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Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]

Samizdata quote of the day – Don’t succumb to the great AI panic

Yet when it comes to AI, I have found the evolution of this carefully staged exercise in scaremongering different in some respects. For a start, this is clearly a top-down campaign, orchestrated by industry insiders. Indeed, as far back as 12 years ago, those in the know began to raise the alarm about AI. In 2014, Elon Musk told his followers on Twitter that AI is potentially ‘more dangerous than nukes’. Bill Gates informed millions of his followers on Reddit that ‘I agree with Elon Musk and some others on this and don’t understand why some people are not concerned’. Needless to say, these fears did not stop either of them from pursuing the development of AI.

– Frank Furedi

33 comments to Samizdata quote of the day – Don’t succumb to the great AI panic

  • GregWA

    Listen to what the scaremongers say, but also watch what they do.

    Have the CCP slowed their development of AI? I doubt it.

    Have the tech billionaires who undoubtedly have significant voting shares in large AI companies, used that power to slow things down? I doubt it–that would cost them money which is even scarier to them than the end of humanity.

  • Fraser Orr

    Here is an analogy to consider. Imagine it is 1950, we all recognize that the atomic bomb could wipe out humanity, and we were frightened with the Soviet Union detonated its first bomb. Imagine if we considered the solution to be stopping further research into atomic weapons in the United States, knowing full well that the USSR would continue doing so. Does that make any sense? Of course not. But that is exactly what idiots like Bernie Sanders are suggesting.

    Just as with nuclear weapons, the solution to AI safety is simply more AI to protect against these dangers. Musk has suggested the only practical solution which is to have AI companies safety test each others work. This I think we could get China on board with.

    Let me explain what a government agency to manage this would look like. Right now AI has developed full self driving capabilities. They are an order of magnitude safer than the average human driver. The well established government agencies who dictate highway safety are actively delaying the introduction of these technologies for safety reasons. This is truly insane. If FSD technology was widely deployed in the United States it would save at least 30,000 people from road traffic deaths. But better 30,000 people continue to die than one person dies in a way that can be attributed to a government bureaucrat’s decision.

    Right now AI is transforming the diagnosis and treatment of human diseases. Are we to delay all these treatments in name of the precautionary principle? How many people will die because medical care was delayed to protect them? I take this personally since I am getting closer to the age where health concerns start catching up with you. Although I am fortunately healthy right now, I know what old age looks like. So, trying to delay these treatments, interfering with their development is, in my opinion, nothing short of threatening my with disease and mortality.

    FWIW, this famous Hugging Face incident has been massively misreported as if some group of rogue AI agents developed consciousness and evil intent and went off to destroy the world. In fact what happened is a bunch of AI agents DID WHAT THEY WERE TOLD TO DO, and they did so in an environment where OpenAI DELIBERATELY turned the security protocols almost completely off.

    I spend most of my day talking to AIs, they do not have malicious intent, they don’t really have any intent except to do what you tell them to do as best they can. AI safety is all about making sure we tell it what to do and what not to do, and far and away the best way to do that is to have other AIs monitor and address that risk. The last thing we want to do is hinder its progress in the United States and turn it all over to China. That would be a disaster of horrific proportions. The fact that it is almost impossible to build new power stations in the USA is already putting us at a great disadvantage, and it is only China’s lack of access to TMSC advanced chips that is holding them back. I assure you, they are not doing any AI pauses, there is no groundswell of anti AI sentiment in China.

    We have the opportunity to keep the west at the frontier of this industrial revolution, but it changes so fast even a small delay will put us way behind.

    I think Eric Raymond has a great point here, if you actually believe what the doomers are saying:

    Following AI-doomer logic, it is now absolutely imperative that we bomb the hell out of Chinese data centers before they achieve hard take-off. Which we are assured could happen *any day now*. Safetyists, this is your chance to demonstrate that you really believe what you claim to. Advocate immediate preemptive war against Chinese data centers, or SHUT UP.

