I do not understand how they are getting away with this level of hype or sleight of hand in directing attention away from the real dangers of ai. Ed Zitron aside, the one critic I have seen address it less as an injustice issue and more as a bloviation issue is this scientist Adam Becker:
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-mad-religion-of-technological-salvation/
https://arstechnica.com/culture/2025/04/youre-not-going-to-mars-and-you-wont-live-forever-exploding-silicon-valleys-ideology/
I am myself struggling with science in a niche area beyond which I have no ambitions. I aim to be averagely competent in that area and above all to never break things.
The two most important things I learnt as a scientist are:
1) everything is really, really difficult.
2) don’t ever break things for real.
And these guys won’t accept simple constraints like those.
I saw an interview with an economist whose name I forget whom Yan Lecun recommended. And he disagreed with Amodei’s bullishness.
(Amodei is the CEO of Anthropic and Yan Lecun used to work at Meta. Prof Lecun is the rare ai scientist I trust to be honest with the public).
People seem a little more restrained just lately with language after all the earlier hyperbole by the tech press worked to get us here. That is not a bad thing. But Amodei’s hype should be checked more forcefully.
What is more worrying than LLMs are agents. I think they may either be a disaster or merely reduce the already poor quality of life further. I am hoping it is the latter, but in certain areas like medicine, policing and the military they will be a disaster. I think that has already started. It makes me think of Dr. Who’s “Smile”.
Until technology company ceos recognize that escaping accountability is not viable in the long run, they will keep treating collateral damage to customers, citizens as irrelevant.
So much of it struck me as cornucopianism in action. I have been wondering when the many world theory will take over as the next excuse used to shill limitless expansion. Quantum computing, unlike this mediocre stuff, is cool. It is still not magic.
I am on the pessimistic side and these guys have made it worse. It is not superficially visible depression so much as deep hopelessness that anything but Harry Harrison’s “Make Room! Make Room!” is even feasible. Unless they nuke the place.
My money is still on drastically reduced quality of life and an average of all the more realistic dystopian scifi our there. We are almost there.
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