[mptest]

earnest question, hope this does not come off as skeptical of the skeptical position on ai and especially their salesmen. I ask because I share your skepticism, not because i think it's silly, to be clear.

does it ever occur to your types of commenters (derisive of an entire field because of personal experience) that some people who talk about stuff like control systems/ai/safety recognize this, and it's actually why they want sensible policies surrounding the tech?

not because they're afraid of skynet, but because they observe both, the reading comprehension statistics of a populace over time, and the technological rate of progress?

tech very clearly doesn't have to be a god to do serious societal damage... e.g. fossil fuel use alone...social media has arguably done irreparable harm with fairly simple algorithms... the ottomans went to great lengths to keep the printing press from their empire, and certainly not because it was bullshit or god.

Or do you recognize those types and classify them as a negligible minority?

[jrflowers]

> does it ever occur to your types of commenters

I can’t speak for ares623 but there are some people that don’t agree that the software that generates text that agrees with everything that you say if you say it twice is the same thing as the printing press.

It’s like if you imagine that the slot machine was just invented and because of enormous advertising and marketing campaigns it has become hard to tell the difference between marketing material written by the slot machine manufacturers and stuff written by folks that really really like pulling the lever on the slot machine

[somenameforme]

People often see liars or propagandists as required to take an extreme position. For a recent example that actually played out, let's say I'm a media site that wants to run a publicity campaign for Sam Bankman-Fried after it came out that he's a conman, in part because he previously donated large sums of money to me and/or interests I care about.

Does that mean I now evangelize him like he's the most amazing and noble person ever? No, because that reeks of insincerity. Instead, you acknowledge the issues, and then aim to 'contextualize' them. It's not 'a person of minimal ethical compass doing scummy things because of a lust for money', but instead it's him being misguided or misled - perhaps a naive genius, who was genuinely trying in earnest to do the right thing, but found himself in over his head. It's no longer supposed to be basic white collar crime but a 'complex and nuanced issue.'

And it's the same thing in all domains. Somebody taking a 'nuanced' position does not mean they actually care at all about the nuance, but that they may believe that as being the most effective way of convincing you to do, or believe, what they want you to. And the worst part is that humanity is extremely good at cognitive dissonance. The first person a very good liar convinces is himself.