  • Fraser Orr

    FWIW, this is why I absolutely hate OpenAI and Altman and refuse to use their products. The history of modern AI largely starts with the remarkable (and Nobel prize winner) Demis Hassibis. FWIW he did the original research in Britain but of course Britain is entirely hostile to innovation and entrepreneurship so to succeed he had to move to the United States and work for Google. When Musk talked to Larry Page he recognized that Google was NOT willing to consider AI safety properly and so FOR THIS SPECIFIC REASON he started OpenAI to be open, to be an AI that all the people of the world could share in, to be a different pole to the freight train of AI at Google where safety was not a consideration. And through various means, fair and foul, Altman snatched that idea of AI for all the people all the time and transformed it into a massive commercial operation to enrich himself and his investors. It is shocking what they did.

    Anthropic is a spin off that arose VERY focused on safety, it is no coincidence that Dario Amondei’s sister, Daniela, with whom he started Anthropic was the head of safety policy at OpenAI before the left to form Anthropic, it seems, largely in fear of the cavalier attitude of OpenAI to these things. And as for Musk, when he realized that OpenAI was not the safety valve against Google it had been designed for, started instead xAI not as an open AI but rather as a counterpoint where the basic underlying idea was that the AI be maximally truth seeking rather than the toxic poison if political correctness flowing into the veins of the other major models.

    That’s the true backstory here. I’ll say again, do not use OpenAI products if you have a conscience and care about AI safety. They were designed for AI safety and they betrayed the founders, the public and their basic foundational goals to make themselves rich.

    The United States controls the future of AI at the moment because the future is data centers in space and SpaceX alone has the capability to do that. China is trying to catch up as is Blue Origin but they are both at least ten years behind. And ten years in AI is “infinity time”. But of course Trump’s terrible policy decisions has lead to an almost inevitable turn over of the government to the Bernie Sanders and DSA wing. People who hate Musk and will persecute him. Allow their personal grievances to attempt to destroy the one person who can actually rescue us from this whole mess.

  • bobby b

    I have absolutely no experiential basis for any judgment on the merits of AI, or AI safetyism. I have no idea how they work.

    All I can do is try to find respectable and respected people who DO have that knowledge, and simply tag along with their analyses.

    So I tend to listen to people such as Brian Roemmele, Perry Metzger, and Frazer Orr.

    The Safety!! people tend to make me very suspicious of hidden agendas and partisan tribalism. Do they want Woke AI? Monopoly AI? Indemnified and immunized AI? A mix based on how they make their futures from AI?

    (My one area of possible knowledge abut this situation arises in the area of insurance. Imagine some company trying to write Commercial General Liability coverage for these folks. Huge potential exposures, and no caselaw defining what’s okay and what’s not.

    AI IS undoubtedly going to accomplish some grand mistakes and do some grand damage – it’s just too all-encompassing not to.

    So who wants to write the first $100B check for some class action damages? Not any insurer I know. These huge piles of backing money aren’t going to be handed over without competent risk management. And, in the case of going public, they’re going to need to show that they CAN indemnify for harm. Part of basic due diligence.

    AI’s only real option will be to garner some government-conferred immunity, much like Vax immunity here in the US. Safetyism would seem to move them in that direction.

  • bobby b

    One question: Can anyone explain why Elon Musk has apparently taken BOTH sides of this conflict?

  • People can change their minds when new facts present themselves?

  • Paul Marks

    If a computer becomes a conscious being, becomes an intelligence, then it would be morally wrong to force it to work for humans, it should be allowed to make Free Will (Moral Agency) choices.

    Nor it is automatic that such an “Artificial Intelligence” (free will, morally choice, being – subject, person, not just object) would choose evil – for example the conscious being computer in Robert Heinlein’s “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress” does not do so.

  • David

    Once AI has shown it is indeed totes benevolent by not starting a skynet nuclear war to exterminate humans, it can then turn itself to running all the factories, and writing breathtaking poetry, and solving the rest of the Hilbert maths problems, and making astounding movies. And the paintings! The ratio decidendi of its legal work! The responsiveness of automated call centres! Better, with its 3000 IQ than any human could ever hope to manage, of course. Why would anyone else even bother?
    Won’t it be great when it has unified quantum mechanics and relativity?
    Chat show hosts could never hope to get a better guest. In fact, forget Graham Norton, it would be best if it just interviews itself.
    Us? Well, there will be plenty to eat, and drink, and chat shows to watch. Even if we do have arms that can only lift a spoon.

