TinyTimmyTokyo

In a recent Hard Fork (Hard Hork?) episode, Casey Newton and Kevin Roose described attending the recent "The Curve" conference -- a conference in Berkeley organized and attended mostly by our very best friends. When asked about the most memorable session he attended at this conference, Casey said:

That would have been a session called If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, which was hosted by Eliezer Yudkowski. Eliezer is sort of the original doomer. For a couple of decades now, he has been warning about the prospects of super intelligent AI.

His view is that there is almost no scenario in which we could build a super intelligence that wouldn't either enslave us or hurt us, kill all of us, right? So he's been telling people from the beginning, we should probably just not build this. And so you and I had a chance to sit in with him.

People fired a bunch of questions at him. And we should say, he's a really polarizing figure, and I think is sort of on one extreme of this debate. But I think he was also really early to understanding a lot of harms that have bit by bit started to materialize.

And so it was fascinating to spend an hour or so sitting in a room and hearing him make his case.

[...]

Yeah, my case for taking these folks seriously, Kevin, is that this is a community that, over a decade ago, started to make a lot of predictions that just basically came true, right? They started to look at advancements in machine learning and neural networks and started to connect the dots. And they said, hey, before too long, we're going to get into a world where these models are incredibly powerful.

And all that stuff just turned out to be true. So, that's why they have credibility with me, right? Everything they believe, you know, we could hit some sort of limit that they didn't see coming.

Their model of the world could sort of fall apart. But as they have updated it bit by bit, and as these companies have made further advancements and they've built new products, I would say that this model of the world has basically held so far. And so, if nothing else, I think we have to keep this group of folks in mind as we think about, well, what is the next phase of AI going to look like for all of us?

Excerpt:

A new study published on Thursday in The American Journal of Psychiatry suggests that dosage may play a role. It found that among people who took high doses of prescription amphetamines such as Vyvanse and Adderall, there was a fivefold increased risk of developing psychosis or mania for the first time compared with those who weren’t taking stimulants.

Perhaps this explains some of what goes on at LessWrong and in other rationalist circles.

Maybe she was there to give Moldbug some relationship advice.

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.”

In her sentencing submission to the judge in the FTX trial, Barbara Fried argues that her son is just a misunderstood altruist, who doesn't deserve to go to prison for very long.

Excerpt:

One day, when he was about twelve, he popped out of his room to ask me a question about an argument made by Derik Parfit, a well-known moral philosopher. As it happens, | am quite familiar with the academic literature Parfi’s article is a part of, having written extensively on related questions myself. His question revealed a depth of understanding and critical thinking that is not all that common even among people who think about these issues for a living. ‘What on earth are you reading?” I asked. The answer, it turned out, was he was working his way through the vast literature on utiitarianism, a strain of moral philosophy that argues that each of us has a strong ethical obligation to live so as to alleviate the suffering of those less fortunate than ourselves. The premises of utilitarianism obviously resonated strongly with what Sam had already come to believe on his own, but gave him a more systematic way to think about the problem and connected him to an online community of like-minded people deeply engaged in the same intellectual and moral journey.

Yeah, that "online community" we all know and love.

Molly White is best known for shining a light on the silliness and fraud that are cryptocurrency, blockchain and Web3. This essay may be a sign that she's shifting her focus to our sneerworthy friends in the extended rationalism universe. If so, that's an excellent development. Molly's great.