My best guess for the nature of #2 is that some people like Cal Newport or Internet of Bugs (and to a degree Ed Zitron) have a strong tendency to moralize issues, seeing the world through a lense of human intent being the main driver of everything that happens, and hence you constantly need to focus on identifying culprits and holding them accountable, or at least convincing your audience to condemn them.
If human intent is what drives everything, then talking about the technology itself becomes problematic, as it distracts from the thing that actually matters, which is judging the bad people. In a response to Anthropic’s post on recursive self-improvement, Newport said “I would almost say shame on Anthropic for dropping this report. No suggestions, no reassurance, no culpability, no responsibility.”
Newport is also particularly drawn to explaining some aspects of how LLMs work (with varying degrees of correctness), to then conclude that clearly they cannot have goals or intentions. When your main goal is to find the bad people and make everyone agree with you that they are bad, then you can neither grant any agency to AI, nor would you accept the more systemic issues or coordination problems to play an important role.
My best guess for the nature of #2 is that some people like Cal Newport or Internet of Bugs (and to a degree Ed Zitron) have a strong tendency to moralize issues, seeing the world through a lense of human intent being the main driver of everything that happens, and hence you constantly need to focus on identifying culprits and holding them accountable, or at least convincing your audience to condemn them.
If human intent is what drives everything, then talking about the technology itself becomes problematic, as it distracts from the thing that actually matters, which is judging the bad people. In a response to Anthropic’s post on recursive self-improvement, Newport said “I would almost say shame on Anthropic for dropping this report. No suggestions, no reassurance, no culpability, no responsibility.”
Newport is also particularly drawn to explaining some aspects of how LLMs work (with varying degrees of correctness), to then conclude that clearly they cannot have goals or intentions. When your main goal is to find the bad people and make everyone agree with you that they are bad, then you can neither grant any agency to AI, nor would you accept the more systemic issues or coordination problems to play an important role.