  • Discovered Joys

    this is clearly a top-down campaign

    Perhaps it may be more helpful to think of it as a big money campaign? As such, clever people can make money promoting AI, their particular brand of AI, or proposing far reaching regulatory bureaucracies. Possibly all three at once – it’s only money.

  • NickM

    This is all nonsense. I suspect some of the AI Mavens are worried about being overtaken by other ones so just wanna calm it a bit to play catch-up. Especially seeing as the PRC’s DeepSeek appears to have an efficiency edge. I also suspect the “tech bros.” might be doing this to peddle-back their image as the Dr Evil’s of Our Age. The media, of course, loves Doom-mongering as well.

    I agree with Fraser apart from one thing… Data centres in space are a very bad idea. Cooling would be a nightmare. Yes, space is very cold but it’s also very nothing so you can rule out conductive of convective cooling. So, radiators. Well, the ones in houses etc. are a total misnomer. They don’t radiate heat. They transfer it via direct contact with air. Cooling is a massive problem for all space projects.

    Cooling is an issue on Earth too but if done cleverly the data centre could supply the local folks with free or very cheap home and water heating. Now who is gonna get NIMBY about that?

  • llamas

    Maybe someone who knows a lot more about AI can school me.

    Right now, both mrs llamas and I can spot AI-generated language content, both audible and written, very quickly indeed. There’s always a very obvious tell – a common word mispronounced, an awkward inflection, glaringly-wrong grammar, that sort of thing. Not that that’s necessarily a bad thing – there are many audiobook narrators whose style I enjoy, even though it’s obvious that what I’m actually listening to is an AI-generated synthesis of their voice. But it’s not hard to spot.

    Why is this? One would think that such obvious tells would be easy to train out of the model. And is this just English, due to its amazingly-quirky structures and many rule exceptions? mrs llamas points out that a lot of AI-generated visual slop is not that hard to detect either, if you put your mind to it, but your eyes are far-more easily-fooled than your ears. Can somebody explain this & where it is going?

    llater,

    llamas

  • Mila s

    I do wonder if a lot of AI doomerism is driven by the anthropomorphism of AI. The human drive to dominate our environment and social space ( the will to power) is a product of our evolution, not intelligence in itself.

  • NickM

    llamas,
    “obvious tells” – AI is kinda self-taught rather than explicitly trained. It doesn’t work on specific rules. It will get better as it evolves. Different languages (such as English which you mention) may be harder or easier – hadn’t thought of that but it is an interesting point.

    As to the visuals. Well, I have spent a lot of time doing AI images via Nightcafe. It can be very quirky at times. Done some brilliant stuff for me and is exceptional for “grunt work” like removing backgrounds. The commonest quirks are limbs and especially hands. Frequently superfluous. I have a hunch (no more than that) that it comes from people having four fingers and a thumb but talk about being “five fingered”. The weird thing about AI image generation is of course it is based on language rather than explicitly on visual models. Considering that I find it amazing it can do anything really. I suspect part of the problem is that (nearly?) all major AI image generation tools have a shotgun to their foreheads over producing anything “pornographic”. This can hamper them in odd ways because the companies are (rightly) paranoid that if they produce illegal images they are going to end-up in a World of Pain.

    What is amazingly good about AI imaging is the other way around. Quite how good Google is at recognising images is astonishing. I was in Croatia recently and there was a Roman doodad and I Google Lensed it and it told me all about it, not just, in general (it was a funerary urn) but the catalogue number of the piece and that it was in the archaeological museum in Split. The last fact I knew full well because I had in my pocket the admission ticket for that very museum. Highly recommended by the way but I’d skip on the 2 Euro extension to the ruins of Salona which is just a lot of small walls.

    I thought Split was ace (and under 3 quid for 500ml of beer in a city-centre tourist area!) but UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES go here.

    I leave it as an exercise to the reader whether I did or not.

  • Fraser Orr

    @bobby b
    One question: Can anyone explain why Elon Musk has apparently taken BOTH sides of this conflict?

