Hypothesis I is testable! Instead of prompting with a string of actual tokens, use a “virtual token” (a vector v from the token embedding space) in place of ‘ petertodd’.
It would be enlightening to rerun the above experiments with different choices of v:
A random vector (say, iid Gaussian )
A random sparse vector
(apple+banana)/2
(villain-hero)+0.1*(bitcoin dev)
Etc.
Great points about not wanting to summon the doom memeplex!
It sounds like your proposed narrative is not doom but disempowerment: humans could lose control of the future. An advantage of this narrative is that people often find it more plausible: many more scenarios lead to disempowerment than to outright doom.
I also personally use the disempowerment narrative because it feels more honest to me: my P(doom) is fairly low but my P(disempowerment) is substantial.
I’m curious though whether you’ve run into the same hurdle I have, namely that people already feel disempowered! They know that some humans somewhere have some power, but it’s not them. So the Davos types will lose control of the future? Many people express indifference or even perverse satisfaction at this outcome.
A positive narrative of empowerment could be much more potent, if only I knew how to craft it.