I also feel a need to amass retirement levels of wealth right ASAP before this all comes crashing down, and then move to somewhere else away from this mess.
The only good way for me to do that is to keep working in AI, because nothing else that I have skills for pays that high.
You do not feel similarly to the resigning guy if what you are worried about is an economic crash from this not turning out
> move to somewhere else away from this mess
You do not feel similarly to the resigning guy if you think there is anywhere you could move to run away from what you are worried about
It's bizarre that your reply was nearly insta-[dead] and I can't reply to it directly.
My personal view of the modality of failure: I don't think AI will destroy humans, but rather functionally dismantle civilization as we know it; I think we will just increasingly become slaves to the systems they create and the world won't be run in human interests anymore (it already is not run in the bests interest of the non-ultra-wealthy, so it's really just an extension of that: I think the future will just start moving toward s/ultra-wealthy/AI/) and we will increasingly become more like worker ants.
2. I disagree, I think some countries of the world are more likely to value stability of the population than others. I think there are places that are likely to be more safe than others. Also, a notable side effect of current trade wars is that some countries may end up getting left out of a good chunk of the destruction.
All those who worked in AI still have the money they cashed out on, there might not be another opportunity to obtain generational wealth in such a short time again.
As another poster said, hating the player is acceptable, as is self-hate for the things we must do. We're all complex and can't all make the grand gestures, but I would hope people have dissonance about that, and maybe sit with it and speak to it like it's real * shrug*
I already chose a job that I believe is minimally harmful within the AI space. I work in an autonomous vehicle company which I believe puts safety first and is on track to reducing injuries and deaths to humans. This is not the thread where I wish to debate that premise, but that's just my belief so I'm happy to work towards it.
I realize that we are complicit in enabling Anthropic, OpenAI, NVIDIA, TSMC, et al. in the rest of the AI space.
I only have space to think about this so much. I still need to pay rent next month, and I don't have enough saved up to pay rent for the remaining several decades of my life.
I have mad respect for people who can actually throw away a shit ton of financial security for themselves and their families for something they believe in. It’s rare for a reason. Everyone has a price.
If you can get financial security without selling your soul, fewer people would do that, across every industry where selling your soul for security is possible.
My personal take is almost all capitalist enterprises are on a path to cause destruction to civilization. AI is not unique here, and every industry is "AI or die" right now.
As for short term survival, I don't have the option to just quit in protest without income, nor do I think that will be effective in accomplishing anything. If anything I will just pigeon-hole myself into becoming a worse future-victim of the system than I already would be.
> have no skills that would help you after the collapse
That's not what I said. I only have 1 high-paying skill that can help me buy that optionality, and that's software engineering. I don't know of anything else high-paying that I could study quick enough, and other high-paying industries including lawyers and doctors are also predatory in different ways. I don't think the alternatives are better.
As for post-collapse skills, I think the ultimate is just being able to live off the land and move to somewhere that has the right climate and natural resources for that. Moving to another country isn't logistically straightforward, but money can help remove some of those hurdles, both in terms of residence permits and in terms of buying land and housing. So the priority is still financial. The learnings happen in parallel.
> Seems like a better use of your time
Not looking for advice on time management advice. I'm only trying to protect my family's future by building optionality. My individual decisions aren't going to change what the system is doing.
If AI is going to do that, AI needs to at least get good enough to autonomously produce all the chips and energy it needs to execute. That seems like a pretty far way off, considering we don't even have robots that can fold laundry competently.
If AI exists but there are still humans producing chips for it, I don't think you would be able to say that civilization has been destroyed
I’m reacting to this
> I also feel a need to amass retirement levels of wealth right ASAP before this all comes crashing down, and then move to somewhere else away from this mess.
and further context is the WSJ story from yesterday discussing the resignation of anthropic engineers and another anthropic engineer who says it will “kill us all by the end of the decade”.
Essentially I continually hear the perspectives of people who work at AI labs. They frequently brag about escaping the “permanent underclass” and often rationalize ideas like “well better they be the ones in poverty and not me”.
I'm not this extreme, and don't wish for others to be in poverty.
But I do wish for myself and my family to not be in poverty or suffering.
If the system is designed for these to be in conflict, that's not something I have the power to change, beyond voting for the less-shitty of 2 shitty choices on a ballot. At the end of the day I will prioritize myself and my family, and I think that's natural for 99% of people.
We’re all humans, we have agency. We’re not some pachinko ball bouncing through life.
On the former: It kind of makes sense if they think they can convince regulators that they (and maybe a few select competitors) are the only ones who can keep AI in check. Regulation can work in their favor given how well they're established, financially, compared to the small upstarts they need to keep down.
On the latter: I agree, see above. Promoting the idea that AI can or will kill us all, but also that it can't be stopped except by them, puts them in a position (if they're successful in their persuasion) to get more financial benefits.
The scale of damage when occurring is what worries me.
