alt Hacker NewsThis guy from Effective Altruism pivoted away from helping the poor to help try to control AI from being a terminator type entity and then pivoted to being, ah, its okay for it to be a terminator type entity.
> Holden Karnofsky, who co-founded the EA charity evaluator GiveWell, says that while he used to work on trying to help the poor, he switched to working on artificial intelligence because of the “stakes”:
> “The reason I currently spend so much time planning around speculative future technologies (instead of working on evidence-backed, cost-effective ways of helping low-income people today—which I did for much of my career, and still think is one of the best things to work on) is because I think the stakes are just that high.”
> Karnofsky says that artificial intelligence could produce a future “like in the Terminator movies” and that “AI could defeat all of humanity combined.” Thus stopping artificial intelligence from doing this is a very high priority indeed.
https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/2022/09/defective-altrui...
He is just giving everyone permission to do bad things by saying a lot of words around it.
Replies
> then pivoted to being, ah, its okay for it to be a terminator type entity.
Isn’t that the opposite of what he’s saying? He’s saying it could become that powerful, and given that possibility it’s incredibly important that we do whatever we can to gain more control of that scenario
Getting SBF vibes from this. "Earn to give" is an inherently flawed philosophy.
Effective altruism came from the "rationalist"
It was never about helping poor people.
For some reason, the rationalist movement and its offshoots are really pervasive in silicon valley. i don't see it much in the other tech cities.
Effective Altruism is such a beautiful term for a pretentious Karen that needs to wrap their selfish actions with moral superiority.
It's that perfect blend of I'm doing what everyone else are doing, and I'm better than everyone else.
Chefs' Kiss