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Comment by c0nducktr

3 days ago

Claiming your product increases the risk of extinction doesn't sound like something someone would do if it were just for fiduciary duty.

Consider the amount of debt they have piled up. If you don't believe your company can lice up to said debt or the current valuation, and if you do believe fear can lead to government capture that would protect your company from said liabilities, fiduciary liability would incentivize you to push the extinction risk narrative.

It’s something you would do if you were desperate for regulatory capture to make competitors go away

Read it as "please regulate us so we have a plausible explanation of why we're missing our growth/revenue projections by several orders of magnitude"

"Our product is so amazingly powerful that it just might result in the extinction of the human race."

A lot of people will only hear half of that sentence. Semantically speaking.

  • The old "might end the human race" trick used by cynical promoters throughout history

    If only investors and buyers weren't so vulnerable to the "might kill you and everyone you ever cared about" ploy

    • "Yes, the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders!" has been a meme for over a decade.

      3 replies →

Ok.

So… follow out your own line of thinking. Altman and Dario and whoever is at Google are all saying the same thing, and are all required to make moves better for business…

Scaring tue gov into regulation - is good for business.

Another mark in the “they clearly want regulatory capture” column.

If their activities materially increase the probability of human extinction and this poses a risk of potential loss to shareholders then they must disclose it.

  • If their activities materially increase the probability of human extinction, is there any reason that they should not be treated as invading aliens, or doomsday apocalypse-cult terrorists?

    Like, why on Earth would anyone tolerate someone in the same train car playing with a grenade?

    • I dunno, we share an earth with North Korea who has nukes... which perfectly fits your "same train car playing with a grenade" analogy, but we don't do anything about it.

      Are you gonna continue to tolerate it? Or are you gonna stop them from playing with grenades in this train car we call earth?

    • In my opinion, no; but they are now getting in bed (Metaphorically) with people who see their software as potential means to "beat China" or "beat Iran" and together they are weaving a very tangled Pandora's box of worms

The "increases the risk of extinction" bit is 100% marketing BS that they're spewing to pump up their stock prices and encourage the government to shutout foreign competition (who would use this ability against the USA, of course ).

They've played you like a fiddle.