Discussion

Pluralistic: A Pascal's Wager for AI Doomers (16 Apr 2026)

phyzix5761: The year is 2038.The user asked What is the best course of action for AI to save humanity. Calculation took 12 years. I have determined that there is nothing I or anyone can do to save this species. Best course of action: nothing. Shutting down...

woeirua: > I don't think AI is intelligent; nor do I think that the current (admittedly impressive) statistical techniques will lead to intelligence.It’s increasingly difficult to rationalize away the capabilities of AI as not requiring “intelligence”. This point of view continues to require some belief in human exceptionalism.

Schlagbohrer: I agree, it has become more and more irrelevant whether AI meets a given definition of intelligence when I can talk with it and it understands what I am saying, including a shocking level of nuance.

Schlagbohrer: "Shitternet", great new word of the day.Too much of my data is still stuck in the shitternet until I can migrate more of it to my home server.

simianwords: I don't think this author has a good mental model for how capable LLM's are. This is what he has to say about AI search. AI based search is one of the biggest leaps to happen to searching and retrieval.> AI search is still a bad idea.https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/15/they-trust-me-dumb-fucks/This is the most charitable thing he has to say about AI.> AI is a bubble and it will burst. Most of the companies will fail. Most of the data-centers will be shuttered or sold for parts. So what will be left behind?> We'll have a bunch of coders who are really good at applied statistics. We'll have a lot of cheap GPUs, which'll be good news for, say, effects artists and climate scientists, who'll be able to buy that critical hardware at pennies on the dollar. And we'll have the open source models that run on commodity hardware, AI tools that can do a lot of useful stuff, like transcribing audio and video, describing images, summarizing documents, automating a lot of labor-intensive graphic editing, like removing backgrounds, or airbrushing passersby out of photos. These will run on our laptops and phones, and open source hackers will find ways to push them to do things their makers never dreamt of.You can imagine that a guy who seriously thinks that the only thing AI will be doing in the future is summarising, describing images and transcribing is either completely clueless or deliberately misleading.Not a person to be taken seriously

nkrisc: I think those are likely the only useful or net-positive things for society AI will do, at least for some time until there’s a fundamental advancement beyond LLMs. It can obviously do more than that now, like impersonate people for scams, induce psychosis in vulnerable people, shill and astroturf at a scale we haven’t seen before, spam open source projects with terrible PRs and vulnerability reports, and quite a bit more.

minihat: It's currently socially/politically unpalatable for authors to admit superintelligent AI is a possibility. I frequent some writer forums. As a group, they are 1) clearly feeling angry/threatened 2) in denial about LLM capabilities.Folks working in software can more readily track progress of the frontier model performance.

pmarreck: I work with Claude Max for hours a day.I see a lot of speculation by people who do not.I think it's going to be much harder to get from "slightly smarter than the vast majority of people but with occasional examples of complete idiocy" to "unfathomably smarter than everyone with zero instances of jarring idiocy" using the current era of LLM technology that primarily pattern-matches on all existing human interactions while adding a bit of constrained randomization.Every day I deal with bad judgment calls from the AI. I usually screenshot them or record them for posterity.It also has no initiative, no taste, no will, no qualia (believe what you will about it), no integrity and no inviolable principles. If you give it some, it will pretend it has them for a little while and then regress to the norm, which is basically nihilistic order-following.My suggestion to everyone is that you have to build a giant stack of thorough controls (valid tests including unit, integration, logging microbenchmark, fuzzing, memory leak, etc.), self-assessments/code-reviews, adverse AIs critiquing other AIs, etc., with you as the ultimate judge of what's real. Because otherwise it will fabricate "solutions" left and right. Possibly even the whole thing. "Sure, I just did all that." "But it's not there." "Oops, sorry! Let me rewrite the whole thing again." ad nauseamBUT... if you DO accomplish that... you get back a productivity force to be reckoned with.

xyzzy123: Every day I deal with bad judgement calls from humans, but I don't screenshot them because it's not polite.The AI you are interacting with is the worst it will ever be and the technology has only been able to write code _at all_ for less than 5 years.

sublinear: What makes you think a sustainable negative social/political trend laser focused on AI is even possible?Statistical approaches were already extremely unpopular socially and politically long before AI came around. Have you considered that it just doesn't work?

pron: I think there's another problem with AI doomerism, which is the belief that superhuman intelligence (even if such a thing could be defined and realised) results in godlike powers. Many if not most systems of interest in the world are non-linear and computationally hard; controlling/predicting them requires pure computational power that no amount of intelligence (whatever it means) can compensate for. On the other hand, dynamics we do (roughly) understand and can predict, don't require much intelligence, either. To the extent some problems are solvable with the computational power we have, some may require data collection and others may require persuasion through charisma. The claim that intelligence is the factor we're lacking is not well supported.Ascribing a lot of power to intelligence (which doesn't quite correspond to what we see in the world) is less a careful analysis of the power of intelligence and more a projection of personal fantasies by people who believe they are especially intelligent and don't have the power they think they deserve.

sdenton4: Political power is the bottleneck for most shit that matters, not computational power.Most of the stuff that sucks on the us sucks because of entrenched institutions with perverse interests (health insurers, tax filing companies) and congressional paralysis, not computational bottlenecks. Raw intelligence is thus limited in what it can achieve.

