This is indeed an interesting sociological breakdown of the “movement”, for lack of a better word.
I think the injection of the author’s beliefs about whether or not short timelines are correct distracting from the central point. For example, the author states the following.
there is no good argument for when [AGI] might be built.
This is a bad argument against worrying about short timelines, bordering on intellectual dishonesty. Building anti-asteroid defenses is a good idea even if you don’t know that one is going to hit us within the next year.
The argument that it’s better to have AGI appear sooner rather than later because institutions are slowly breaking down is an interesting one. It’s also nakedly accelerationist, which is strangely inconsistent with the argument that AGI is not coming soon, and in my opinion very naïve.
Besides that, I think it’s generally a good take on the state of the movement, i.e., like pretty much any social movement it has a serious problem with coherence and collateral damage and it’s not clear whether there’s any positive effect.
This is indeed an interesting sociological breakdown of the “movement”, for lack of a better word.
I think the injection of the author’s beliefs about whether or not short timelines are correct distracting from the central point. For example, the author states the following.
This is a bad argument against worrying about short timelines, bordering on intellectual dishonesty. Building anti-asteroid defenses is a good idea even if you don’t know that one is going to hit us within the next year.
The argument that it’s better to have AGI appear sooner rather than later because institutions are slowly breaking down is an interesting one. It’s also nakedly accelerationist, which is strangely inconsistent with the argument that AGI is not coming soon, and in my opinion very naïve.
Besides that, I think it’s generally a good take on the state of the movement, i.e., like pretty much any social movement it has a serious problem with coherence and collateral damage and it’s not clear whether there’s any positive effect.