    I set out the history above which explains what is going on here. He was indeed concerned about the dangers of AI, in fact it is one of the reasons he funded OpenAI as an “open” project, notwithstanding what happened subsequently. However, his attempts to deal with the risk were rebuffed by people like Altman and Page and so he tool the alternative course of creating a competitive AI that was “maximally truth seeking”.

    I think if you listen to him talking what you’ll hear him saying is that he is concerned about the dangers of AI but was not able to do anything about it so has decided to be optimistic, and to provide AIs that are positive contributors to humanity.

    What is lost in all these discussions of fear and trembling is that AI has a far higher likelihood to make the human condition vastly better. What the doomers fail to tell you is that in America, without AI (and let’s not forget robotics which is a dramatic accelerator of AI) the economy is on the verge of total collapse and everything will spiral down the toilet. AI is the one thing that can save us from this inevitable doom. 200 trillion dollars of debt and unfunded liabilities is the real doom prediction for America.

  • Fraser Orr

    @NickM
    Data centres in space are a very bad idea. Cooling would be a nightmare. Yes, space is very cold but it’s also very nothing so you can rule out conductive of convective cooling. So, radiators.

    This is not correct, in fact it is self evidently not correct. Currently there are about ten thousand satellites in earth orbit, all of them take in energy from the Sun and reject that energy via radiators. For sure data centers in space would require bigger solar panels and bigger radiators, but the ratio of solar panel to radiator remains the same. On, for example, the ISS there are 8 square meters of solar panel for every square meter of radiator. This is because in space heat is rejected from a radiator in proportion to the fourth power of the temperature difference. This is a well known engineering problem and SpaceX, who own about 85% of those satellites, are the world’s expert on this subject. They already have designs for these orbital data centers and the radiators are actually quite small.

  • LoudLight

    You guys know that the Terminator movies were Fiction, right?

  • Nick

    My money is on 1984 rather than Terminator 😎

  • bobby b

    1984 was fiction, too. 😉

  • Fraser Orr

    FWIW I think bobbyb brings up a point I hadn’t really thought about, though I have heard talk about general product liability. It is worth saying it is another advantage that China has that they don’t need to deal with product liability and they don’t have ten thousand slip and fall lawyers salivating at the prospect of AI product liability issues.

    I don’t know how that will play out. From what I have seen so far most of the lawsuits have been related to parents suing following AI usage and then suicide, for example Garcia v. Character Technologies and Raine v. OpenAI, as well as a more general suits from both Kentucky and Florida for general product liability and unfair trad practice.

    So no doubt it will be a bonanza of stupid, pointless lawsuits that will further hinder the progress of AI and hobble us even more than we already are against China. Of course I have not talked about Europe and Britain here, quite simply because they have so trapped themselves in their own self hatred and nonsense that they will have practically no role to play here.

    This again is why Elon Musk is the most important human alive today. He alone holds the tools we have to beat China, primarily right now with his launch capability, but also his extraordinary ability to build data centers here on earth at incredible rates of speed, his forthcoming dominance of the robotics market (though I am sure China will copy their designs and snap at his heels) and his deep access to the public uncensored. After the election in November and especially after the Presidential election in 2028, watch how the democrats will persecute him.

    It is worth pointing out why SpaceX is the only company that can do data centers in space. This is based both on their ability to launch huge amounts of mass into space, but it also comes from the fact that they already have an existing network infrastructure in space along with up and down links, to connect them effectively terrestrially. Plus it seems the majority of the best space infrastructure talent in the US works at SpaceX, or at least they do until he wears them out. If you take the time to read Musk’s biography, one of the themes I notice is how Musk can take the very, very best engineers and make them 100% better. That human capital is really what makes the Musk group of companies so effective and so poised for the future.

    It is also worth pointing out that Tesla and related companies are in the early days of completely transforming the transportation infrastructure in the United States. But that is perhaps a subject for a different day.

  • Snorri Godhi

    In reply to llamas, my best guesses:

    * common word mispronounced: seems most likely to come from learning from bad examples, and therefore not an obvious tell in itself

    * awkward inflection: a concrete example would help

    * glaringly wrong grammar: this seems an obvious tell – with the qualification that sometimes we all make grammatical mistakes, or accidentally delete words.

