Today in 1962, JFK told the public about nuclear missiles the USSR had secretly placed 90 miles from US soil. Now is an important time to remember the Cuban Missile Crisis because, until now, it was probably the closest the world ever got to ending. But now there is a new and worse crisis. Most experts agree that there are double-digit odds of superintelligent AI killing every single human. There is no plan in place to prevent this from happening, and no one knows how much time is left. The AI crisis is harder to explain than a nuclear missile aimed at your home. But people are starting to pay attention, and asking: what are we going to do about this? So it's probably a good time to look back and remember how humanity has faced other global emergencies.

Yes. note that there's also a third option, which is "if it's too dangerous for everyone to have it, it's too dangerous to train in the first place."

This whole story is pretty cool: - Iceland President Halla Tómasdóttir saw The AI Doc, was moved and reached out to Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin - It prompted her to dedicate the 40th of anniversary of the Reykjavik summit on nuclear arms controls to AI

Liron Shapira asked someone at Anthropic what he's doing about AI risk. His answer: his p(doom) is even higher than Liron's, so his focus is "just to enjoy whatever life I have." A self-described hedonist, working at one of the labs building this. John Sherman and Liron react on this week's Warning Shots. Full episode, link in bio. #AISafety #AIRisk #Anthropic #ArtificialIntelligence #WarningShots #TechNews

If you’re among those who doubted the sincerity of Dario Amodei’s call last month for an AI slowdown, this week brought new grounds for your skepticism: Jack Clark, an Anthropic co-founder who serves as a kind of co-visionary-in-chief at the company, gave a talk at the IMF that I’d call de facto accelerationist. One of the talk’s most salient themes is that we need to speed up the construction of AI infrastructure. A big reason, says Clark, is that then we’ll get the benefits of scientific advance sooner (which in turn means that building more data centers ASAP isn’t the only priority: “Infrastructure alone will not be enough. If discovery becomes abundant, we need to avoid bottlenecking ourselves downstream…”) Clark does of course mention the dangers of AI, and near the end of the talk he alludes to the possible need for a slowdown. But here he is even vaguer than Dario was. Clark says, “We will need to build the infrastructure to take advantage of this technology, but we will also need to go slowly and deliberately on developing the technology itself, to pace or otherwise control its development.“ What does that mean in practical terms? For example: Since market dynamics encourage Anthropic and OpenAI to race each other recklessly, maybe the government should step in and make them slow down—like, maybe, mandate a pause on large training runs? No, there’s no mention of such a thing, and it sounds like Clark wants us to mainly just count on the companies to exercise good judgment. As we move toward recursive self-improvement, “labs like Anthropic will need to make decisions about how much oversight we apply to AI-driven research… We will need to move extremely carefully here, because otherwise we could lose control of the technology. We will also likely need rules to govern this.” So apparently it’s only “likely,” not certain, that we’ll need actual rules—and even then it’s not clear that they’ll come from the government? I guess we’ll just let Dario and Sam come up with the rules at one of their many friendly meetups! Clark’s lack of practical urgency would be remarkable in any event, but what makes it downright weird is his talk’s billboard theme: He declares that “the singularity is here.” He calls the singularity a time when “AI systems drastically increase the pace of overall scientific and technical progress, making things move so quickly that it is hard for humans to keep up.” Well if it’s already getting hard for humans to keep up, then maybe we should… slow things down? Apparently not. “The singularity” doesn’t just denote fast technological advance; it denotes faster and faster and faster advance—a positive feedback loop that draws us into a vortex of change that could without warning pull us past the point of no return. It’s kind of like walking down an icy slope that gets steeper and steeper and steeper: Things are under control until they’re not. The idea that we’re in the singularity but it’s too soon to take dramatic precautionary action is a contradiction in terms. I have a very different take on the singularity and its implications, and I lay it out in an essay called “The Singularity is Clear”: thegodtest.net/singularitycl…. And the text of Clark’s IMF talk can be found here: importai.substack.com/p/impo…

Cuteness solves AI alignment! Everyone asks which value superintelligent AI should be aligned to. Cuteness! Humans are cute. That’s it. No joke. Babies. Cats. We take care of cute things. Nobody wants to wipe out the cuties. If we’re cute to it, we’re good.

Yeah they always skip that middle step

Anthropic is quietly lobbying Congress to ban all 50 states from regulating AI. Source: Politico exclusive, "Anthropic quietly pitches its own AI safety bill to lawmakers."

"Utopia ruled by god in a box" is just human disempowerment and the end of our liberty.

Homo sapiens and our distant descendants must have a long and flourishing future, and this future must be rooted in freedom and self-determination.

How do people cope when they hear AI might be the thing that ends their life?

Our group studied a plan we call a “hardwired pause” that’s designed to last at least a decade. Two core features: 1) Prohibit frontier training, allow inference 2) Stop making training-capable chips, gradually replace them with inference-only chips hardwired-pause.ai

Perhaps vertical short-form video is the Great Filter that stops every intelligent species from reaching the stars. noahpinion.blog/p/maybe-the-…