It says he actually converted to Judaism during college, open question how formally, but he certainly acted the part, kippah and all.
It feels like it would be genuinely hard to discern where the gaslighting stops and the self delusion begins with this guy.
Love how the most recent post in the AI2027 blog starts with an admonition to please don't do terrorism:
We may only have 2 years left before humanity’s fate is sealed!
Despite the urgency, please do not pursue extreme uncooperative actions. If something seems very bad on common-sense ethical views, don’t do it.
Most of the rest is run of the mill EA type fluff such as here's a list of influential professions and positions you should insinuate yourself in, but failing that you can help immanentize the eschaton by spreading the word and giving us money.
(No spoiler tags because it's just background lore for Dune that's very tangential to the main plot)
Dune - after catastrophic wars between humans and AIs, computers are forbidden.
That's a retcon from the incredibly shit Dune-quel books from like 15 years after the original author had died. The first Dune was written well before computers as we know them would come in vogue, and the Butlerian Jihad was meant to be a sweeping cultural revolution against the stranglehold that automated decision-making had achieved over society, fought not against off-brand terminators but the entrenched elites that monopolized access to the setting's equivalent to AI.
The inciting incident semi-canonically (via the Dune Encyclopedia) I think was some sort of robo-nurse casually euthanizing Serena Butler's newborn baby, because of some algorithmic verdict that keeping it alive didn't square with optimal utilitarian calculus.
tl;dr: The Butlerian Jihad originally seemed to be way more about against-the-walling the altmans and the nadellas and undoing the societal damage done by the proliferation of sfba rationalism, than it was about fighting epic battles against AI controlled mechs.
He claims he was explaining what others believe not what he believes
Others as in specifically his co-writer for AI2027 Daniel Kokotlajo, the actual ex-OpenAI researcher.
I'm pretty annoyed at having this clip spammed to several different subreddits, with the most inflammatory possible title, out of context, where the context is me saying "I disagree that this is a likely timescale but I'm going to try to explain Daniel's position" immediately before. The reason I feel able to explain Daniel's position is that I argued with him about it for ~2 hours until I finally had to admit it wasn't completely insane and I couldn't find further holes in it.
Pay no attention to this thing we just spent two hours exhaustively discussing that I totally wasn't into, it's not really relevant context.
Also the title is inflammatory only in the context of already knowing him for a ridiculous AI doomer, otherwise it's fine. Inflammatory would be calling the video economically illiterate bald person thinks evaluations force-buy car factories, China having biomedicine research is like Elon running SpaceX .
Seriously, don't generate an array unless explicitly asked for it. Please.
Peak prompt engineering right there.
In todays ACX comment spotlight, Elon-anons urge each other to trust the plan:
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Just had a weird thought. Say you're an eccentric almost-trillionare, richest person in history. You have a boyhood dream you cannot shake: get to Mars. As much as you've accomplished, this goal still eludes you. You come to the conclusion that only a nation-state -- one of the big ones -- can accomplish this.
Wouldn't co-opting a superpower nation-state be your next move?
In a completely unexpected turn of events this new experiment in mainstreaming eugenics is being currently boosted by siskind.
There's also the Julian Assange connection, so we can probably blame him for Trump being president as well.
To have a dead simple UI where you, a person with no technical expertise, can ask in plain language for the data you want in the way you want them presented, along with some basic analysis that you can tell it to make it sound important. Then you tell it to turn it into an email in the style of your previous emails, send it, and take a 50min coffee break. All this allegedly with no overhead besides paying a subscription and telling your IT people to point the thing to the thing.
I mean, it would be quite something if transformers could do all that, instead of raising global temperatures to synthesize convincing looking but highly suspect messaging at best while being prone to delirium at worst.
Google pivoting to selling shovels for the AI gold rush in the form of data tools should be pretty viable if they commit to it, I hadn't thought if it that way.
I didn’t know the “eu” in “eugenics” came from greek.
Further fun facts: Eugene (the name) is greek for noble born, but since like most people we did away with nobles a long time ago now eugenic just means to have good manners, so when the modern term 'eugenics' came to Greece it was regreekified into eugonics (ευγονική).
Meanwhile on /r/programmingcirclejerk sneering hn:
transcription
OP: We keep talking about “AI replacing coders,” but the real shift might be that coding itself stops looking like coding. If prompts become the de facto way to create applications/developing systems in the future, maybe programming languages will just be baggage we’ll need to unlearn.Comment: The future of coding is jerking off while waiting for AI managers to do your project for you, then retrying the prompt when they get it wrong. If gooning becomes the de facto way to program, maybe expecting to cum will be baggage we'll need to unlearn.