Anthropic's conception of 'mitigating AI risks' is 'do everything I say, just the way I say it, and this system has to be enforced by someone who thinks like me'. It's like Microsoft saying, 'look, I don't want a monopoly, I just want to recognise that CPUs being able to run an open or foreign OS is a clear threat to public safety, and incidentally don't you think Apple bundling OS and hardware really deserves anti-monopoly legislation?'.
If your preferred regulatory regime also excludes almost all your potential competitors except the ones you're basically okay with, then it is indistinguishable from a power grab. From a customer and an enthusiast perspective I really don't care which of Anthropic or OpenAI comes out on top. I don't just want it to be technically possible to enter these markets, I want it to be easy. I want us to strain every sinew to allow new AI companies to start, I want us to give gobs of compute to anyone who isn't Anthropic or OpenAI. Let a thousand flowers bloom!
You can, but cars, airplanes and drugs are famous examples of very heavily regulated industries where creating a new business is almost impossible, incumbents rule, and incumbents and their lobbyists design the majority of the regulations themselves.
This is, in fact:
They want to be the ones deciding who gets to play with the toys and the government tamely follows their instructions as regards shutting down their rivals, but it's not going to work like that.
and Anthropic is just putting it into nice friendly words that people are swallowing. While I deeply dislike the way the Trump government handled the Fable incident, all this ultimately a fight over who gets to rule, who gets to be in and out, and who gets to set the rules. If the Trump government had calmly and consistently mandated open weight releases and anti-monopoly legislation, Anthropic would be screaming about how this was unsafe.
Regardless of what anyone here thinks, this is aimed at locking up Ukranian refugees from the press gangs and delivering them back to their government like escaped slaves.
We can take it as read that they think dying for their country isn't legitimate or noble, or they would have done it voluntarily.
Corvos
4d ago
To be fair, the ratio of fouls Argentina:England was literally 2:1. And the yellow cards were worse. England played a comparatively clean game.
England players don’t do the grandiose ‘let me hear your joy, pour champagne on me now’ routine when they score either.
Corvos
4d ago
They did bloody well, though. I though they were going to get pasted but they held on till the 80 minute mark.
Corvos
5d ago
Re: 2A there’s a pretty large ‘guns keep people safer’ contingent which is essentially what you’re describing.
Putting aside my feelings on your end destination, this doesn't work logically. It's like saying that you are looking forward to factories being entirely roboticised so right now we should enforce that workers toil 24/7 without stopping and lose all labour disputes.
The fact that people aren't machines and have feelings and rights is the point.
I was talking about the big surge in coal from 2000 to 2011 ('last few years' not very helpful), where it nearly doubles from 27k TWh to 45k TWh and then remained stable as you say. Natural gas has also heavily expanded.
FWIW your bulverism is incorrect, I live in the UK. My skepticism is that from where I'm standing in the UK these technologies are being incredibly pumped up by governments and institutions that believe buy-in is the most important factor for growth, so they're all operating on a fake-it-till-you-make-it mindset as well as subsidising like billy-o.
The EV sales figures you cited don't distinguish between true battery-powered EV vehicles and hybrids, and indeed almost nobody does. (Again, my suspicion is that this is to juice the numbers.) I therefore found it difficult to find a good source but https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/19/hybrids-having-their-moment-as-car-buyers-rethink-electric-vehicles.html suggests that true EV sales are broadly stable (and low) while hybrids are doing well. EV sellers like BYD are certainly having a moment and are visible in the market, but are nowhere near a third of all car sales, and that's before you start looking at takeup of used vs new cars.
I am not saying that you're completely wrong, or that this isn't somewhat good news rather than bad news. I'm saying that you're presenting pretty curves and I'm not willing to take it as-read that those curves are going to curve up till they hit the stars. It may happen, it may not. Reform UK had great growth last year, beating the Conservatives out of the park, but Reform has now broadly stabilised at a level significantly lower than they need to win elections outright.
As for the resource issues, I remember during covid when people where freaking out over a lithium shortage due to EVs that turned out to never happen.
Because nobody is actually buying battery-powered EVs. Sorry, that was mean :P What did happen? I am/was expecting higher battery demand to lead to supply issues.
Corvos
6d ago
Bit of both. I do a bunch of catholic stuff and anywhere that tech comes up there's a lot of 'what do we do about Big Tech and AI' that transitions almost immediately into 'we need to regulate AI'. Then there's a vocal 'Big Tech CEOs are psychos who want to turn you into serfs, we have to destroy them NOW contingent'. It's hard to get an idea of numbers because they're so vocal.
Forgive me, but I think this perspective is broadly insane. The use of electric cars - or electric anything else - is a solution only to the extent that the electricity used comes from renewable sources. And those renewable sources need to be really renewable, not something that we can maintain for five years until there need to be mass replacements.
If you look at https://ourworldindata.org/energy-mix you see that the big story of the last few years is a massive upsurge in coal. Solar capacity may be growing but so far has managed only to propel world solar usage to the giddy heights of 2.8%. Scaling up to even 20% would produce massive issues in the manufacturing requirements (silver) and battery requirements.
