> interesting if true.
Not sure what you mean by this. This is obviously about MAGA and other allied political forces in the US, at the very least. I wouldn't call it interesting to document the recent observed behavior. It's been evident through journalistic analysis of public statements, policy, and investment for most of the year.
> The hope of the Elons and Sams of the world is that this will come to fruition well enough that we only have to bother sustaining the "cream of the crop" in the labor force […]. So basically the plan here is to let things go to shit, and when billions of people die as a natural consequence of that, things will keep running as desired.
For one, I don’t think that Sam Altman can be characterized as MAGA (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Altman#Political_engagemen...). Secondly, I’d be interested in sources substantiating a plan that explicitly includes billions of people dying as a necessary factor for the plan to work out.
He is not usually associated with MAGA. The reference was not directed at the heads of the most well know tech companies, despite the quote about "Elons and Sams". This wouldn't make sense in context. It was a reference to the ruling political regime.
This is the paragraph in the entirety. While previous sections referred to “the Elons and Sams of the world”, this section that was specifically called out:
> The connection made to climate change in the latter part of the article is new to me, and would be interesting if true. However, I wish the author would cite supporting evidence for their conclusions.
Does not refer to them explicitly (many of the very same), although it could be believed that the second clause of the first sentence refers to Sam, et al. Elon doesn't fit as he has no fiduciary duty nor has he called for slowdown, nor are there "many" in this demographic, which is a sign that this is more stream of thought. I believe the narrative only fits if you consider this to be a tangent about political sociopaths that was muddled by a very human leading thought intruding (from previous paragraphs), on an otherwise straightforward observation.
It makes no sense in the context of billionaires, as they were not generally driving "us" toward climate destruction prior to the AI boom.
> The dangers posed by this technology on its present trajectory are best understood as simple accelerants for the existing dangers humans pose to themselves.
Is very true. All the doomspeak "aI EsCaPeD AnD HaCkEd aNoThEr sYsTeM" was a human error all along, and the tech was doing what it is programmed to do, retry until a satisifiable outcome is met.
With dangerous chemicals and radioactive materials these are generally pretty easy to classify. This said, after the physical behaviors, the above technologies can induce behavior changes in humans because they exist. After nukes, a lot more people had issues with extental dread. It also causes n-order interactions that get very hard to predict. For example MAD or laws against using chemical weapons.
And these are weapons with a very easy to map out causal chain in their own behavior. You can't prompt a chemical weapon to make a decision.
We come up with agentic AI and all of a sudden a lot of rules on causality break. In a harness they are a causal agent. They can interact with a digital reality, and with the right tools and/or human contacts they can causally effect analog reality.
Anyone that says 'programmed' about an LLM almost certainly does not know what they are talking about and can be summarily ignored.
Accelerating the ability for any given person to have access to some amount of these capabilities is terrifying, is it not?
Maybe many were too young for the cold war. But it really does feel like we're setting a new one up.