Comment by ForHackernews
3 hours ago
I'm not sure how else we are to interpret the behavior of the AI doomers & the AI developers (who are frequently the same people)
3 hours ago
I'm not sure how else we are to interpret the behavior of the AI doomers & the AI developers (who are frequently the same people)
This was fun games until their fictional machine god started actually getting very intelligent.
There is a fairly specific definition of what a cult is, and just being publicly worried about an existential risk isn’t that.
Would you at least concede that the Zizian offshoot was a cult? They murdered multiple people!
Rationalism has spawned many offshoot cults which are genuine and in some cases dangerous cults, but rationalism and Effective Altruism are not themselves cults.
Most people among both ideologies have long believed in the arrival of a machine demigod of sorts, but I kind of am skeptical of the notion that there are any tech people who have not always held similar beliefs in the long run. Like, all the people reading this: you think in a thousand years from now humans are going to be doing most labor? Obviously far, far, far smarter machines will have unimaginably changed things by then, and/or we'll all be gone.
The difference is most people in tech have historically thought it's maybe a century or three away, while the rationalists think it's a decade or two away (and also thought it would be 2020s - 2040s even decades prior to now).
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If you all believe in the same prophecy and hang out at the same orgies together, I'm willing to call that a "cult", at least in the colloquial sense.