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Anthropic is Now Running Television Ads Threatening Humanity
I saw this ad play on my tv while watching the England vs Argentina postgame. I could not believe what I was watching. I had vaguely heard of a tone-deaf video from Anthropic communications, but I hadn't actually watched it until it popped up on my screen against my will. I am stunned that this is how Anthropic chose to portray themselves to the general public. Maybe this sort of messaging works on a tiny subset of niche technological policy nerds, but they played this during the World Cup.
The ad opens with scenes of destruction: a house ablaze, civil unrest in the streets, hundreds of graves at Arlington National Cemetary. A concerned voiceover asks the questions that many of us ask of the AI industry every day. "Can AI be trusted?" "Who's gonna hit the brakes if we need to?" "How do we really ensure that what we're aiming to acheive really does benefit the majority of people?" All good questions that the rest of the ad is utterly unconcerned with answering.
It feels like a threat. It doesn't feel like they're saying, "oh please God somebody stop us". It feels like they're saying, "just try and stop us, MUAHAHAHAHA!" I suppose it's good that they acknowledge the gravity of what they are undertaking, but that doesn't really matter if they keep doing it anyway.
Also, sort-of-unrelated-but-not-really: Is "Total Clanker Genocide" an acceptable sign for an anti-AI protest?
Is Anthropic evil or is it stupid?
For the longest time I thought they knew what they were doing, that this is all a ploy to force governments to regulate and thereby establish their dominant position over the field forever, since any competitor would no longer be able to even get the computer required. And then they can happily be the people who decide what you get to know about in a society that relies heavily on their product, a much stronger position that the people who regulate them.
But if they really wanted that, why the hell would they put insane conditions on military contracts? Maybe instead they got high off their own supply and are actually convinced they're making God and that because they're such right thinking bourgeois liberals, God will have their values and it's futile to resist the promised eternal rule of the managerial theaterkid Reich. Just be a nice heckin human bean okay, God cares.
Is there a third option I'm missing? Because what could bring someone to have made this "ad"? It's literally just saying "yes we are going to destroy your life, but not to worry, we still care about you in some abstract sense". Regular "we care" corporate bullshit at least has the decency to not fear monger about itself whilst delivering the empty platitudes.
Sincerely, do you imply here that AI is not going to be a strategically decisive technology? At present, Anthropic's power is nothing before Pete Hegseth, but that's not guaranteed to remain the case.
It's a technology, it is not the Lord God Almighty. And the dreams/fears seem to revolve around "We will create super-intelligence, and then the thing magically becomes alive just like us, so just like us it will have goals and aims of its own, and we have to make sure it is well-instructed in How To Be Nice Liberal and then it can take care of us like pampered pedigree cats as it colonises the known universe".
The life of a pampered pedigree cat may or may not be an ideal to strive for. You get the pampering, but your life is literally no longer your own, and your entire line of descendants gets warped by selective breeding to the tastes of your owners, not your inherent nature. If your owners decide that squishy noses are cute, you will be bred to have squishy noses, and who cares about how it affects your respiratory system.
I don't think we're going to get "AI as conscious entity". I do think we're going to get "more and more use of AI, and more and more idiot decisions by idiot humans to hand over more power to make decisions and perform actions to AI".
How about "we need to make sure the thing doesn't help people develop cyber weapons or biological weapons?"
That just means "we need to make sure the thing helps my group develop weapons, and no other".
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