Meanwhile, surprisingly enough, it turned out that regular “100 IQ individuals” with no prospect to become absurdly rich and powerful actually do not want an apocalypse! Too bad that we have already stained our reputation quite a bit, while appearing as bootlickers to the tech-billionares for all these years, but better late than never.
There is a lesson about naivity/cynycism and personal bias here. How it’s much more pleasant to persuade influential elites than common masses. The former feels like respectable intellectual activity, while the latter like—gah! - politics, something what crazy activists would do. And it’s good that we’ve managed to learn it, diversifying our activity and trying to appeal to common people more. Would’ve been even better if managed to win initially, instead of making this kind of fascinating mistake, but sadly we are not that good at rationality yet.
That has been the default strategy for many years and it failed dramatically.
All the “convinced influential people in tech”, started making their own AI start-ups, while comming up with galaxy-brained rationalizations why everything will be okay with their idea in particular. We tried to be nice to them in order not to lose our influence with them. Turned out we didn’t have any. While we carefully and respectfully showed the problems with their reasoning, they likewise respectfully nodded their heads and continued to burn the AI timelines. Who could’ve though that people who have a real chance to become incredibly rich and important at the cost of dooming human civilization a bit later, are going to take this awesome opportunity?
Meanwhile, surprisingly enough, it turned out that regular “100 IQ individuals” with no prospect to become absurdly rich and powerful actually do not want an apocalypse! Too bad that we have already stained our reputation quite a bit, while appearing as bootlickers to the tech-billionares for all these years, but better late than never.
There is a lesson about naivity/cynycism and personal bias here. How it’s much more pleasant to persuade influential elites than common masses. The former feels like respectable intellectual activity, while the latter like—gah! - politics, something what crazy activists would do. And it’s good that we’ve managed to learn it, diversifying our activity and trying to appeal to common people more. Would’ve been even better if managed to win initially, instead of making this kind of fascinating mistake, but sadly we are not that good at rationality yet.