarious if it wasn’t so dangerously sad.
💯 % agree!
Thanks for reminding me of my new favorite word-wanker!
It’s such a great word
I remember a time when someone pitched an app to another group of people, and one of audience went, “Oh, so basically you want to make a replacement to do all the things your mother used to do for you.”
I still think about that.
These people all have serious mommy issues.
Thank you for clearing the fog around this entire thing. It is insane that some people really hold these thoughts. I have always wondered at that segment of this infamous Peter Thiel interview when he's asked if he would want the human race to endure and he hesitates to answer. I thought surely people misunderstood the reason for his hesitation. But reading this article, it all makes sense now.
I suppose we do need Ai safety research. It is something we do have in common with the AI Doomers. But the fact that our species extinction is offered up as a trade-off for anything makes me doubt the saneness of these people.
I definitely agree with you on your view of AI: I also believe and want it to be used for good, I think it can be used for great advancements in the medical and mathematical fields. However right now, (aside from maybe AlphaFold) it’s not being used for that!
It’s being used for students to cheat there way through school and never learning anything, people using it as companions and therapists even though it isn’t really good at either unless you’re (I hate to say it) mentally-ill, and of course being used to generate AI-porn.
Additionally, we waste so much resources on trying to create AGI or ASI, or some similarly conscious being even though it’s clear that’s not happening anytime soon. If we could move beyond this paradigm, I think AI can be used for great things…but until people stop trying to use it to take away jobs from humans or it’s stopped being used by the TESCREALists, I won’t be using it anytime soon.
Interesting, and way over my head. What are the numbers of TESCREALists and how far away is their envisioned future? Who/how/what will power this future? Pretty crazy these folks are getting paid.
They’re getting paid and subsidized by US tax payers. Their data centers are largely paid for by government subsidies. The insane amount of water (they claim they can only use fresh, clean drinking water-no recycling it) and energy data centers require are largely paid for by citizens who have seen increases in utility bills. Governments are not requiring remediation plans so when, as predicted, this whole endeavor self destructs in 2-3 years, it will be the burden of property tax payers to clean up the site.
All of this is to make sure we beat China in the race to be biggest idiots. Meanwhile, China has built less than 500 data centers to the more than 5,000 in the U.S. we are racing a country that is strolling! You know what China is building enthusiastically? Renewables! We’ve been sold a narrative that we can’t let China beat us on AI, while China has already moved on from AI.
So, to better answer your question, depending on which prediction you want to believe, AI will self implode anytime between this month and late 2027. Btw, it will take our economy with it, which is why the techbros who are eagerly purchasing our president are already discussing potential government bailouts.
My sense of David Kreuger, having talked with him a bit, is that – compared to others in the rationality community – he's pretty grounded in terms of wanting people to live their lives and not assuming that some people are supreme in their thinking.
So in his case, when he says 'human extinction', I think he literally means the extinction of the current human species.
It's frustrating because the way transhumanists redefine 'humans' and 'humanity', it could mean everything from radically genetically engineered IV babies to emulations of scanned human brains on cold calculating computer chips.
Also, I dislike the term 'superintelligent AI'. Not only does it have eugenics connotations and boosts the hype, but it hides the agenda of the people jostling to develop machines that can do 'good enough work' at scale. It's the human replacement agenda.
As I was reading through the entire story about all of these people who were so gung-ho about bringing in some kind of new digital mind into existence, and then remember periods in my life where I wondered why I came into existence into this vale of tears and I was like… you know, that sort of shit makes me hesitant to bring forth actual human children into existence, much less some kind of “mind-children”, to borrow their parlance.
Like, what's going to happen to you when your Digital Sapience points at you accusingly and tells you that they didn't ask to be born?
The greatest danger, and the greatest tragedy, will be humans acquiescing to technological transhumanism: surrendering themselves prematurely, giving up their humanness before having explored it fully.
The impulse toward transhumanism is not illegitimate. It is valid, necessary even for the evolution of our species. It is a primordial impulse that naturally rises to the surface once the mundane struggles of survival have been conquered, as it does among the billionaire techno-utopists. But the path being taken is misguided and will end in tragedy, whether or not AGI dreams are fulfilled.
To write off humanity prematurely is already a grave disservice. To then lead it down a path of ruin is the deeper tragedy, one we must begin to reverse.
There is another way: a natural transhumanism that does not rely on external technological enhancement.
And the moral cowardice of this writer’s grandiose self-conception: have we seen it saying anything about the horrific slaughter, potentially genocide in Sudan, funded by US allies? Too dark a question for it to address I suspect.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cjel2nn22z9o
Thanks for this very informative analysis. I come to the conclusion that this is all a gigantic pile of horse shit dreamed up as a “revenge of the nerds”, only these nerds have stumbled upon billions of dollars so that we may have to worry about how they vent their resentments toward humanity (the one and only). Yudkowsky definitely fits the part (I would recommend he abandons mental masturbation and gives the natural one a try - much safer for the rest of us). On the other hand, look at Bezos, another archetypal nerd but one who has successfully transitioned to cool kid. In comparison to accelerationists and doomers, his gutting of the Washington Post or his naked bribing of Trump seem reasonable, even benevolent. Oh well.