Ben Bernanke Joins Anthropic Oversight Trust

Krugman: "I've been writing some about downsides of technological change and I realized afterwards that if I really wanted a really stellar example of a productive important innovation that had terrible effects on society would be the cotton gin."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJxQbfbpf7M&t=25m38s

Richardson: "I always have a hard time articulating this, but the number of large plantations in which enslavers owned in air quotes, you know, more than 25 or more than 50 other human beings was a very very small proportion of the American South, less than 1%. The majority of people who again owned their black neighbors had one or two enslaved people on their farms. They weren't necessarily called plantations. And they would be working alongside those black Americans. And the cotton gin could have made small farms viable and could have ended human enslavement. And instead what they gave us was, you know, the the Trail of Tears in the 1830s that cleans indigenous Americans out of the southwestern land. You get an extraordinary land rush into the American South in the 1830s and the 1840s. And you get the establishment of these gigantic essentially factory farms. And that's a place where, you know, the majority of southerners, obviously the indigenous southerners and the black southerners, wanted no part of this system, but it actually didn't serve the white farmers either. It served a really small, less than 1% group of American enslavers in the American South. And you look at that and you think that wasn't the technologies fault. That was the fault of the people who um who set up the political system that enabled it to work that way."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJxQbfbpf7M&t=28m18s

Google self reports 70% ai usage in code, bun was fully ai rewritten to be rust

Yes, at least until ~6 months ago that was my reading too. I felt they were part of the EA/less wrong crowd. Earnest, convinced they were smarter than everyone else, paternalistic, massively lacking in real wisdom.

Now, I think maybe they're still struggling with that but they've had a real taste of power and like everyone smart but lacking in wisdom, faced with the real world, all their idealism has become lip service and pandering to their previous in group while their real target (which they probably haven't even admitted to themselves) slips further and further towards gathering more power.

As another example of a tech company where something similar happened, see Google. Although at least they never started out with this condescending "we're here to save you from... us" vibe.