[lappet]

Is there anyone prominent in the tech world who is pessimistic? I am tired of this relentless optimism regarding new technologies.

[bamfly]

When's the last time you saw a pessimistic car salesman? Same thing.

Now, a mechanic....

[dragonwriter]

A lot of the worst x-risk AI doomers are... selling AI (Altman at OpenAI being the most visible).

X-risk, of course, is leveraged as a powerful argument for regulation which narrows the field to a small number of favored firms which have privileged mutual relations with government, with a difficult on-ramp for anyone else, and minimum public transparency.

[cubefox]

Both Altman (OpenAI) and Hassabis (DeepMind) have said existential risk from AI is real.

[JohnFen]

But their actions say that they don't really believe it. Or that they're sociopathic. Pick your poison.

[esafak]

Musk is pessimist about AI.

[Footkerchief]

Two of the three so-called "Godfathers of AI," Yoshua Bengio and Geoffrey Hinton, as well as Sam Altman and Bill Gates, have signed the Statement on AI Risk.

https://www.safe.ai/statement-on-ai-risk#open-letter