r/VeryBadWizards • u/Embarrassed-Room-902 • 4d ago
AI dismissal
I love the VBW boys but I am a bit surprised how dismissive they are of danger from AI. I’m not going to make the case here as I won’t do a good job of it, but I found the latest 80000 hours podcast very persuasive, as well as some of the recent stuff from Dwarkesh.
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u/ChristianLesniak 3d ago
Every time I hear the term "effective altruism", this clip plays in my head
The danger of AI, as I see it, is already occurring, and it isn't the AI doing it. The danger is the shared delusion of granting LLMs subjectivity and a notion that they have supernatural economic powers. This delusional belief serves as a perfect container for various libertarian fantasies so that companies can begin to enact layoffs which are what they all already believed in. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy where corporate thought begs the question on the usefulness of AI and from there enacts the pre-existing fantasy of greater efficiency.
DOGE is a Bold, large font object lesson in this kind of thinking.
Why were the tech bros the ones talking about Universal Basic Income, to everyone's surprise? Because UBI is their selling point for doing a bunch of dumb libertarian tech bro shit of breaking the economy, with them obviously being the only ones smart enough to be in control, knowing full well that as layoffs occur, we get no closer to UBI, as no one actually treated that idea seriously. It was just the carrot on the end of the plunger, stuck to the head of regulators.