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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   16276 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 6, 2026

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If AI is going to kill everyone unless some fantastical global regulatory regime that won’t happen is magicked into being, what are these people even doing?

Go to the beach, touch grass, spend time with people you love, drink good wine. No atheist (which pretty much all rationalists are) who believes the world is about to end should spend their final months playing cassandra, to mostly deaf ears.

Isn't that what Scott is doing, essentially? Having a kid and enjoying life.

I think most people who think of doom as a likely outcome are not letting it drive their decisions: no one at this point thinks there's a chance that this kind of safety regime will develop and be effective. Instead, it's optimizing for scenarios where their individual actions might matter, e.g. permanent underclass scenarios (best get that SWE role at Anthropic to get your bag).

Even Eliezer seems to have more or less given up, getting his utils mostly from investing his sense of psychological worth in doom.

The SWE at Anthropic to avoid permanent underclass status strategy reflects a very limited understanding of finance or markets, but I suppose that’s to be expected for software engineers.

Somewhat ironically, the "get a ton of money at Anthropic" likely offers the most over alternative strategies for scenarios that are more like an AI fizzle or bust.

No amount of worldly carnal pleasures will measure up to the spiritual nirvanah the rationalists will feel in the few moments between seeing the flash and burning to death. They were right, and everyone else was wrong. Their arguments were valid, everyone else's invalid. If only the sheeple had listened and installed Eliezer Yudkowsky as Emperor of Terra this could have all been avoided.

And they will be right to feel this way.

I have embraced the Cassandra role, and the brief moment of payout will be enormous and entirely worth it. Like a thousand simultaneous continuous orgasms lasting for days as the end becomes clear.

The entire history of humanity exists solely to maximize the utility felt by the entire rationalist community in the picosecond before they keel over dead with the rest of us as the AGI executes its plan.

The bad ending is when the AGI convinced them that AGI is impossible right before deleting them.

Go to the beach, touch grass, spend time with people you love, drink good wine.

For the most part, people do these things because they feel good, agreed?

Arguably, it also feels good to have a feeling that you are RIGHT, both in the sense of being correct and also in the sense of being moral or just.

It feels good to feel (correctly or incorrectly) that you are working to save humanity (or some slice of humanity) from people who are some linear combination of stupid, ignorant, and evil. That you alone possess some important knowledge. That some day people will regret having laughed at you.

As another poster pointed out, look at Eliezer Yudkowsky. If his worldview is correct (as believed by him and the people around him) it means that he is one of the smartest and/or most important people in the world. That must be a very heady feeling.

For a lot of people that kind of feeling is very tempting compared to sunburn and a hangover.

Edit: I'm not necessarily saying that the likes of EY are wrong. I do think they overstate their case, but that's a different issue. I'm just offering a hypothesis as to why someone who sincerely believes the world is doomed would continue to preach doom rather than just kick back.

They don't want AI to not kill everyone. They want fantastical global regulatory regimes.

This is what we would term uncharitable thinking on any other post

I dont think its uncharitable, from my reading of various AI safety writings I would describe it as substantially accurate.

I don’t think it’s uncharitable, but I do believe the prominent rationalists are altruists (or less kindly, quokkas) who genuinely want regulation to save humanity and/or are using the threat for attention and funding.

It doesn’t matter, because the people implementing the regulation would almost certainly corrupt it for power and personal gain, including undermining it for themselves or their friends, unless it was designed so that corruption and undermining are almost impossible. If ASI needs much more chips than already exist, that may actually be feasible (because a defector must run many fabs, which takes a while and can’t be easy to hide).

Yeah, probably, but it's fun to dunk on the "AI safety" nerds

The nuclear non-proliferation treaty was not about preventing nuclear apocalypse. They just wanted a fantastical global regulatory regime.

Correct. Notice great powers were sure to get the bomb before locking in their hegemony. And all serious countries maintain a turnkey program in case the US stops having the will or ability to enforce it.

Political coercion is so seldom selfless that I'm willing to stand by the idea it never is. And call it realism.

Speaking of nuclear apocalypse, though.

Plan B is the real one here. Implementation probably involves going to war with a near-peer, nuclear-armed superpower so sophisticated they are on the edge of ASI.

You probably do need a credible path for how a full-scale conventional conflict avoids escalating to nuclear exchange and then avoids escalating to nuclear apocalypse, if that's an at-all viable Plan B.

It would be quite ironic if the way AI managed to kill all of us is that we were so afraid it might go to a fast takeoff that we decided a nuclear apocalypse would be better than risking it.

Nah, not even that. The NNPT is just about the big kids deciding the big stick club should be exclusive to them only. And its enforced by big sticks, not some figleaf of global regulation. It would only work if AGI already existed but was a closely held secret of the militaries of the various signatories.

You say fantastical global regulatory regimes and I hear big kid threatening to blow up the Three Gorges Dam if they don't comply.

The trick is, there's undoubtedly some sociopathic subset of people who did in fact just want to gain a global regulatory regime's power and weren't all that worried about nuclear war.

And these are the people who most want to control that regime, and UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES should be allowed to.

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