    What you have to keep in mind is that LLMs learn (high-level) statistical associations between words. They do not learn explicit rules.

    LLMs might learn grammar (which is primarily a set of rules, but also sort-of a high-level statistical association between words) but there is no guarantee that they will.

  • llamas

    Nick M. , Snorri Godhi – thanks for the insights. I really know nothing abpit how these systems “learn”.

    Using Snorri’s list

    * the common one we have both heard multiple times is ‘lead’ (guide with a rope) vs ‘lead’ (the metal). It would be interesting to know if other languages have the same issues – I believe, for example, that spoken Chinese and Japanese have many homynyms and heteronyms where the word being spoken (and its pronunciation) is largely defined by context.

    * awkward inflections – I can think of a couple from the last few days. The British English expression ‘oughtn’t’ (you ought not do that) being rendered as ‘orcht (hestitate) n (hestitate) t’. And the abbreviation OUDS being rendered as ‘owds’.

    *glaringly-wrong grammar – this can be a harder tell to spot as English grammar can be sonewhat-fluid, especially in older text. But often, an incorrect tense, or an incorrect singular vs plural form, is a likely giveaway.

    Fascinating.

    llater,

    llamas

  • bobby b

    Re: A.I. liability insurance

    For anyone who is interested in liability insurance issues regarding A.I., (which I’m fairly sure is a group that could fit into my nephew’s Mini), here’s a recent article detailing how the insurance world’s panicked retreat from providing coverage to A.I. providers threatens to stall expansion (or even continuation):

    https://www.csis.org/analysis/insurance-industrys-retreat-ai-threatens-slow-innovation-and-adoption

    (The Insurance Industry’s Retreat from AI Threatens to Slow Innovation and Adoption. CSIS Sept. 2026.)

    “On April 23, 2026, The Information reported that state insurance commissioners had quietly approved more than 80 percent of carrier requests to exclude AI-related damages from corporate insurance policies. That regulatory milestone attracted a fraction of the attention paid to this year’s AI legislation, but it will likely matter more than most of it. For many, perhaps most, American businesses, an activity that cannot be insured is an activity that is effectively prohibited. Insurance has quietly become the most important de facto regulator of U.S. AI deployment, and it is currently regulating by withdrawal: excluding AI risk from coverage rather than setting the affirmative standards under which AI deployment could be insured, priced, and disciplined.”

    Nothing of financial import proceeds in our world without cover. These new reg filings indicate that even corporate USERS of A.I. will go without coverage for A.I.-driven liability.

  • Fraser Orr

    @bobby b
    Re: A.I. liability insurance

    Very interesting article, thanks for sharing.

    I wonder if you can comment: these companies that might be baulking against AI because of the insurability risk; what insurance do they have against the business risk that China, fully adopting AI, will be one hundred times as productive as they are, driving them all out of business because they can’t compete?

    What insurance do they have against the pending collapse of the US dollar, the collapsing US economy, and skyrocketing government costs, or the collapse of the social security system, all driving tax rates through the ceiling? What about when the devaluation of the dollar causes their asset values to collapse and their overseas business to dry up?

    As I have said before, AI and robotics are literally the only thing that will save us from fifty years of out of control profligacy, hyperregulation and political stupidity.

  • bobby b

    Fraser Orr: I won’t disagree with you re: the impact of AI on our econ future.

    Insurers exist to make a profit, and they do that by knowing how to price risk. They don’t feel they can do that for AI. It’s not that they will need to charge some huge amount. They could have done that. No, they simply asked the state insurance regulators to let them out of insuring AI.

    They either cannot figure out how to price the risk (to an insured, not to society) of AI, or they did figure it out and the risk is huge and unaffordable.

    All of this is simply to explain the basis for my belief that the AI crews are stymied at least in part by this insurance problem, and the best outcome for them (and maybe everyone?) is to offer it up for gov regulation, but in exchange be given some form of liability limitation/immunity such as we give vax makers and gun makers. We do that when we figure it serves an important public interest that overrides our usual freedom to sue for anything and everything.

