XLE

@XLE@piefed.social · Joined ⁨Jun⁩ ⁨2025⁩

Replying to an earlier post

https://ondiscourse.com/ai-doomerism-is-a-business-tactic/

Now I’m interested in how you conflate “expert” with “employee” when determining who you trust. Do you see any conflict of interest here?

And I asked you earlier about why these “experts” never sound the alarm about the environmental or mental harms of AI. I wonder why that is… Do you think it hurts their bottom line?

ON_DiscourseAI Doomerism is a Business TacticAI Doomerism is a Business Tactic Recent warnings from tech leaders that AI could lead to the extinction of humanity have raised eyebrows and reminded me

Replying to an earlier post

That AI doomerism is AI marketing.

Now I’m interested in how you conflate “expert” with “employee” when determining who you trust. Do you see any conflict of interest here?

And I asked you earlier about why these “experts” never sound the alarm about the environmental or mental harms of AI. I wonder why that is… Do you think it hurts their bottom line?

Replying to an earlier post

I disagree with Yudkowsky in pretty much every way possible, and don’t know how you could conclude I agree with him if you saw anything else I posted in this thread. He’s like you, he believes AI is inevitable and wants it to be good too.

When I said “the experts” I meant all the people working on AI at these frontier AI companies

Interesting how you conflate “expert” with “employee” when determining who you trust. Do you see any conflict of interest here?

And I asked you earlier about why these “experts” never sound the alarm about the environmental or mental harms of AI. I wonder why that is… Do you think it hurts their bottom line?

Replying to an earlier post

Since your first post, I’ve been challenging you to justify your thought-terminating cliches, but instead all you do is string together insults like

it really is like discussing vaccines with an antivaxxer.

and slightly less overt ones. You should retract all the personal attacks or at least retract your insincere “apology.”

And for your vague sourceless claims about “experts” need to actually provide sources. Tell me the cult leader Eliezer Yudkowsky isn’t one of your favored “experts.”

Replying to an earlier post

I can’t tell if you’re reading what I’m writing. I mention CEOs twice and you assert I’m not listening to “The Experts”.

No one is claiming that “AI” doesn’t have downsides.

You mean climate damage and psychosis?

Zero of the “experts” in your strained theory about looking for excuses to “pause” AI ever talk about them. It’s almost like they don’t want to imply their product is unworthy of all the hype, doomerism and fearmongering.

Replying to an earlier post

I meant no insult

Uh-huh. You compared me to an antivaxxer , implying that people who disagree with you don’t believe in science or technology - the same reason you felt the need to throw in the “inevitability” cliche. Which I do not buy, and somebody claiming to understand the technology should never repeat.

Later, you say anyone who disagrees with you just feels “desperate” and “threatened." You’re really pulling everything from the “I am rational and you are neurotic” playbook aren’t you.

I can’t know the motives of anyone, but I can say it’s at least plausible that the people working on the frontier models want an excuse to slow down that doesn’t give an advantage to other countries and companies, and also doesn’t put them in the crosshairs of investors and board members.

It’s all the same song and dance. Dario Amodei screams “hold me back!” because he loves pretending his product is Great and Powerful.

Why do these developers never talk about real harms like the environmental damage they cause? How about the psychosis they are liable to fall into?

It’s pretty obvious they’re just doing marketing, knowingly or not. And these are smart people who should know better.

Replying to an earlier post

Odd article. It’s halfway speculative: a better title is “what if always-on recording devices spy on everybody around them and not just the person wearing them?” A bit long, maybe.

The article makes this All About AI by focusing on

  • AI recording devices specifically, like the joke product “Friend” (the Atlantic never mentions this one by name, I presume out of embarrassment) or an upcoming piece of Apple hardware that IIRC has been fraught with development issues from the beginning
  • AI noise cancellation algorithms, which they note have been around since 2020 and barely register to the average person as AI unless you’re writing some long-form speculation piece

I dunno, I’m more worried about the microphone in my own computer, not somebody across the room rambling into a battery-powered pendant.

Replying to an earlier post

Any pause will have to be a global treaty

Which is why tech CEOs love to promote it. They know it’ll never happen.

We know how to make “AI” more capable, but we don’t know how to make it stay aligned with human goals.

“Alignment” is almost entirely a myth cooked up by AI companies who want to make their word generators sound scarier than they are. There’s no such thing: the next word generator generates next word. It’s unpredictable because it’s built that way. “Hallucination” and “going rogue”, all poor terms and pathetic attempts to fearmonger and humanize, are identical functions to “working” and “aligning”.

The technology… isn’t going anywhere

The “it’s just inevitable” cliche rears its ugly head again.

Replying to an earlier post

Bernie has been compromised by AI evangelists and PR stunts.

As a reminder, Bernie believes AI should be privately owned but with a large public stake in it (a sovereign wealth fund), which effectively means the US government would have a vested interest in keeping the unprofitable part of Elon Musk’s industries — the CSAM-generating ones — profitable.

The senator says recent rogue-agent incidents show AI firms are losing control of their own systems.

Those were PR stunts.

You’ll notice Bernie isn’t even talking about regulating data centers any more, which is concrete and actionable.

He’s just repeating what AI companies say to promote their product as being better than it really is, and encourage corporate capture that will guarantee a corporate monopoly.

More than 1,300 employees from the world’s leading tech companies just signed an open letter…

Yeah, OpenAI and Anthropic executives signed it because it is good for their business.

Thomson Reuters Tax & Accounting NewsSanders calls for tax on 'systemically important AI activity,' payable in equitySenator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) has proposed a remittance tax on certain artificial intelligence companies amounting to 50% of the company's outstanding equity interests.

Replying to an earlier post

The guidelines also deal with connections to unusual or high-risk IP addresses, traffic through uncommon ports, long-duration sessions involving relatively little data, encrypted traffic on non-standard ports, repeated connections to the same remote IP and unusually high data volumes during odd hours.

Do you have a loicence to encrypt traffic through that port?

IPDR can be matched with call detail records (CDRs), customer application forms (KYC details), and mobile tower data to provide a “complete picture of any user activity”, added the HT report.

Your home PC sure was downloading a lot of data while you’re at work but not at home… You wouldn’t be torrenting movies instead of buying a Netflix subscription would you?