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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   14011 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 5, 2026

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This is a plan that has a nonzero chance of success - though I think Scott's way overestimating it - and could possibly fit the "better plans are too hard" argument. But you still need a pause for that, just not as long of one.)

Yes - Plan A is a good plan if you think that aligned ASI is a win condition. Part of what is going on in the circle of "people who care about AI safety but don't understand it" (ipse dixit) is that there is a fairly widespread view, on all sides of the political divide, that ASI aligned to Altman and Amodei is not a win condition for humanity - they are both profoundly blue-tribe (which offends Reds) and sociopathic billionaires (which offends Blues). Altman and Amodei are living in a paradigm where "If we build ASI, we will get Clippy or the Culture, so we should build it carefully to maximise the chance of the Culture". I am not alone in thinking "If we build ASI, we will get Clippy or the Culture. Both of these are bad outcomes, so we should not build it". Based on reading the report proposing Plan A, Plan S (ban development of new models for the forseeable future, AI companies who want to keep their GPUs have to accept inspections to confirm they are using them for inference only) is obviously superior, and I am not unsympathetic to a full-on Butlerian Jihad.

The limit on the potential of LLMs to improve the human condition is not the speed at which more powerful models can be developed, it is the speed at which we can incorporate LLMs into our workflows and institutions without breaking anything loadbearing. This is a generation's work even if the frontier models don't get any better than they already are.

I am also in favour of Plan S, to be clear, as I think Plan A is far too risky. I was merely noting, for the sake of honesty, that the chance of Plan A succeeding is not ε and as such if Plan A were considered vastly easier than Plan S for some reason his argument would apply.

"people who care about AI safety but don't understand it" (ipse dixit)

Who said this, and to whom does it refer?

I mean that I am one of the people who care about AI safety but don't understand the technical detail.

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