In its desperate hunger for clicks, much of the media has decided to endorse a maximalist interpretation of what AI might do. I’ve cataloged them before: disrupt every industry, eliminate poverty and need, send us off of into the stars, end death. Or, alternatively, threaten everything we’ve built, provoke dystopia, exterminate humanity. Take your... See more

What AI is is an ideology—a system of ideas that has swept up not only the tech industry but huge parts of government on both sides of the aisle, a supermajority of everyone with assets in the millions and up, and a seemingly growing sector of the journalism class. The ideology itself is nothing new—it is the age-old system of supremacy, granting... See more

… when imagining worrisome AI capabilities, we don't have to think ahead to a time when 1.7 trillion parameters seem as dinky as 1.7 billion do today. Even current AI systems, equipped with diverse objectives and allowed to interact, have the potential to wreak havoc. When personal AI systems are deployed to buy and sell on eBay, send and receive

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