Eg. in old times when someone wanted to eavesdrop someones phone they needed ratio of 1:1 in person count, one keeping up the conversation and another one transcripting it up. Then some more people to intrepret that transcript an make conclusions, maybe even decisions what comes next. That is not the reality we leave in today. Today's scale of data processing and storage capabilities makes the ratio of 1:8298979488 (AI:everyone). I don't want us to ever have AI decision making over those transcripts with the same ratio. Possibility seems clearly to be there soon.
Another eg. in old times when someone wanted to dig into vulnerable system they needed ratio of 1:1 in count, one person having time to dig in one system at a time. I don't want to know how many critical and vulnerable systems we have running today in this planet connected to the same network these AI agents are run. Yes, over time you can use AI to find and patch those vulnerabilities but the scale and speed to do harm (exploiting every system at once) is the problem here.
But it’s still hard for me to take them seriously. These arguments start with reasonable assumptions and then project them wildly. Current LLMs are powerful and can be used dangerously. It’s reasonable to accept a few tumultuous years of change. But I can’t see them reasonably leading to civilization-ending doom.
Are the doomers within the AI industry overly anxious? Or am I missing something?
I still think that aligning AI is a fool's errand though.
If this turns out to be existential, what would anyone be able to do to prepare? Short of politically controlling territory with a population and militia, any plan is merely some blind bet in it not really being existential and you figuring out what will be safe.
Can you be more specific? This is new to me, but I'm not familiar with Californian history.
It has some interesting ideas, and also gave us people like Sam Bankman-Fried.
Edit: saw the other responses. I don’t think effective altruism was the right answer. Effective accelerationism, which came out of effective altruism, has all the ideas about human extinction and needing to develop AGI at all costs to save the species insanity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_altruism
Edit: Another comment suggests Effective accelerationism.
I say this neither negatively or positively, it's just that US news is, for now, the only international news, in both tech and politics.
Something we all suffer from in this industry !
- We'll build an AGI able to perform most cognitive tasks at least at human level (including, of course, the most fulfilling)
- This will wreak havoc in the job market, but people can still compete for jobs requiring physical labor, until robots take also most of these jobs
- Then, we'll build an artificial super-intelligence way smarter than any human, and we'll be forever the pet species of a silicon god operating according to "human values"
- In the process, there's a non-negligible probability that humanity will go extinct
The goal may be to build a super-intelligence, but the plan is incredibly dumb !
It gives away the game entirely, they want regulatory capture and the politicians boosting it want millions in donations from the IPOs, there's big money in this type of AI grifting.
The SEC should heed the AI labs own warnings and forbid any AI lab doing doom marketing from doing an IPO, for safety of course.
That's because you're up against billions if not trillions of dollars desperately searching for any kind of return on investment, and there aren't that many industries left now that China has everyone by the balls.
As much as I'd love to see some enforcement action before the AI bros turn the world into another horror show like 2007ff... it won't happen. And just like we didn't have any meaningful consequences back then, this time the ones responsible (hello Sam Altman) will get away scot-free as well.
I have yet to see a positive improvement in the world that could be blamed on AI. Why don't they fix the DMVs of the world? The answer is that they would if they could, it would be great PR, but they can't. They can't even operate a phone for the corner drugstore.
I'm bullish on LLMs and they're defeating any optimism I have daily. I should see every program on my computer improving, but they're getting worse. I should see every website getting cleaner while heavy, crappy frameworks put in for developer convenience are being removed and being replaced with feather-light, minimal code and new designs that anticipate my needs. Nope, even getting worse. This is coding, where they're best.
Can somebody tell me anything that AI has improved in my life? The costs are obvious and massive. Just one improvement to hold onto my optimism.
On the other hand, my personal computer setup is better than it's been in a long time. Other peoples' software that I run has not improved much, but I've managed to fix several long-standing issues by just giving Fable access to my configuration and telling it my intent.
I've also vibe-coded several applications which are lighter-weight versions of things like Pinboard, Descript, and Weechat. I'm not releasing them because I've been doing OSS for 10 years and I've felt first-hand how the economics of open-source is skewed. And in this day and age where anyone can vibe up their own custom app, it doesn't feel worth it anymore.
What this tells me is that there's not proper incentive for the software you use to get "better" according to your values. You have implicit metrics of "cleanliness", "minimalism", "anticipatory design", and I share those values, but having worked as a SWE for 30 years, I have never worked for a corporation which encouraged those values. If I managed to inflict them on the corporate software I created, it was a "yes and" situation and I only did it because I (or other engineers) cared, never because management wanted it.
So the problem is not "AI is failing us" but rather "the system is failing to use these awesome tools to improve our lives". We can use AI to try to improve the system itself, but our system is not a github repo you can deploy to prod. It's a bit trickier to vibe up the improvements to our incentive structure (though I am trying to do it a bit myself).
It’s especially worsened by every leader doing their damndest to force something related to AI into their workflows and products, regardlesss of if it’s a good fit, lest their own leaders or investors decide they are dinosaurs who need to be replaced.
The entire interview he's just grinning like he has the "answer" to all these companies he alleges don't take safety seriously.
Can also be attributed to stress, nervousness no?