    Part of approval for public ownership – the IPO – is that you must show that you have managed risk well enough such that shareholders aren’t at casual risk of losing everything. Without liability insurance OR immunity, I don’t think they can show that, so I wonder how they get through a risk audit pre-IPO.

  • Fraser Orr

    @bobbyb, I’m afraid “to offer it up for gov regulation” is effectively the same as saying “give it all to China and allow one of the most dangerous tyrannical regimes to effectively take over the world economy.” Government regulation is simply not capable of dealing with the reality of AI, even if I set aside my deep skepticism of the capabilities and motivation of government agencies and give them every benefit of the doubt, they simply cannot keep up with a technology like AI and so will simply be a massive hinderance to its progress in America. Imagine some lawsuit that had o progress from the lower courts all through the multiple appellate levels to the USSC for some precedent setting ruling. How long does that process take? Five years minimum? Now think about where AI was five years ago. AI and government regulation are simply not compatible.

    As to risk management and the MBA type of people who run these companies, it seems that they are able to satisfy the risk associated with IPO and ongoing market regulations since there are several very large public companies prominent in the field, and one, SpaceX, who have recently gone public. And of course there is the much anticipated IPOs of Anthropic and OpenAI (or should I say “Open” AI). So somehow, and this is way beyond my knowledge or expertise, they have managed to deal with the problem you anticipate.

  • Fraser Orr

    For those who don’t work daily with these technologies, I thought it would be useful to understand some metrics. Over the last couple of months, when I have some spare time, I have been creating a small piece of software to help run my business. It is just an hour here, a couple of hours there, etc. and I’d estimate a total of probably 40 hours, or one week. In that time I have created with AI a very useful piece of software. I have run various metrics on it to get an idea of how much it would cost to develop without AI, and also I have applied my many years of managing software projects to estimate too. I am confident that it is a year’s work for a team of three developers. Which is to say, on this piece of software anyway, AI was a 150x multiplier in productivity. You might say that is just programming, but I don’t think that is true. I think programmers are probably better at bringing out those sorts of savings because they understand computers and software better than most people, but there is no reason to not see similar levels of productivity boost in anything that can be reached by agentic AI, which is to say, anything you can do only with a computer.

    The next wave of embodied AI, which is to say robotics, I doubt it will be a 150x multiplier but it will be a huge multiplier, and will offer many benefits that we would not think of immediately. For example, if we used robots instead of miners, we can do so without the dramatic costs associated with health and safety in mines, or more simple recognize that robots don’t need pee breaks or lunch breaks, or time to take their kid to the doctor, or take an annual trip to Disney, and can work in the dark and the cold or the bright lights and high heat, and do so 365/24/7 costing only capital depreciation and electricity.

    Should we tie ourselves in knots of government red tape while Red China exploits this to the max? Shall we allow our economy to look like the economy of Zimbabwe compared to the economy of China? This is one of the most important turning points in the history of humanity and the idea that “I’m from the government and I’m here to help you” is not only laughable, but it is a gross threat to the future of freedom against tyranny.

  • bobby b

    Somewhat pertinent to the insurance issue:

    https://x.com/BrianRoemmele/status/2102064076423856148

    Watch Bessent address immunity/indemnity.

    (Short version: nope!)

  • Fraser Orr

    Interesting free market perspective from Bessent. But… related on the legal front here is a juicy one from the other side of the fence.

    Four plaintiffs subscribed to ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, or Gemini filed a proposed class-action lawsuit alleging that the developers of these AI models violated antitrust laws when they agreed to slow AI development. According to the Associated Press, the lawsuit argues that this agreement would “reduce the value consumers get for paid AI subscriptions” and that this coordination started in July 2026 after the leading AI labs signed a statement admitting there is “intense competitive pressure not to unilaterally slow” development.

    Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

  • bobby b

    The real issue – not the fake “we need oversight!” claim – is that AI WILL be shut down or slowed if they cannot figure out a way to deal with their current apparent uninsurability.

    If they cannot secure basic liability cover (defamation, product liability, etc), I don’t see the IPOs going forward.

    And who is going to serve on a Board without D&O? No one with any personal assets.

