Comment by keybored
8 hours ago
> Here’s the thing about these safety justifications: I think they work because, to Anthropic, they aren’t justifications. The company really believes that they are the only ones who believe in super intelligence, and thus are the only ones who are sufficiently concerned about the dangers. That excuses decision after decision, policy after policy, and confrontation after confrontation that, to people on the outside, look like a bizarre combination of cynicism and naiveté.
I really dislike this belief (that has at least been expressed here) by some that X is okay because they-really-believe-it. This has a real Road to Hell stank on it.
It is incredibly convenient when your predictions or supposed beliefs go south. Well, we really believed that we were doing it for the betterment of human kind. And we really believed that X was an existential threat that was inevitable in which case we had to step up and do it because we we the only good guy ideologues. So sorry but not sorry.
I also don’t care if commenters know rank-and-file on the inside that “really believe it” as well. Not for one second.
The problem is when people use "we really believe it" as an excuse to do harm, which has not actually occurred here. Anthropic is not committing violence, they're not defrauding the population. They're sticking to both morality and the rules.
So... what, you just don't trust anyone good? Would it be better to pull in a health insurance CEO? They're happy to watch people die for profits, no concerns at all about them pulling a "greater good" card because they're in it for entirely selfish reasons.
I think the second the company starts to classify "competition" as mis-use... the whole "they're not committing harm" line sort of goes out the window.
Modern society is built on the idea that competition is required from companies, and we seem to be exiting that age into a new world of monolithic, monopolistic, mega-corps. Personally, I find that a real route to dystopia.
Where do you draw the line here?
What happens when your car stops working because you're driving a tesla, but you're working on EVs for Honda or Ford?
What happens when your macbook stops working, because you decided to commit to changes to ARM software, or RISC-V?
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And before you dismiss those, this is literally what Anthropic is doing TODAY. Using their tools to develop competing tools is something they classify as mis-use, and shut you down for doing.
Personally, I just can't accept that as a valid moral stance. Wonderfully successful, abusive, and dystopian? Absolutely. Moral? FUCK NO.
When tools turn themselves off because the manufacturer has decided it doesn't like how you're using them... you're a slave with no autonomy.
... you're perfectly welcome to compete with them, they're just not willing to provide their own product for that purpose. I also can't buy the schematics for Intel's latest chips, the source code for Windows, or a rocket from SpaceX to disassemble and study.
Like, there's a very critical point where you are asking to use their servers to directly compete with them.
This has been normal for somewhere between "decades" and "the entire history of commerce"
Incomparable domains. People routinely suffer illness. We can compare outcomes. These ideologues are building something completely unprecedented which, according to themselves apparently, can go paperclip-rogue if one is not careful. So the worst case is unprecedented. Then there is the more mundane matter of heating up the economy, something which also has no one blameworthy until any such supposed bubble actually pops.
> So... what, you just don't trust anyone good?
The baseline here is apparently that they are good, I’m just supposed to trust and shut up?
No, I'm saying they have an actual track record that you can evaluate, and if you do so you will see that they have killed approximately zero people, etc. etc.
Or even just propose an alternative: who has a better track record, here? Who DO you trust?