In general I think there is this common problem where the battlegrounds over climate measures have been fought so intensely for so long that people have long forgotten the chains of reasoning behind them. For the forseeable future electric cars are just a more complex way of turning fossil fuels into movement, and one third of new cars being electric means diddly squat except more competition for cobalt.
Corvos
6d ago
drop it altogether and re-invent Marxism from first principles.
Are you aware of any serious attempts to do this? Seems an interesting project.
What alignment research actually exists? What I've seen seems to fall either into the incredibly abstruse 'Read the Sequences' bucket that basically hasn't been relevant since LLMs came out and weren't utlity-maximisers, vs 'AI shouldn't make child pornography or say nigger or take people's jobs' bucket that is more about managing the social consequences of AI actually existing.
I'm aware that Anthropic does a certain amount of practical work on how well you can RLHF different ethical stances but that doesn't seem to be 'solving alignment' in the way that Safetyists use the term, which seems to be about 'solving alignment' the way you solve an equation system and providing a mathematical proof that AI built on these principles will never threaten humanity.
Corvos
7d ago
To be fair, this is a world where a president's senility was hushed up for at least a year and it's expected for senior politicians to continue their duties while almost insensible from stroke or in their hospital beds. I can see why people jump to a 'weekend at Bernie's' explanation without a huge leap in logic.
[...] speak to more women and it’s more likely to happen for you”
Thing is, the absolute core of 'geek feminism' was directing young men not to do this. The single biggest complaint of geek women was getting swarmed by men b/c the gender ratios of geek subcultures were so skewed and therefore the 'advice' they repeated more than anything was:
'If I want to talk to you, if I want to do something with you, I will let you know. If you are coming up to me, or talking to me, and I haven't proactively expressed interest then you are probably harassing me'.
Which hit like a freight train to guys like me who already had trouble approaching women. That the girl talking to you doesn't like you and is smiling until you get the message and go away is essentially every man's worst nightmare, and geek feminism was broadcasting it (for somewhat understandable reasons) 24/7. It also meant that the only guys talking to these girls were the ones who didn't take no for an answer, which intensified everything.
Corvos
8d ago
I don't know how cheap you consider cheap, but I used to buy canned chilli con carne in bulk. You can bulk it out further by mixing it 1 part chilli 1 part (or more) black beans without any real loss of flavour, and rice is cheap.
A board that treats competence and contributing to society in ways that people actually desire enough to pay for, pale skin, and indeed the ability to spell your own name as being spiritual defects and anatomical defects per your charming descriptor, decided that being able to use the fruits of your labour to improve your life and to make a new prosperous district mattered far less than the right to contribute nothing while defecting on your debts and shoving the costs onto other people.
Isn't bulverism fun?
Corvos
10d ago
The women womanning desks in Tokyo hospitals are brisk but usually cheerful, or at least straight-forward and professional. I certainly wouldn't call them miserable.
Corvos
10d ago
Speaking as a Christian, one flaw in CS Lewis’ otherwise great writing is that he cannot depict atheism without curling his lip and stacking the deck. Agnosticism, yes, many of the defects of faith yes, but not atheism.
To be fair to him, he was at Oxford at the time when English socialite atheism was at its most arrogant and self absorbed, when atheism (as opposed to agnosticism) was a stance you took on to Make a Statement.
Corvos
10d ago
I think we broadly agree with each other and we're just litigating wordings. To my mind "physics forbids space becoming a population frontier" is a perfectly cromulent way of saying "physics makes going to space and living there so difficult, unpleasant and uneconomical that nobody will" but I understand your point.
Corvos
10d ago
But you’re still broadly conflating ‘doable’ with plausible and rewarding.
The point is that physics precludes space being a frontier by making it so unpleasant to go and live there that nobody will. The same way it precludes underwater settlements - it’s not that we can’t build on shallow waters but that physics makes it less pleasant than the alternatives.
Corvos
11d ago
That's the point. People act like "not forbidden" equals possible and technically it does, but only technically. Physics doesn't prevent me from slaughtering my way through Parliament and Buckingham Place with a slingshot and declaring myself Emperor of England, but it's not going to happen.
Being a population frontier has to mean being realistically somewhere will populate. The Americas were unpleasant in many respects, but they were on Earth and people believed they contained pretty good farmland, which often did turn out to be the case. They were also breathable, and full of lumber etc. Finally, people weren't really able to communicate with them, leaving space for hope.
Space just doesn't compare in that regard. If you can't make space at least as comfortable as the Americas then or e.g. the Congo now, people aren't going.
Well, that's the rub, isn't it? I think that their stated beliefs on AI dangers, which long predate Anthropic as a going concern (and which like all delusions survived the future being completely different from all claims made for the last 15 years), are delusions of grandeur for the Silicon Valley class the way that the Cult of Reason justified taking over France and cutting off the heads off anyone who expressed doubt. The sincerity of their beliefs, which I mostly don't doubt, can't be separated from the fact that these beliefs are grossly self-aggrandising and justify the infinite self-serving accumulation of power.
My point is that a power grab is still a power grab. Dressing it up in impassioned and sincere rhetoric about how everyone will die if they don't get power doesn't make it any less of a power grab.
(My proposed regime at least rounds off to opening the floor to everyone.)
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