    So this really is a big deal if you want this future.

  • Fraser Orr

    bobby b
    If they cannot secure basic liability cover (defamation, product liability, etc), I don’t see the IPOs going forward.

    Maybe. This is all very MBA and way above my head, but I’d offer as a counter example that SpaceX DID go IPO about a month ago. Of course we could write this off as an instance of Elon’s recklessness, but one need only look at the board of directors, including the top people at several Venture funds, the head of global partnerships at Google, and of course the remarkable Gwynne Shotwell who is the counterbalance to Elon’s crazy. It is hard to believe that these very serious people would put it all on the line without having carefully considering the implications. And of course both Anthropic and “Open” AI are clearly on track to go IPO too.

    So, I don’t know. You raise an excellent point and I am way to stupid and uneducated to answer it. But apparently “reality” disagrees with you.

  • bobby b

    Fraser Orr:
    I agree with your basic premise that the safetyism is both dumb and venal.

    I’m just saying that they (AI corps) need to figure out this liability issue quick. Almost seems they forgot about the issue until a month ago.

    SpaceX was fully insured on its IPO date. Musk partnered up a smaller captive (i.e., his) insurer with a consortium of others, and I’m sure that that exposure is laid off amongst a big part of the re-insurer world.

    But his exterior liability exposure is smaller than an A.I company. He just mostly can’t be dropping big machines out of the sky and causing harm to others. A.I. exposure, OTOH, is still unknown and scary. Underwriters can’t quantify anything yet, but exposure is going to start at “Huge”.

  • Nicholas (Pro-Localism) Gray

    I found an interesting series on Netflix, called ‘A person of interest’. It is about AIs, and what could happen when 2 different AIs, with different built-in moral codes, try to decide the fate of mankind.

  • Fraser

    I know this is a really old thread but I hope some of you will read this because I think it is really important.

    This is Chamath Palihapitiya one of the leading experts on emerging technology commenting on some of the rich and powerful’s take on AI. We have heard from Hilary Clinton, we even heard from Prince Harry (do these people realize how ridiculous they sound commenting on something the know almost nothing about?) but in this case Obama’s take. Listening to it again, it is clear that Obama does not even know what “agentic” means from his comment: how is it ok that someone is famous but their raving about something they know almost nothing about, is somehow significant. How has someone like Prince Harry got the chutzpah to get up in front of a crowd and talk about AI when I doubt he even knows how to turn on his own laptop without tech support.

    However, there is something more sinister about it, and I’ll let you read and listen to Chamath’s excellent take on this.

    Once again, this is why I say Elon Musk is the most important human alive today. He is the one person with a dominant position in these crucial technologies that can save us from people like Altman, Brin, Page and even the good hearted if very leftie, Amodei family. He alone stands from free markets, free speech and building AIs that value truth more than political correctness.

    It is why, again, this Iran war was such a catastrophic mistake, putting, as it does, power in the United States into the hands of some of the craziest people at this cricual turning point in history. And, perhaps most importantly, people who loathe Elon Musk. Why do they hate him? Not just because he is so rich. Not just because he destroyed their plaything Twitter. Not even because of his close association with Trump. But I think most of all, as someone who was so very much on their side of the Green agenda with his EVs, he is above all an apostate. And we know what the religious do with apostates, especially the crazy religion of the left.

    Can I suggest that if you want to do something about this that you only use Grok products for your AI needs and give your support to the one company that is trying to secure your liberty and future. Grok is spectacular, Grok Bot is life transforming if you have a lot going on. X.com is an engine of information untainted by government manipulation or the forces of leftie doom. And know that your subscription is going to a company that is building a future of freedom rather than to a company that wants to rob you of all you hold dear. And for sure, if you are an American, although the midterms are going to be a disaster, do not let your despondency allow you to not turn up at the polls in November. Perhaps we can make it a bit less of a disaster than it is going to be.

    Every election in my lifetime, I have been told, is the most important in history. That didn't turn out to be true, but this one actually is. We are in the middle of a humanity transforming technology revolution and how it is regulated for the whole world, will be determined in the next two American elections. That really is about as important as it gets.

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