First, what an incredible article. Just an extremely concise and clear explanation of all of the problems with AI right now.

Second, wow, the list of signatories is like a whos-who of mathematicians.

Third, I love the clearly intentional use of ‘alignment/misalignment’ language, applied to targeting the entire industry instead of AI in particular. I’ve said in the past that optimizers are substrate agnostic. Companies and governments can be misaligned, just in the same way AI can.

Fourth, I'm not sure that we can stop the optimization machines. Not the LLMs, I mean the incentives that lead to companies implementing dark patterns, lying about addiction, securing effective monopolies through downright shady behavior, and generally trying to jailbreak the system instead of improve it