Hank Green and the fantastical tales of God AIs

It is noteworthy that negative eugenics was embraced by not just German fascists but progressives and liberals elsewhere in Europe and North America [16]. As Bashford and Levine (2010) observe, “the optimism of eugenics, and its aspiration to apply scientific ideas actively, was among the reasons it so frequently attracted progressives and liberals”

Consequently, the new eugenics claims to be “liberal,” emphasizing the freedom of parents to decide whether, and how, to produce “enhanced” offspring (Agar, 1998). However, some philosophers have argued that in practice this new, “liberal” eugenics — sometimes dubbed “neo-eugenics” — would have the very same liberty-undermining consequences as the eugenics programs of the twentieth century (Koch, 2020; Sparrow, 2011). And while many second-wave eugenicists claim that their version of eugenics has shaken itself free of the discriminatory attitudes that animated first-wave eugenicists [22], we will see in the next section that this is dubious.

In 1996, Bostrom argued that “Blacks are more stupid than whites,” lamenting that he couldn’t say this in public without being vilified as a racist, and then mentioned the N-word (Torres, 2023a).

Discriminatory attitudes. The same discriminatory attitudes that animated first-wave eugenics are pervasive within the TESCREAL literature and community. For example, the Extropian listserv contains numerous examples of alarming remarks by notable figures in the TESCREAL movement.

Also in 1996, Yudkowsky expressed concerns about superintelligence, writing: “Superintelligent robots = Aryans, humans = Jews. The only thing preventing this is sufficiently intelligent robots”

More recently, Yudkowsky tweeted about IQs apparently dropping in Norway, although he added that the “effect appears within families, so it’s not due to immigration or dysgenic reproduction” — i.e., less intelligent foreigners immigrating to Norway or individuals with lower “intelligence” having more children

Internet personalities like Yudkowsky who have endorsed military strikes against data centers, if necessary, to stop a hypothetical AGI apocalypse

Goertzel later became director of research at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI), initially called the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, which was founded by Yudkowsky with more than US$1.6M in funding from the tech billionaire and fellow TESCREAList Peter Thiel

In what activists are calling “AI sweatshops,” thousands of young Kenyans are being hired to train artificial intelligence systems for global firms like US social media company Meta, OpenAI, Microsoft, Google and Amazon.

It's obvious at this point that humanity isn't going to solve the alignment problem, or even try very hard, or even go out with much of a fight.  Since survival is unattainable, we should shift the focus of our efforts to helping humanity die with with slightly more dignity.

Alan D. Attie describes its process as "to amplify uncertainties, cherry-pick experts, attack individual scientists, marginalize the traditional role of distinguished scientific bodies and get the media to report "both sides" of a manufactured controversy."[13]

Roger Irwin said:[36] Microsoft soon picked up the art of FUD from IBM, and throughout the '80s used FUD as a primary marketing tool, much as IBM had in the previous decade. They ended up out FUD-ing IBM themselves during the OS/2 vs Win3.1 years.

This strategy bears striking similarities to Microsoft's approach against open-source software in the late 1990s, where Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt (FUD) tactics were deployed to maintain market dominance.

In its latest proposal to the Trump administration, OpenAI wants companies that voluntarily share their models with the federal government to be shielded from state-level regulations.Yeah, you read that right. The company whose CEO was parading around the world asking for regulations now wants to get exempted from said regulations, especially copyright laws.

and that he’d be willing to sacrifice “all of humanity” to create god-like superintelligences wandering the universe.

Today, researchers call this the ELIZA effect: projecting human traits onto computer programs and overestimating their capabilities as a result.

He says this would mark an “existential threat” to humanity – despite acknowledging to the BBC that as recently as a few years ago most experts “thought it was just science fiction.”

models present plenty of concerns beyond the supposedly existential and science fictional ones Hinton is most preoccupied with, including everything from their environmental costs to how they’re already being deployed against marginalized populations today. But when CNN asked Hinton about those concerns in May 2023, he said they “weren’t as existentially serious” and thus not as worthy of his time.

Those who think we are living in the end times are less likely to say climate change is an extremely or very serious problem (51 percent) than those who do not believe this (62 percent).

Understanding this is a two-step process. First, we need to make sense of what’s behind this statement. The short answer concerns a cluster of ideologies that Dr. Timnit Gebru and I have called the “TESCREAL bundle.” The term is admittedly clunky, but the concept couldn’t be more important, because this bundle of overlapping movements and ideologies has become hugely influential among the tech elite.

TESCREALism — meaning the worldview that arises from this bundle — is simple enough: at its heart is a techno-utopian vision of the future in which we re-engineer humanity, colonize space, plunder the cosmos, and establish a sprawling intergalactic civilization full of trillions and trillions of “happy” people, nearly all of them “living” inside enormous computer simulations. In the process, all our problems will be solved, and eternal life will become a real possibility.

The uptick in lobbying work — and the policies CAIP and CAIS are pushing — could directly benefit top AI firms, said Suresh Venkatasubramanian, a professor at Brown University who co-authored a 2022 White House document that focused more on AI’s near-term risks, including its potential to undermine privacy or increase discrimination through biased screening tools.

The similarly named Center for AI Policy and Center for AI Safety both registered their first lobbyists in late 2023, raising the profile of a sprawling influence battle that’s so far been fought largely through think tanks and congressional fellowships.

Each nonprofit spent close to $100,000 on lobbying in the last three months of the year. The groups draw money from organizations with close ties to the AI industry like Open Philanthropy, financed by Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, and Lightspeed Grants, backed by Skype co-founder Jaan Tallinn.

Their message includes policies like CAIP’s call for legislation that would hold AI developers liable for “severe harms,” require permits to develop “high-risk” systems and empower regulators to “pause AI projects if they identify a clear emergency.”

“Why do the models give these attackers what they want 90% of the time but the rest of us have to deal with ass-kissing, stonewalling, and acid trips?”