Comment by ben_w
9 hours ago
I'm reminded of a comic about global warming, "What if it's a big hoax and we create a better world for nothing?": https://climateactionreserve.org/blog/2012/08/31/environment...
"What if AI doom is all fear-mongering, and we create AI less prone to make up dangerous stuff or mistake buggy goals for real ones" (which is what alignment is) "for nothing?"
Even if Yudkowsky is autistic, you're muddling the condition. Autistic people have a *practical* intolerance of uncertainty in the moment (everything unexpected from a noise to a missed turn can be a jump-scare in their day-to-day activities), but often they're absolutely fine with intellectual uncertainty, unconventional ideas, abstract ambiguity, nonconformity, etc. Indeed, one of Yudkowsky's main things is Bayesianism, i.e. being precise about uncertainty.
Yudkowsky's reported P(doom) is somewhere around 90%, which is very much in the realm of "we might eventually be able to figure this out, *but we're not even close to ready so for the love of everything slow down so we can figure this all out*"; the book title comes from a long tradition of authors noticing you need to beat readers over the head with your point for them to notice it.
Anthropic (like at least also OpenAI), appears to think they can solve the problems that Yudkowsky has found. They're a lot more optimistic than him, but they take these problems seriously.
For his work on AI, Hinton got a Nobel prize in Physics, a Turing Award, the inaugural Rumelhart Prize, a Princess of Asturias Award, a VinFuture Prize, and a Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering. Calling him a "patron saint" of "doomerism" is like calling Paul Krugman (Nobel laureate in Economics) a patron saint of "Trump Derangement Syndrome" on the basis of what he says in his YouTube channel: a smart person's considered opinions are worth listening to even if you have not got time for the details, because you can be sure someone else has considered the details and will absolutely be responding to even an i missing a dot.
A Pascal's mugging would be more like S-risk (S stands for suffering) than doom risk: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk_of_astronomical_suffering
Much like a lot of LLM usage burns tokens so that mediocre people can hallucinate that they're doing something brilliant, Yudkowskyism is just a lot of empty verbiage for the purpose of building a sex cult around a plump gnome. Reusing his nonsensical and poorly defined terms but failing to get the benefit of the sex cult really misses the point of the entire exercise.
The problem is that effort spent to reduce the "risk" of creating an evil god who tortures us all for the rest of time doesn't actually produce outcomes that reduces the risk of things like widespread job loss or hyperaggregation of influence and money.
"Oh we'll at least get some side benefit" is not actually what is coming out of the endlessly circular forums talking about the apocalypse.
Even if there was no overlap*, that would be like criticising the green movement for not focussing on working hours and pay like trade unions do.
Different people can care about different things; it's good that each of us gets to focus on what motivates us, rather than all chasing the same thing, because when multiple teams do all chase the same thing typically only the best few of them actually make a difference.
* as it happens, there is some overlap. Knowing more about how a narrow utility function behaves outside distribution is useful for both capabilities and safety. We're not even at the stage of being able to make AI not kill random subsets of the users with bad advice, nor reliably prevent users from falling into delusions of grandeur, let alone giving AI a reliable sense of liberty and the pursuit of happiness to maintain.
> I'm reminded of a comic about global warming, "What if it's a big hoax and we create a better world for nothing?": https://climateactionreserve.org/blog/2012/08/31/environment...
The people who've made the biggest contribution to creating a better world over the last 50 years have been the Chinese; powered largely by coal and petroleum. And in one of the most ironic results in the 21st century, they're now the leaders in solar panel production on the back of the largest investment in fossil fuel energy in global history.
The comic ran into the same problem as the climate change movement in general - they proposed ideas that generally made people worse off. And if measured in terms of CO2 emissions achieved nothing except pushing wealth creation to Asia. Which, in fairness, is probably appreciated by the Asians.
That cartoon was drawn at the very end of 2009.
BYD had release the first plug in hybrid the year before.
The Beijing Olynpics had made air pollution a hot topic in China in 2007-8.
Wind power had accelerated after their 2005 Renewable Energy Law.
Solar panel production rose around this time, taking over the market from European manufacturers when the Financial Crisis hit and they pulled back investments.
So China at that time, was doing all the things on the cartoon's presentation list, and has benefitted greatly from them.
Many people in Europe want to see green energy transition. But no transition is happening in China.
" “We see addition, not transition,” said Yasheng Huang, a professor of global economics and management at the MIT Sloan School. “China is building alternative sources of energy as well as fossil energy sources, simultaneously. In terms of the global footprint on CO2, China is emitting twice as much as Europe and the United States. I don’t think there’s a transition going on.” "
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2026/02/yes-china-has...
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Something that has been largely forgotten about is that it used to be routine to see pictures of smoggy Chinese and Asian cities, this was a problem for them that they solved. I can't help thinking we can't get this kind of preventative action on any large scale, we need to have severe issues first and that's not accounting for longer term/cumulative effects.
"Over the past years, the government has implemented various methods to improve the air quality in Northern China. Sandstorms, which were quite common 15 years ago, are now rarely seen in Beijing’s spring thanks to afforestation projects on China’s northern borders. The license-plate lottery system was introduced in Beijing to restrict the growth of private vehicles. Large trucks were not allowed to enter certain areas in Beijing. Above all, the coal consumption in Beijing has been restricted by shutting down industrial sites and improving heating systems. Beijing’s efforts to improve air quality has also been highly praised by the UN as a successful model for other cities. However, there is also criticism pointing out that the improvement of Beijing’s air quality is based on the sacrifice of surrounding provinces (including Hebei), as many factories were moved from Beijing to other regions."
https://www.statista.com/statistics/690823/china-annual-pm25...
CO2 emissions are a different kind of "pollution". They are not visible and diffuse quickly over the whole Earth.
The US had the same issue and fixed it through federal and state environmental regulation. It just happened in the US 100 years before it happened in china Heavy pollution is what lead to the environmental movement that started back in the 60s and that led to the creation of the EPA and whole slate of state and federal regulation that dramatically improved air/water quality in the US. It was a slow process that took a ton of work to build a movement of support, but it can be done.
We can actually address problems when we want to. It's just pretty slow and requires people to actually give a shit and put in the effort to build support.
Mm, there is that.
The unfortunate comparable here is that all the people who care about making sure their AI is safe, regardless of what they mean by that, are beaten to the market by the people who don't.