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AI safety is mostly a sex cult - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49737985 - Sept 2026 (314 comments)
Hard to tell without looking closely at the articles...
(Off-topic note: the title variation makes a surprising difference)
(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49766911)
I feel there's many interesting pieces to this -- Yudkowsky certainly has extreme views, it's clear there are a ton of poly and open people in this community, some people do have a religious veneration for Yudkowsky and "rationality" in general, and there's some smarmy folks in the mix. But I'm not sure any of that is a negative critique of the general movement. I suspect similar statements were true of the enlightenment, protestantism, and the beatniks? Marginalized views, free expression, and new ideas often go together in what I feel is an obvious pattern. I don't care if there's a bunch of sexually liberal people in this org, or some obsessive fan-devotion, so long as they're not forcing somebody into a situation they don't want. These people can live their lives however they want; I think that's quintessentially American in a way that's very positive and increasingly rare. And on the other side, there are many impacts from this movement that I'm quite happy with: I'm really happy that this movement has spawned/impacted GiveWell, the Long Now, Scott Alexander, Works in Progress, and Open Philanthropy, to name just a few. I'm also happy that it seems to have birthed the latest AI progress. Of course there are things that I find ridiculous (I didn't really like hpmor, their forum board is somewhat silly, and Roko's Basilisk[0] is just hilarious, lol).
If this piece was meant as documentation of a particular moment in time, then they've picked a really fascinating group to document! But it feels like it's really meant as criticism, that we should trust the whole group less because there are some sexually open fans of Yudkowsky. I'm not sure I can get on board with that. If sexually open fans of Yudkowsky want to build great things, I say let them!
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roko%27s_basilisk
A post by the author: https://bsky.app/profile/segyges.bsky.social/post/3mwc2eopu6...
>> I apologize for my earlier article, which did not undergo proper legal review, and will not be able to be present on social media for a while.
The "AI safety" movement is largely an answer to only one side: the apocalyptic one. Doomers like Yudkowsky and his ilk are popular over there. Note how his most recent book reads like scifi, including with its implausible "solutions"? These people are living in a fantasy land. This isn't to say p(doom) = 0, but we've lived with it being non-zero since the introduction of nuclear weapons. Very little has changed there, I'd say.
For the socio-realism side, well, this model aligns well with exactly the kinds of real-world misery often posted on this site, as intellectual workers' livelihoods and telos are negated by automation. Sellers of "AI safety" don't care about them. There's no calls from that community to carve out space for us to retain a life of meaning within society when our ability to contribute is nullified. The fantasy of AI safety doesn't have room for that: they're too busy warding off imaginary demons; hence the cult-like behavior.
Yes! Also the "apocalyptic, focusing on existential threats of the kind seen in scifi literature" serves as a useful strawman fo AI advocates to deflect attention away from the socio-realism critique.
It's happened a few times where I say I don't really care about in the apocalyptic sci-fi scenarios [1] but I'm more concern about the "socio-realism," but some AI proponent keeps trying to bend the discussion back to the unrealism of self-replicating von Neumann machines or something.
[1] The most interesting thing about the apocalyptic sci-fi scenarios is that they show the fundamental irresponsibility and recklessness of many very important AI leaders. Those people often seriously entertain those doomsday scenarios while simultaneously racing as fast as they possibly can to build the technologies that they say would enable them.
Another aspect is the world that people like the Altmans and Musks come from. The wealthier someone is, the more detached they tend to be from the manual labor that runs the world. When your goods simply appear at your door after a few taps on an app, it's easy to forget that someone made them with their hands (especially true for high-end products), someone packed them, someone drove them to a warehouse, someone photographed and edited them, someone wrote the listing, someone packed them again, and someone eventually brought them to your door.
The entire physical world gets compressed into an app. From that perspective, it can start to seem as if the app is the world itself, and that if someone can hack the app, they can destroy the world.
It's the fascist playbook to champion the end of times while simultaneously proclaiming to being the chosen one to save humanity. It's not different than with these LLM companies.
Naomi Klein's and Astra Taylor's book go over just this: "End Times Fascism."