logoalt Hacker News

JumpCrisscrosstoday at 10:39 AM3 repliesview on HN

> generally if people get angry there is a reason other than "things are changing"

Silicon Valley’s leaders have been one upping themselves on messaging to the public that they’re building a doomsday device. And then, bewilderingly to the outside, all of us who read through that bullshit then appear to merrily go along with the apparent suicide pact.

Most Gen Z, it appears, can also see through the bullshit. But about a third of them taking the message sincerely seems par for the course, and as you said, I wouldn’t assume it’s just aversion to change.


Replies

rcarrtoday at 1:19 PM

The thing is what is the alternative option? If you don't build it, then your rivals do. All of your electronic and military systems then become compromised because your rivals can exploit or negate them one way or another via AI. So you have to build it regardless. It's a suicide pact the same way nuclear weapons are a suicide pact but if you don't have them then you're at the mercy of anyone else who does.

ben_wtoday at 11:02 AM

> Silicon Valley’s leaders have been one upping themselves on messaging to the public that they’re building a doomsday device. And then, bewilderingly to the outside, all of us who read through that bullshit then appear to merrily go along with the apparent suicide pact.

What I can't decide, for Anthropic, OpenAI, and xAI, is if the part which is BS is that they don't take the doom risk seriously at all*, or if the BS is that despite taking it seriously they think they are best placed to actually solve the doom. Or both.

Meta at least it is obvious they don't even understand the potential of AI, neither for good nor ill.

Google and Microsoft seem to be treating it as normal software, with normal risks. If they have doom opinions, they are drowned out by all the other news going on right now.

* xAI obviously doesn't care about reputational risk, porn, trolling, propaganda, but this isn't the same question as doom.

lostmsutoday at 11:09 AM

> Most Gen Z, it appears, can also see through the bullshit.

Where did you get this notion? Did you hallucinate it?

show 1 reply