Michael Sevel

Yup, I think your perspective might be corrupted. Those who work for these entities and find it personally useful and flippin awesome and whatever don’t seem to do well at taking seriously the massive potential downsides. This strikes me as a combination of ignorance resulting from motivated reasoning and straight up bad faith engagement. I know you will disagree but it’s the only way I can make sense of how otherwise smart people do so badly at basic cost benefit analysis in this case. And yeah I think ordinary people who are anti-AI are doing much better at seeing the basic moral situation than all these AI alignment geniuses. And it’s not just some populist thing. It’s literally almost everyone once you step out into the real world and out of these techno-optimist echo chambers you must be in. Even the “alignment and safety” people are absurdly credulous. It’s a bit rich (pun intended) to hear about good faith engagement while I’m repeatedly engaging with people who are getting $$$ with no disclosure, not to mention the bots on this platform who are doing the bidding of Big AI. People are like ‘it saves me so much time with my coding and emails and admin tasks look how cool.’ Also we will solve cancer and abundance and mortality! Koolaid techno-optimism living in la la land with respect to how power and wealth and autocracy will actually make use of this technology. Meanwhile whole generations are being pacified and zombified and we are walking into unthinkable horrors with AI warfare, cyberterrorism and cybercrime, AI enhanced despotism, AI enhanced electioneering and manipulation, sloppy displacement and enshittification, and increasing tech-driven sociopolitical inequality. Also awful distortions in work, art, human relationships, creativity, intellectual development, and meaning. I also think we absolutely should be seriously thinking about de-teching and taking a much more cautious approach to social embrace of new technology. I make some of that case here: static1.squarespace.com/stat…