A ritual relying on a terribly eurocentric history of humanity, that quotes Nick Bostrom alongside Galileo and Thomas Edison? Why, LessWrongers, you shouldn't have....no really, you shouldn't have.
Also they do the "that's a nice quote isn't it....it's from Hitler!" bit, which seems like kind of a cheap routine to have in your ritual.
Looking at the course page, it seems like the students might have chosen the subjects themselves. I did not know Aella was Chicana. Is she? I guess technically she wouldn't have to be, but all the other topics students have chosen are about Chicanos.
Émile Torres writing last year:
[...] Nick Beckstead, a noted EA, argued in 2013 that, given the “overwhelming” moral importance of the far future — “millions, billions, and trillions” of years from now — we should prioritize saving the lives of people in rich countries over those in poor countries, other things being equal. The reason is that people in rich countries are better positioned to influence the far future.
And that about sums it up. They don't care. They simply don't care. Beckstead explains that it's better to focus on the rich countries because "rich countries have substantially more innovation" and "their workers are more economically productive". He apparently presented these ideas in a graduate thesis: I hope he got a bad grade.
This NY newspaper still makes slop the old fashioned way
And he still works there! I guess it might be hard to get a new job with "presided over largest theft of labor in human history" on your CV.
#3 suggests that people in tech have gotten way wayyy too comfortable with saying "hey, I know that company's evil, but it's a really good job" about companies that make software for arms manufacturers or ICE or surveillance, so of course people who think AI might kill us all think it's ok to work for AI companies even if it might cause an extermination.
I'm already thinking about complaining about some of the stuff he's said¹, so that might be a good idea. However I think my university's policy for students is that you can use AI to start research, summarise notes etc. so he might not be breaking any rules.
¹ Inappropriate questions to students. Not sexually inappropriate, just inappropriate.
"the overtone window" would be a good name for the amount of racist dogwhistling that's acceptable in the mainstream media
Nope, different degree. This guy is brought in as a guest lecturer about the field he works in: most of the actual lecturers are nowhere near this AI-pilled.
Hell is a university lecturer who not only hands out AI-generated summaries of his lecture to the class, but uses AI to generate diagrams and infographics for his lecture slides.
What the fuck is this and why am I getting emails from avaaz about it
I feel like every time I turn around there's another baffling anti/ai project
What We Tell AI, a project collecting anonymous confessions about people's AI use. Project was created by Synthetic Wisdom, a "emerging practice" dedicated to "public sense-making" about AI. It's not clear who's funding them (or if anyone is). The confessions are interesting even if I'm a little skeptical of the framing (chatbot use might be ubiquitous but it's not inevitable).