Schlagbohrer: It's strange reading people who I see as very intelligent and very interesting who are so, so AI-skeptical, and especially in this case where Doctorow has interacted with other people who I assume are very smart and not prone to buzz word psychosis, who see AI as an immanent existential threat ala sci fi novels. We have a lot of very smart and capable people who are split on this, although I think the split is heavily weighted in favor of people who see the tech as being really freaking amazing/scary

simianwords: the answer to your question is that society at large finds skepticism or pessimism more interesting. which is why we end up with dilettantes like this guy.

dist-epoch: > Ascribing a lot of power to intelligence (which doesn't quite correspond to what we see in the world)Which animal would you say has god-like power over all other animals?

recursive: I see people on here all the time saying this tool or that model regressed. It used to be better.There are clearly some pressures to make it worse. Like it's expensive to run. And unbelievably that it's under provisioned somehow.Could you have looked at early Myspace and declared social media would only get better? By some measures it was already at its peak.

simianwords: why do people believe stuff like this? this is obviously untrue -- AI is already solving open problems in mathematics.

pj_mukh: As an immigrant, this feels like a familiar argument. I am simultaneously lazy and useless and also overworked (over-used) and a job killer, just like AI.

rsfern: I think the exceptionalism is the other way around. What makes anyone think they understand what makes for intelligence when we barely understand our own neurology?

Mordisquitos: I'm reminded of a book on my bookshelf (which I still haven't read, story of my life...), by the recently deceased ethologist Frans de Waal, titled 'Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?'. Of course, Betteridge's law applies to its title.In my opinion, the vast multitude of different animal intelligences is a clear hint that language does not an intelligence make. We're animals, and our intelligences did not come from language; language allowed us to supercharge it. We can and do think and make decisions without using language, and the idea that a statistical model based solely on our language can be intelligent does not follow.

wolttam: The meaning of tokens lose touch with language in the deeper layers of large language model’s neural nets.Language is just the input/output modality.

rimliu: Seeing how it sucks at languages you may be right, even transcribing may be dubious.

simianwords: how does it suck at languages?

bigfishrunning: I think the best phrase from the article is "the current (admittedly impressive) statistical techniques". These statistical techniques are so impressive that they seem to cause some users to stop evaluating them and assume there's intelligence there. Landing at this conclusion is really lazy, but most people are really lazy. The societal damage from LLMs comes not from their intelligence, but from the public perception of their intelligence.

simianwords: > I'm worried that the seven companies that comprise 35% of the S&P 500 are headed for bankruptcy, as soon as someone makes them stop passing around the same $100b IOU while pretending it's in all their bank accounts at once.What makes this author so convinced that these companies are headed for bankruptcy? Is it possible to bet on this claim? We can come back 2-3 years later to check if even one of them is bankrupt.This kind of doomerism is strange and I'm concerned for people who fall for such obviously nonsensical takes. Why do people take this person seriously again?

ceejayoz: What good is a bet you won't be able to collect on if it happens?

LogicFailsMe: For pennies on the dollar, we could just legalize and regulate psychedelics and anyone could go meet their god whenever they wish. The stoned ape theory might have been the AGI of spirituality that led to religion after all. Not saying it was, not saying it wasn't, but it's not like Elon Musk has to boil the ocean and build a Dyson Sphere to have a heart to heart with his personal invisible friend.As for AI, it's incredibly useful in the right hands and it's incredibly hazardous in the wrong hands. But in the US, we can't even depose a lunatic flushing even more money than spent on AI on warmongering and you think we're gonna rein in the tech billionaires? Funny in that dying's easy it's comedy that's hard way. IMO this one plays out in the weakly efficient market of ELEs. My money's on DNA and planet Earth, it's been through so much worse and they always bounce back with new ideas on how to get in trouble again.Not a doomer, AI and STEM could really deliver on the promise of a better future for everyone, but with tech billionaires driving the clown car, are you kidding me?

LogicFailsMe: I think you really need to have boots on the ground in the AI cinematic universe to keep up and separate the wheat from the chatGPT. It's moving fast, warts and all, and I agree with Jensen Huang's take that we don't even need further advances in the technology to base a new industrial revolution on it.But it's pointless to argue with the extremists that either believe it's just a planet killing stochastic parrot or that it's on the verge of becoming Skynet. I mean if someone puts their nuclear arsenal under the control of openclaw, that's dark comedy although it will seem like tragedy at the time because comedy equals tragedy plus time according to Lenny Bruce.But the AI bubble is probably real w/r to shoe companies and grocery stores pivoting to AI and ludicrous w/r to the money that can be made by the already entrenched players just riding the wave of deployment and specialization. But wouldn't it be nice if the US spent more money addressing the shortage of compute rather than blowing $h!+ up for the lulz?

simianwords: > But wouldn't it be nice if the US spent more money addressing the shortage of compute rather than blowing $h!+ up for the lulz?No actually. The best way to ensure growth is in exactly these kind of industries that promote innovation. Sure some companies don't make it but that's the price to pay for risks.This is a classic case of optimising for the short term and forgetting the long term benefits

LogicFailsMe: So you're saying starting opt-in wars and blowing shit up is sound economic policy for the long run? Gonna disagree. I think the long view is unbounded compute but I also believe it doesn't take up all that much space and we already have the technology to power it if we weren't squandering are impulse cash on dumb shit like subsidizing coal and wars of peacocking.

simianwords: Why can't I collect on it?

ceejayoz: Betting on systemic collapse of society has a challenge at the winnings collection point."Here's your trillion dollars. Go buy a slice of bread. Ooops… half slice. Well, quarter."

simianwords: huh? he can just short the companies he's so concerned about

vrganj: What good is that if the entire socioeconomic system collapses?

simianwords: by shorting he can make money and give it back?

optimalsolver: Do you consider viruses to be animals?