This was one obscure shitpost to decode.
The Brian Merchant article shared recently made a good point. It's most likely a symbiosis of an organic AI panic from incredibly out-of-touch people and savvy capitalists that learned to use it for marketing.
Yeah, the same thing struck me. I'd guess they were jumping on the buzzword, but x-risk just was deemed gaudy and unserious.
Might be semi-related: the german aerospace/automotive/industrial research agency has an "AI Safety" institute (institute = top level department).
I got a rough impression from their website. They don't seem to be doing anything that successful. Mostly fighting the unwinnable battles of putting AI in everything without sucking and twiddling machine learning models to make them resilient against malicous data. Besides trying to keep the torch of self-driving cars alive for the german car industry. Oh, and they're doing the quantum AI bit.
They're a fairly new institute, and I heard rumors they're not doing great. Maybe the organization resists the necessary insanity to generate new AI FOMO at this point. One can dream.
I was going to shitpost that Trump is the least neo-colonial president cuz he cut all foreign aid, but I realized I kinda believe that unironically. I'm in the anti-death-and-suffering camp of course, but a hundred kinda self-serving national aid programs might just not cut it.
(This might be inspired by the Merz government planning to roll the special development aid office into the foreign affairs ministry, partly to tie it more strongly to national interest.)
Maybe we need to bring back the UN bigly.
Didn't come up with that simile, but it might fit:
It's like a fleshed out version of a 12 year old thinking "everything would be great if I was in charge, because I'm smart and people are dumb"
Something about people who are too impressed with their own smarts and swap pet theories that make them feel smart.
be me, super genius autodidact
be deeply moved by the prospect of defeating death with technology, write some sick prose about it because am eloquent as fuck
proceed to punt this goal decades or centuries by helping to justify a tech bubble which consumes tons of R&D resources for no apparent benefit and will bind further resources in the future to adapt to an aggravated climate crisis, and also inspiring a slew of technofascists too dumb to tell the difference between tech that benefits mankind and tech that exploits and oppresses
mein face when
....pirating them at all instead of learning Inkscape & Krita.
can recommend YTDLnis, as others have. If web-based is important to you, cobalt dot tools seems great and trustworthy.
His Wikipedia article is quite a ride. Apparently he and a Stephen Chamberlain were recently found innocent for a bunch of fraud charges. They boil down to inflating the value of a SW company he sold to Hewlett-Packart. They died within a day of each other in unrelated accidents. Must be rough.
I just woke up and some nerd is staring into my soul, asking why I was rude to the spicy autocomplete. What is this? Go home world, you're drunk.
I like that his first argument out of the gate is "You call us a secular religion? Well maybe we are, what happened to religious tolerance?" Just perfect how you tee yourself up to fall in line with the religious conservatives when needed.
We really need bring some sceptical epistemic attitudes back. Maybe some kind of eco-atheism, keeping yourself grounded on actual real shit. (for some definition of real)